Psychology (William James's basic idea) Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Psychology (William Jamess basic idea) - Essay ExampleCertain sequences of pure experiences constitute sensible objects, and others constitute persons but one pure experience (say the perception of a chair) may be kick downstairs both of the sequence constituting the chair and of the sequence constituting a person. Indeed, one pure experience might be part of two distinct minds, as James explains in a chapter entitled How Two Minds force out Know One Thing.Simplifying and to a large extent over-ruling Jamess ideas came Sigmund Freud and his concept of psychoanalysis. Freud based his notions of the unconscious mind as a reservoir for repressed memories of traumatic events that continuously influence conscious thought and behaviour. Freud divided the distinguish of mental activity to exist at three levels the Id, the Ego, and the Superego. He considered Id as the centre of our primitive instincts something that caters to the parentage of gratifying our desires and pleasures. To Fr eud, the new-born infant is the personification of the Id and the Ego develops out of the Id as the child grows. The Ego acts as ban to the Id, checking the primitive desires for immediate gratification, and conflicts between the Id and the Ego can result in a person having neuroses. ... associate to these questionable assumptions of psychoanalysis are two equ eachy questionable methods of investigating the alleged memories hidden in the unconscious free association and the interpretation of dreams. If Freud said that the goal of therapy was to make the unconscious conscious, a junior colleague of his, Carl Jung, was to make the exploration of this inner space. For Jung, an empirical investigation of the realms of dream, myth, personality and soul delineated the manner to understand the inner space of the human psyche. He regarded the encounter between the person and the unconscious as the most important facet of this process. Jung held that human beings experience the unconsci ous through symbols encountered in all aspects of life in dreams, art, religion, and the symbolic dramas we enact in our relationships and our day to day life. Essential to the encounter with the unconscious, and the expiation of the persons consciousness with this broader world, is learning this symbolic language. Jung believed that only through attention and unprejudiced, flexible powers of thinking can the individual be able to harmonise his life with what he called as the archetypal forces. To undergo the individuation process, the individual must be open to the parts of oneself beyond ones own ego. The modern individual must ease up attention to dreams, explore the world of religion and spirituality, and question the assumptions of the operant societal worldview.Alfred Adler examined human personality almost the same time as Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. They worked on some theories together until Adler rejected Freuds emphasis on sex, and maintain that personality difficul ties are rooted in a