PSY3300 Personality: Exploring Freud, Jung, and Dreams Analysis

This assignment, completed for a PSY3300 Personality course, delves into the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. The student reflects on personal experiences to illustrate Freud's concept of defense mechanisms, specifically displacement. The student identifies 'The Hero' as the archetype in their favorite comic book hero, discussing Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. The assignment then analyzes a personal dream from both Freud's and Jung's perspectives, comparing and contrasting their approaches to dream interpretation and explaining which theory resonates more with the student's experience. References to relevant literature from both theorists are also included.

Running head: PSY3300 PERSONALITY
PSY3300 PERSONALITY
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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According to Freud, defense mechanisms keep unconscious material from coming to the
conscious level. However, if you observe your own or another person's behavior
carefully, you often figure out what a defense mechanism is primarily used for.
Based on your understanding of the theory given by Sigmund Freud, answer the
following questions:
Reflect on your own behavior and pick one defense mechanism you have used.
Explain the defense mechanism you identified and share an example of when you used
this defense mechanism.
The mechanism of displacement is what I identify as the one I have used in the past
and I most commonly resort to.
Displacement has been identified as a neurotic defense mechanism. Even with the
term ‘neurotic’ being eliminated from the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders’ in 1980, displacement is still actively used by practicing psychiatrists and
psychologists to explain personal defense mechanisms. It involves shifting aggressive
impulses towards a less threatening object or entity as a target (Freud, 2018). It is connected
with redirecting the emotion towards an outlet that is safer, less offensive as easily
approachable. Targets can include inanimate objects like furniture, gadgets or books to even
pets. Someone frustrated by their employer’s dictatorial behavior at work may come home
and kick their dog, displaying displacement as a defense mechanism.
In my experience, I was terribly disheartened and frustrated because of my teacher’s
bias towards certain select students at school because of which I would perpetually receive
low grades. On one of those instances, I ended up returning home and throwing my bag
towards my computer resulting in the monitor falling off the table. That was followed by me
kicking the chair out of the way causing a bad ruckus.

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Jung asserts that the collective unconscious reflects the collective experiences that
humans have had in their ancestral or evolutionary past. An archetype comes from the
collective unconscious and is an inherited predisposition to respond to the world. One
way to think about archetypes is to think about what every human experiences, like
birth, death, power, and parenthood. Jung suggests that the human response to each of
these experiences is universal and is reflected in fairy tales and myths and so on.
Based on your understanding of the theory given by Carl Jung, answer the following
questions:
Think of your favorite fairy tale, myth, or comic book hero. What archetype is
represented in your choice?
Discuss whether or not you think Jung is correct in his view that there is a collective
unconscious.
The choice of my favorite comic book hero represents that I identify ‘The Hero’ as
the archetype. It displays that my personality and my choices are inclined and simulated by
my ego and the archetype that I identify with, exists to serve the purpose of fulfilling the role
of a model in my life (Knox, 2003).
Collective unconscious identifies the structures in the unconscious mind shared by the
beings of a same species. According to Jung, the collective unconscious of humans are
inhabited by instincts and archetypes which manifest the innate pre-existing imagery and
symbolisms in the conscious mind (Jung, 1936). Jung states that these archetypes may not be
consciously identified by humans but a strong feeling about them can be identified by every
human (Jung, 1936). Several evidences support the existence of a collective unconscious
through dreams, imaginations and fantasies. Moreover, the existence of archetypes and
instincts have also been seen as a commonality in the psyche of most human beings. These
evidences do point towards the fact that Jung’s view of a collective unconscious is correct in

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its essence, even though the contents of the unconscious may vary greatly depending on the
personal choices and preferences.
Both Freud and Jung used dream analysis but in different ways. Freud thought that
dreams provided clues to the unconscious, while Jung thought that dreams were
compensatory. Pay attention to your dreams for three nights this week. It's helpful to
keep a notepad by your bed and to write them down when you first wake up.
On the basis of your understanding of these theories, answer the following:
Provide a concise description of a dream you had and discuss your dream from both
Freud's point of view and Jung's point of view.
Which theory makes more sense to you? Why?
Include terminologies from each theorist's position.
In a dream that I had when I was very young, I vividly remember finding myself with
my father and my mother in an abandoned resort. It was dark, cold and misty and I remember
feeling scared and uneasy. The next bit of the dream was me and my parents being chased by
three huge demonic creatures. We were running on the street and there was no help.
According to Freud, our dreams are our access point for repressed desires and
thoughts that we would not consider visiting in real life owing to social and moral constraints
(Freud, 1958). Freud specified that we mostly resort to accessing our repressed sexual desires
in our dreams and whatever imagery that we see in our dreams can be interpreted by the
dreamer in ways they seem fit Jung was of the opinion that dreams represented the
unconscious mind (Young-Eisendrath & Dawson, 2008). He focused on the imagery and
symbolism in the dreams identifying them as holding meanings based on the associations the
dreamer had in real life.

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Analyzing the dream from both the perspectives, I find Jung’s interpretation to be
more reasonable. That is because in the dream, the resort seemed to appear because we
visited it a few days ago. Moreover, the darkness, the coldness and the mist was important
because I had the dream in winter, and the three demonic figures were actually a morphed
version of the three ‘Jagannath Idols’ from Indian religious mythology because I saw them
the very same evening in a picture book. I find no sexual connotations in the dream as Freud
stated, making his stance hard for me to comply to.

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References.
Freud, A. (2018). The ego and the mechanisms of defence. Routledge.
Freud, S. (1958). The handling of dream-interpretation in psycho-analysis. In The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XII (1911-
1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and Other Works (pp. 89-96).
Jung, C. G. (1936). The concept of the collective unconscious. Collected works, 9(1), 42.
Knox, J., (2003). Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent
Mind. New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Young-Eisendrath, P., & Dawson, T. (Eds.). (2008). The Cambridge Companion to Jung.
Cambridge University Press.