Graziano & Raulin
Research Methods (9th edition)
Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) was a student and colleague of Freud. Freud described Jung as his “successor and crown prince.” However, Jung eventually broke with Freud, criticizing much of Freud’s psychodynamic theory, developing his own personality theory, which he called analytical psychology.
Jung’s model is still psychodynamic, because it is based on the notion of the importance of unconscious processes in human functioning. However, there are many differences between Freud’s and Jung’s models. As discussed by Hall and Lindzey (1978), the most basic of those differences involves their respective definitions of the factors that drive human behavior.
Freud and Jung agree that one’s past experiences, as represented in the unconscious, are critical causal influences on behavior. Freud argued that these past experiences explained all behavior. Jung, however, went further. He insisted that, while these causal influences from the past were important, so too were the person’s unconscious aspirations and goals. For Jung, the past is the actuality and the future is the potentiality, and both are critical in shaping human function. Unconscious drives for Jung impel the person to constant and often creative striving toward future goals (teliology), seeking wholeness and completion in that development. We can see that Jung was strongly influenced by the romantic movement of the late 18th Century.