The Neo-Freudians

It turns out, Mrs. Perl and Gabe Goldstein aren't the only people who had issues with Sigmund Freud: there was a whole school of psychology that formed as an "Oh yeah?!" to Freud. Ironically, the psychologists involved in this area are called Neo-Freudians, which basically sounds like they're saying, "We disagree with Freud because we understand Freud's theories better than he does." Three of the most important psychologists in this area are Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, and Carl Jung. Adler and Horney both agreed with Freud that one's childhood plays an important in the development of his or her psychology, but Adler had a more negative approach. He believed that childhood feelings and experiences drive people to try to overcome obstacles and not feel so inferior to other people (famously known as the inferiority complex). Horney thought that the child's sense of helplessness triggers his or her desire for love and security, and she basically found a better explanation than Freud's "subtley" sexist studies. Unlike Adler and Horney, Carl Jung focused more on the unconscious than social factors. Jung is sort of the Noam Chomsky of Neo-Freudianism--he believes in a collective unconscious, a common reservoir of images derived from our species' universal experiences. If you have trouble following, a collective unconscious is exactly what it sounds like: everybody is born sharing the same ideas of symbolism and myths. For instance, everybody seems to agree that the mother is the symbol for nurturance. To tell you the truth, I think the Neo-Freudians are just as insane as Freud himself. There's really no hard evidence to prove what they're saying, and you could just as easily argue against what they have to say. However, I still find this perspective very interesting, and I'm now even more interested in watching the film "A Dangerous Method," directed by David Cronenberg and starring Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud.