Influences of Freud, Rogers, Laing, and Jung

I greatly admire Freud, and it is to him that I owe the inspiration to cultivate a clear writing style (he was a marvellous stylist when he wanted to be).

Jung dealt mainly with symbolism and myth, as far as I remember. This is useful for exploring the major ideals or themes that drive human aspirations or yearnings. But it does not really explain motivation. Symbolism or myth is the intermediate step between ideals and motivation. To understand how the subconscious mind works with patterns (or symbols), it is necessary to dig deeper and explore basic motivations. 

However, motivation itself is a weird arena. Freud looked at some of it in his explorations of neurosis, and he came up with ideas that are still unacceptable to most mainstream psychologists even today. However, even Freud had to rely on symbolism to some extent.

What is the problem with basic motivations? Motivations that are positive ones present no difficulties for us. The difficulty resides in our negative motivations. Our negative motivations are usually too unpleasant for us to face directly, so the subconscious mind bundles them together into symbols and myths that we can accept. Most people find it easier to work with symbols and myths than with basic motivations. For example, we may think that it is rather glamorous to be on a personal odyssey, when in fact we would be shocked if we discovered the real motive for being on our odyssey.

In my first attempts to understand how the mind works, I faced two main issues – symbolism and vocabulary.

Symbolism

If  I discover a definite process that occurs in the subconscious mind, then I can teach it strait-forwardly. But if I rely on symbolism then I am interpreting a process or a pattern. It is not easy to teach someone else how to make interpretations. Hence it can be hard for other people to verify that my interpretation is correct. 

For example, Freud was brilliant at interpretation of symbolism, but how many of his followers had the same gift ? - Answer, few, if any.

So I decided to avoid relying on symbolism as much as I could; I preferred to dig deeper into the mind and find out what the symbolism was based on.

A Technical Vocabulary

Freud and Jung sometimes use different terminology to explain the same ideas. Plus the fact that counselling psychologists like Carl Rogers use different terminology yet again. And then you have thinkers like R D Laing and Rollo May using existential terms.

During the middle part of my self-analysis I had to decide what terminology to use. The procedure that I adopted to compare these thinkers was to interpret Freud in ways that I could understand and which fitted my own experiences, and then find what interpretations of Jung, Rogers, and Laing fitted with Freud. That way I could compare these thinkers. I found this process extremely hard to do. For some time I chopped and changed the vocabulary that I was using, before eventually settling down to my present one.

Basically, what I was doing was this : when I was absorbed in some experience, I then explored which ideas best described it. The Ariadne's thread that I followed was: what did Freud mean in this kind of situation, what did Rogers mean, what did Laing mean?  In essence, I followed meaning. This comparison of thinkers took me a long time. Each of them is brilliant in some ways and muddled in others.

Jung has never really interested me. To be fair to Jung, by the time that I had adopted a working vocabulary of ideas after comparing Freud, Rogers and Laing, I was nearly intellectually exhausted. I did not feel like making an extensive study of Jung, especially as Jung was the most difficult of the theorists to read.

Copyright @2003  Ian Heath
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