Freud Vs. Jung

The best training for a propagandist is a liberal arts education because it teaches you about the culture we live in, as well as how to think and write about that culture. By culture I mean the cultural forces that shape us, such as religion, philosophy, politics, literature, art, music and psychology, among others – in both their classical and popular form, from War and Peace to comic books. Understanding culture in this way helps a propagandist know how to craft  and present her message so it has the greatest likelihood of  changing  behavior within the target public.

No one, of course (except maybe Harold Bloom) knows all there is to know about the many aspects of our culture listed above. Thus, there is no perfect propagandist. (Though Bloom certainly gives it a try in The Western Canon, where he musters all of his considerable learning to lambaste the relativistic, politically correct fog that covers most university campuses, typically emanating from the English department.)

In this essay, I’d like to focus on just one cultural influence: psychology, and particularly the way in which the two titans of the science of the soul, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, have influenced our culture.

Sigmund Freud

Carl Jung

Freud represents the masculine approach, Jung the feminine. Freud is analytic and mechanistic; Jung is intuitive and mythological. Freud is focused inside our heads; Jung looks outside and beyond. Freud was an atheist; Jung once said he never saw a patient get better without the help of religion. Freud invented the personal unconscious; Jung invented the collective unconscious. Freud was an extrovert; Jung was an introvert. Freud tore things apart; Jung put them together.

Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" - the brothel from hell.

"Dance (1)" by Matisse - the brotherhood of man (OK, sisterhood)

It’s  interesting that the two titans of 20th Century art, Picasso and Matisse,  exemplified the diametrically opposed worldviews of Freud and Matisse.  I’ll let you figure out which was which, but it’s pretty easy. Here’s a hint: Picasso’s best known biography is entitled “Creator and Destroyer.” I’m a Jungian, for what it’s worth, yet I greatly admire and am moved by the work of both of these artists. Which is to say that it is certainly possible to acknowledge the the truths of a worldview with which you disagree and to admire the artistry with which it is presented.

Freud influenced our culture by giving us names for the psychological mechanisms that drive us, such as the id, ego and superego. Think about it, anyone with a grade school education knows what ego means. But do they really? In common parlance, ego means our sense of self worth. To have a strong ego means to have an overinflated opinion of one’s self.

But that’s not exactly what Freud had in mind. By ego, he simply meant our conscious selves, our rational selves, the self we are aware of. Also the self we think we can “control,” but that is, in fact, largely controlled by the unconscious id (our animal, childish drives) and unconscious superego (the parental authority in our head).

Of course, none of these things actually exist. The ego, id and superego are simply conceptual constructs to explain why we behave – and misbehave – the way we do. But we talk about them like they do exist. For a propagandist, it is important to know both what Freud really meant and how his concepts are really used in society. For example, we can use “ego” in advertising copy to quickly communicate self worth. And, perhaps more importantly, knowing about the id and superego  – of which the average Joe knows nothing  – tells us where the unconscious triggers are to generate particular reactions, and the fact that Joe knows nothing about them makes them all the more powerful.

Most people are not as familiar with Jung, one reason being that Freud was a better propagandist. He quite deliberately promoted his theories to ensure they were wildly disseminated, and he sought to discredit those who disagreed with him or challenged him. (I recommend Peter Gay’s biography of Freud to learn about the man behind the myth.)

Though Jung himself may not have the popular awareness of Freud, he may have had an even bigger influence on our culture, at least in modern times. In Psychological Types, Jung invented the concept of introvert and extrovert and the concept of mapping personalities. (If you’ve ever taken a Myers-Briggs personality test, you are indebted to Jung. I happen to to an INTJ.)

Myers-Briggs personality types

About Psychological Types, Jung said, “This work sprang originally from my need to define the ways in which my outlook differed from Freud’s and Adler’s. In attempting to answer this question, I came across the problem of types; for it is one’s psychological type which from the outset determines and limits a person’s judgment. My book, therefore, was an effort to deal with the relationship of the individual to the world, to people and things.”

And this is a pretty good summation of one thing Jung has contributed to our culture: the idea that we see the world through the filters of our personality. This is invaluable information to a propagandist, because if we know about the personality of our target, we know what symbols are important to him and how to employ them to encourage (though certainly not automatically create) the desired behavior.

Just ain't possible...

(A note about the use of psychological concepts and all other tools of the propagandist: Because our methods are persuasive, not coercive, we cannot force anyone to believe anything nor act a certain way. We can, if we are skilled and honest practitioners of our craft, set the stage in the target public’s mind for a sympathetic reception of our message. But, all of the nonsense of subliminal messaging and mind control aside, we certainly cannot force anyone to do anything they don’t want to do. This is an important truth to keep in mind about propaganda in all its forms, but particularly when we are talking about the merger of psychology and propaganda.)

Thanks a lot, Carl.

Beyond his elucidation of the mystery of our personalities, another of Jung’s cultural influences was to lay the groundwork for the granola movement that swept the Baby Boomer generation. By ‘granola movement’  I mean the interest in Eastern religions, mysticism, ecology, mythology, etc. in opposition to the mechanistic, industrial weltanschauung that pervaded the Western World during the 19th Century and the first half of the 20th.

I think you can pretty much lay the Age of Aquarius at Jung’s doorstep. This is because Jung found, far in advance of Joseph Campbell, that the myths of all cultures share certain things in common. From this research, he developed the idea of the “collective unconscious,” by which he meant a collection of fundamental,  unconscious beliefs that have been wired into our DNA through millenia  of human experience.

Graphic representation of Jung's concept of the collective unconscious

This is really a quite profound concept (which Jung developed in The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious,  which I highly recommend), but it has been perverted by popular culture into the sort of vapid, we-are-the-world pabulum for which the 1960s were famous  – and that exerted a strong influence over many people of my generation, the notoriously self-centered Baby Boomers – who saw in this groovy worldview an escape from the suffocating authoritarianism and conventionalism of the 1950s.

But, again, for the skilled propagandist, this is powerful information, particularly knowing what the archetypes are and what primal responses they generate.

And that’s why Freud and Jung are important.