Carl Jung was a psychoanalysis and a psychiatrist from Swiss remembered for founding analytical psychology. He is best known for creating the collective unconscious theory and other works which influenced various fields such as psychiatry, literature, religious studies, philosophy and archaeology ( Crowne, 2007) . Erick Erickson on the other hand was a developmental psychologists and psychoanalysts with roots in both Germany and America. He is celebrated for coming up with the term identity crisis and formulating the psychosocial developmental paradigm ( Žukauskienė, 2015) . Both Carl Jung and Erick Erickson share similarities in their works but also have distinct differences that characterize their theories.
Similarities
Carl Jung and Erickson agreed that childhood experiences matter but with a de-emphasis on sex and rather laid more focus on social environment and how an individual’s personality is affected. Additionally, Jung and Erickson shared viewpoints that sexual drive was not the primary motivator and driver that controls a person’s mental life. The two have similar perspectives that a large part of a person’s childhood is shaped by events that occur during that stage. The two however noted that the personality of an individual also continues to develop throughout a person’s life time thus is not entirely determined by childhood events. According to Ewen (2013), both viewed the unconscious mind as an important element in revealing things that are hidden through slips of the tongue, free association and dreams. The two researchers borrowed heavily from the theory of human ego in developing and expanding their works. Both Jung and Erickson are interconnected as the two reflect on an individual’s behaviour and how one’s personality and identities are shaped as well as the way which relationships work. The two theorists have a common perspective stating that development of an individual’s personality follows a predetermined order and is dependent on each previous stage. The two developed theories that laid emphasis on the essence of a person’s early experiences in childhood in dictating behavior and approach towards life ( Spielman, Dumper, Jenkins, Lacombe, Lovett & Perlmutter, 2014) . The two theorists have not concentrated on parent child relationship but have focused more on a person self-progression. Propositions by the two are based more on environmental factors and the social surrounding but not on biological forces. As the two agree, the environment which a person spent their childhood is critical in shaping personal growth and outlook towards life. Both Carl Jung and Erick Erickson have heavily referenced and borrowed concepts from another theorist called Sigmund Feud in developing their own theories.
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Differences
Erick Erickson works majored on the social elements of personality development, how a person’s personality is shaped throughout their life time and identity crisis while Carl Jung emphasized on concepts such a psychological types, collective unconscious and archetypes. Carl Jung had a deep conviction that every person who lives has a collective unconscious and a connection to everyone else ( Lester, 2019) . He also believed that every person has an archetype that matched the one with an opposite sex individual for example, each man according to Jung had a feminine side which he referred as Anima and females have a male faculty called Animus ( Kropf & Greene, 2017) . Contrary to Jung view, Erickson believed that a person a person’s identity is molded through identity diffusion and does not mention if males had a feminine aspect within them or females having a masculine side in them ( Naidoo, Townsend & Carolissen, 2015) . Carl Jung theory placed emphasis on the essence of the unconscious in relation to personality and proposed that the unconscious faculty has two layers contrary to Erick Erickson who suggested that people undergo through eight phases of milestone development over their lifespan ( Gould & Howson, 2015) . Erickson eight stages of development focused on developmental tasks such as trust vs mistrust, autonomy vs shame, identity vs confusion and integrity vs despair while Carl Jung concentrated on personality and therefore proposed two attitudes; extroversion and introversion, which he termed approaches that people have towards life. As Raval (2013) explain, Carl Jung and Erick Ericson differed on the concept of psychoanalytic community; Jung negatively reacted to Erickson’s proposal on archetypes and unconscious and referred the suggestion as a threat to scientific approach. Erickson had a different view from the Jung’s reasonable observations since he termed them as lacking scientific interpretations.
References
Crowne, D. P. (2007). Personality theory . Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press.
Ewen, R. B. (2014). An introduction to theories of personality . Psychology Press.
Ewen, R. B. (2013). Personality: A topical approach: Theories, research, major controversies, and emerging findings . Psychology Pressz
Kropf, N. P., & Greene, R. R. (2017). Erikson’s eight stages of development: Different lenses. In Human Behavior Theory (pp. 75-92). Routledge.
Lester, D. (2019). Theories of personality: A systems approach . Routledge.
Gould, M. A., & Howson, A. (2015). Erikson's Eight Stages of Development. Research Starters: Sociology (Online Edition), recuperado el , 2 .
Naidoo, P., Townsend, L., & Carolissen, R. (2015). Theories of personality.
Raval, D. K. (2013). Development and Big Five Dimensions of Personality. Education , 2 (1).
Spielman, R. M., Dumper, K., Jenkins, W., Lacombe, A., Lovett, M., & Perlmutter, M. (2014). Neo-Freudians: Adler, Erikson, Jung, and Horney. Psychology .
Žukauskienė, R. (2015). Emerging adulthood, early adulthood, and quarter-life crisis: Updating Erikson for the twenty-fi rst century. In Emerging adulthood in a European context (pp. 27-40). Routledge.
