Freud’s Scientific Legacy: The Unconscious
Freud’s scientific legacy has ramifications for a wide variety of psychological fields. A series of postulates about “(1) unconscious cognitive, affective, and motivational processes; (2) ambivalence and the tendency for affective and motivational dynamics to operate in parallel and produce compromise solutions; (3) the origins of personality and social dispositions in childhood; (4) mental representations of the self, others, and relationships; and (5) developmental dynamics” are central to contemporary psychodynamic theory (Westen, 1995, p. 333). The paper will discuss the first and most central postulate; most of mental life, including ideas, feelings, and intentions, is unconscious, which implies that individuals might act or acquire symptoms that are unexplainable to them.
Essentially, the notion of ‘the unconscious’ was not new to Freud. Western states that the concept was circulating in the intellectual air he breathed in the nineteenth century, particularly in Germany. As early as the beginning of that century, German idealist thinkers proposed a world of the unconscious, filling it with mystical aspects subsequently adopted by Jung, such as the concept that a single Will is inherent in all living things and manifests itself in unconscious motivations. (Westen, 1995). According to Kupfersmid (2019), Freud also promoted the theory that the interaction of numerous unconscious elements (multidetermined) was frequently crucial in developing a range of psychological disorders. Even though its nature has been intensely contested, the notion of a dynamic unconscious remains one of the essential grounds of psychoanalytic theory and the practice of psychodynamic counselling to this day (Yakeley, 2018). As a result, psychoanalytic formulations that reflect the unconscious meaning of the patient’s disease may intuitively make sense to clinicians and their patients, resulting in a shared lexicon of constructive discourse.
Adlerian Psychotherapy and the Use of Early Recollections
The use of early recollections, briefly ERs, is one of Alfred Adler’s most valuable contributions to psychology, and it is Adler’s gift to Adlerian psychotherapy and supervision. Shifron (2020) suggests that ERs are an effective and rapid metaphor for discovering an individual’s strengths, creative talents, and tactics for achieving feelings of belonging and developing a sense of social engagement. Furthermore, ERs are individuals’ most innovative methods of describing their current emotional state in each of the three primary life tasks: personal relationships with family, career, and friends.
The usage of ERs is a precise and rapid way to learn how individuals view their significance and belonging on each of the activities (Shifron, 2020). Finding qualities in each ER should assist every Adlerian therapist and supervisor. ERs enable patients to realize they have the knowledge and techniques they need to move toward constructive experiences and turn unsuccessful strategies into beneficial ones (Lavon & Shifron, 2018). Shifron (2020) acknowledges that ER reconstruction aims to shift the patient’s perception of the event and related sensations, assuming that every ER is an appropriate metaphor for the patient’s current life circumstances. Thus, Adlerian counsellors use the client’s ERs in the treatment process to discover the patient’s tactics and assess the lifestyles. Working with ERs in psychotherapy allows patients to generate fresh ideas and find new methods to deal with life’s challenges (Shifron, 2020). The purpose of Adlerian psychotherapy is to help patients comprehend that they are entirely responsible and have the capacity to select their perceptions, behaviors, and decisions. In the Adlerian tradition, learning how to deal with ERs cannot be accomplished only via reading papers; it takes experience and supervision.
Jung’s Theory of Psychological Types
The theory of psychological types was developed by Carl G. Jung. He proposed the presence of eight distinct types of a persistent general attitude, defining attitude as the mind’s propensity to behave in a specific pattern and direction in a predefined manner (Hernández-Hernández et al., 2017). Jung proposes four functions: thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition. The functions concern how individuals interact with their immediate surroundings and how information is derived from the environment (Hernández-Hernández et al., 2017). When each attitude is coupled with a separate function, eight psychological types are produced: extraverted thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition, as well as introverted thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition. Hernández-Hernández et al. (2017) argue that a vast number of specialists have adopted the theory from many fields of psychology since its inception. Additionally, it has proved to be beneficial in the therapeutic setting, as well as clinically effective for giving a framework for understanding individual variances in behavior.
Clients in counselling may benefit from applying Jung’s theory of psychological types because it identifies and describes personal behavioral characteristics. According to Jung, each individual employs one of the above four functions more than the others, and the four functions work in tandem with extraverted or introverted attitudes (King & Mason, 2020). Consequently, each function may be expressed in an extraverted or introverted manner. King & Mason (2020) state that Jung used an attitude-based characterization of introversion and extraversion centered on the relationship between energy, action, and reflection. Hence, extroverts gain energy from the activity and lose energy from reflection, and introverts lose energy from action and gain energy from thinking.
References
Hernández-Hernández, M. E., Roca Chiapas, J. M. D. L., & García y Barragán, L. F. (2017). Measurement of the Jungian psychological types in Mexican university students. Acta de Investigación Psicológica, 7(1), 2635-2643. Web.
King, S. P., & Mason, B. A. (2020). Myers‐Briggs type indicator. The Wiley Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences, 315–319. Web.
Kupfersmid, J. (2019). Freud’s clinical theories then and now. Psychodynamic psychiatry, 47(1), 81-97. Web.
Lavon, I., & Shifron. R. (2018). Adler’s use of early recollections: Evidence in neuroscience research. In P. Prina, C. Shelley, K. John, & A. Millar (Eds.), UK Adlerian year book (pp. 119–132). The Adlerian Society UK and Institute of Individual Psychology (ASIIP). Web.
Shifron, R. (2020). The miracle of early recollections in Adlerian psychotherapy and supervision. The Journal of Individual Psychology, 76(1), 110–127.
Westen, D. (1998). The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 333–371. Web.
Yakeley, J. (2018). Psychoanalysis in modern mental health practice. The Lancet Psychiatry, 5(5), 443–450. Web.