Cultural Implications
An interesting application of self psychology has been in the interpretation of the friendship of Freud and Jung, its breakdown, and its aftermath. It has been suggested that at the height of the relationship 'Freud was in narcissistic transference, that he saw in Jung an idealised version of himself', and that conversely in Jung there was a double mix of 'idealization of Freud and grandiosity in the self.'
During Jung's midlife crisis, after his break with Freud, arguably 'the focus of the critical years had to be a struggle with narcissism: the loss of an idealized other, grandiosity in the sphere of the self, and resulting periods of narcissistic rage.' Only as he worked through to 'a new sense of himself as a person separate from Freud' could Jung emerge as an independent theorist in his own right.
On the assumption that 'the western self is embedded in a culture of narcissism...implicated in the shift towards postmodernity', opportunities for making such applications will probably not decrease in the foreseeable future.
Read more about this topic: Self Psychology
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or implications:
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”
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