Carl Jung and Karen Horney's Contributions to the Field of Psychology

Reflective Response

1.
Carl Jung and Karen Horney both made great contributions to the field of psychology; their studies have been applied to modern day research also their theories are used to support modern day studies.
Carl Jung and Karen Horney were both Neo-Freudians meaning they all believed that Freud's original theories were correct, however disagreed with him on certain details. The detail in common with these two theorists was that they both believed that inside a healthy individual was born with the forces of good and evil inside one’s mind being at balance. This opposed Freud's theory that stated that from birth the id (IE your desires) controlled you and only after time a super ego (IE your moral standards) is developed by inheriting the moral standards of the people around the child.
Jung's primary disagreement with Freud stemmed from their differing concepts of the unconscious. Jung saw Freud's theory of the unconscious as incomplete and unnecessarily negative. According to Jung, Freud imagined that the unconscious entirely as a storeroom of repressed emotions and desires. Jung agreed with Freud's model of the unconscious, what Jung called the "personal unconscious", but he also proposed the existence of a second, far deeper form of the unconscious the personal one. This was the collective unconscious, where the archetypes exist in such as the shadow is an archetype that consists of the sex and life instincts. The shadow exists as part of the unconscious mind and is composed of repressed ideas, weaknesses, desires, etc.
Carl Jung made subsections of Sigmund Freud’s theory on the unconscious by dividing them into archetypes like the self, shadow, anima and persona.

Like many who held opposing views with Freud, Horney felt that sex and aggression were not the primary source for determining personality. In addition, Freud's idea of "penis envy" in particular was subjected to criticism by Karen Horney. She thought Freud had stumbled upon women's jealousy of men's generic power in the world. Horney accepted that penis envy might occur occasionally in neurotic women, but stated that "womb envy" occurs just as much in men: Horney felt that men were envious of a woman's ability to bear children. The degree to which men are driven to success may be merely a substitute for the fact that they cannot carry, nurture and bear children. Horney also thought that men were envious of women because they fulfill their position in society by simply 'being', whereas men achieve their manhood according to their ability to provide and succeed.
Horney was confused by psychiatrists' tendency to place so much stress on the male sexual organ. Horney also revised the Freudian Oedipal complex of the sexual elements, claiming that the clinging to one parent and jealousy of the other was simply the result of anxiety, caused by a disturbance in the parent-child relationship.
Despite these alternatives with the common Freudian view, Horney strived to redefine Freudian thought with a humanistic view of the individual psyche.
2.
Carl Jung’s theory on archetypes are applicable today as well, Jung’s theory on archetypes can be used to evaluate the common day scenarios we encounter from day to day. For example the persona is how we present ourselves to the world, people mostly in public do not act the same way they would at home.
An example of when people do not use personas is if they are using social networking sites on the internet. An individual knows that when their identity is protected by the internet and that there isn’t anyone there can criticize their ego or their true self, then a person can truly express their identity without the fear of criticism which eliminates the need for a persona.