but there are many exceptions. In short, although Adler ’s theorizing triggered
a great deal of research, most likely the impact of birth order on personality
and intellectual development is far more complex than he imagined (Rodgers,
Cleveland, van den Oord, & Rowe, 2000; Wichman, Rodgers, & MacCallum,
2006; Zajonc, 2001; Zajonc & Sulloway, 2007).
CARL JUNG
Perhaps the most bitter of the defections from the Freudian camp was Carl
Jung’s break with the psychoanalytic circle. In Freud’ s eyes, Jung was the
heir apparent to the leadership of the movement. Jung served as the first pres-ident of the International Psychoanalytic Association. However, in 1914, after
long and intense disagreement with some of the basic aspects of Freud ’st h e o r y ,
Jung resigned from the association. In the years that followed, he continued
his work as a psychotherapist, traveled extensively around the world to ob-serve other cultures, and eventually established his own school of psychology,
named analytic psychology .
At first blush, some students find Jung’ s ideas confusing. Part of the
problem lies in Jung ’s frequent reliance on ancient mythology and Eastern
religious views in his writings. The unfamiliar terms and abstract concepts
can be perplexing to people reading Jung the first time. However, once theinitial difficulty with unusual terms and concepts passes, many students find
Jung’s work among the most intriguing and thought provoking of the person-
ality theories.
The Collective Unconscious
If you were like most newborn children, you had no difficulty recognizing
and developing a strong attachment to your mother. When you were a lit-tle older, you most likely expressed at least some fear of the dark. When
you became older yet, you probably had no difficulty accepting the idea
that there was a God, or at least some superhuman existence that created
and controlled nature. According to Jung, all people have these experi-
ences. If we were to examine history, talk with people from other societies,
and thumb through legends and myths of the past, we would find these samethemes and experiences throughout cultures past and present. Why is this?
Jung’s answer was that we all have a part of our mind that Freud ne-
glected to talk about. He called this part the collective unconscious ,a sd i s t i n -
guished from the personal unconscious . Like the unconscious Freud described,
the collective unconscious consists of thoughts and images that are difficult tobring into awareness. However, these thoughts were never repressed out ofconsciousness. Instead, each of us was born with this unconscious material,
and it is basically the same for all people. According to Jung, just as we inherit
physical characteristics from our ancestors, we also inherit unconscious psychiccharacteristics.
The collective unconscious is made up of primordial images .J u n gd e -
scribed these images in terms of a potential to respond to the world in a certainCarl Jung 101