In Which Jung prewrites AtD's epigraph

[Jude Bloom]

> On Mar 14, 2012, at 10:44 AM, Ian Livingston wrote:
> 
> But the literary Everybody seems to love Freud. Maybe that's because
> he was so wrong about people, maybe it's because he smoked big cigars
> and suffered sexual obsessions....
> 
> Btw, while Freud's ideas are mostly absent from current trends in
> psychology, a number of the tools Jung developed remain in play,
> evolving as more information comes to light.



Seriously?

Freud today:

Conception of the mind and subconscious
Psychoanalysis in film, literature, music, TV, photography
Talking Therapy
The Couch
The Life and Death instincts
Defense mechanisms
Freudian slips (parapraxis)
Dreams as "royal road to the unconscious"
Civilization and its discontents in the 20th Century (various Holocausts)
Atheism movement (The Future Of An Illusion)


Bloom (no relation) said that Freud was the most important essayist since Montaigne. He survives as an essayist and philosopher, although not a scientist. In F's defense, they didn't have much brain science back then. Interesting to note that as psychology becomes more and more 'physically' based — neurochemicals, brain structures, etc. — it comes back closer to Freud, who argued for a biological basis of everything mental.

Uh, also... To say something like, F was wrong about sex because he suffered from obsession, well, that's a Freudian argument right there. See? Freud did or didn't do something he wasn't consciously aware of because of unconscious motivations. That's a Freudian idea. 

Yes I know Freud didn't invent much of this stuff — a lot of it is in Plato — but our very language and idea of the mental is Freudian now.  You run across archetypes and stuff every once in a while, but I don't see 1/10 as much Jung in culture — or in psychology — as Freud.