Developmental psychology.pdf

Personality 403
Jenny's Unconscious When we consider Jenny Masterson from this perspective,
we notice certain prominent behaviors and speculate about their childhood origins.
Jenny has been excessively attentive to Ross, constantly aggressive toward women of
any age, and without regularly satisfying relations with any adult. In these regards we
might speculate about the resolution of the Electra struggle. It is at this stage that a
person begins to develop clear interpersonal relations, including attachments and
antagonisms to parental figures, and these may have significance for other social
relationships.
We know little of Jenny's early relations with her father, who was a busy man
at work and had many children at home. She never refers to him in any of her hundreds
of letters, which in itself seems significant.
But according to psychoanalysis her adult anger toward all women could have
its earliest roots in a latent hostility toward her mother. In her numerous, often lengthy,
letters, by which we know Jenny, we learn of her incessant antagonism toward other
women and abrupt discontinuation of relations with them. We know also that during
the late genital stage Jenny experienced few opportunities for relationships with females
of her age, which could have facilitated a feminine identification. Instead, she
was significantly responsible for the welfare of six younger siblings, five of whom were
girls. Within the typical parental tendency to dote on younger children and expect
more of older ones, Jenny certainly could have been thwarted in efforts to gain affectionate
attention from her father and mother.
Jenny is extremely rivalrous with Ross's girlfriends and has more than the
usual maternal impulses toward her son. With much feeling she describes how she and
Ross, when he was in college, dined together, went to the theatre, and "kissed goodnight
under the stars." The story of personality in psychoanalytic theory is that of the
ego's struggle to maintain a balance among the psychic forces, including the id, superego,
and demands of the environment. Amid these pressures, her ego's first line of
defense was repression, and the unconscious sexual and aggressive impulses later gave
rise to behavior that was otherwise inexplicable. Having lost the Electra struggle in
her own childhood, Jenny became a "smother mother," stifling the very person she
wanted to see grow into a tiappy, capable adult.
At times she was vaguely aware of this problem she made for herself, but she
could do nothing to change this behavior, presumably symbolic and based on the earlier
unconscious concerns. In this sense Jenny was a driven woman, her single-minded devotion
bringing about Ross's unhappiness, as well as her own.
Collective Unconscious An even more speculative view of the unconscious, and
therefore appropriate only for passing mention, is the view of Carl Gustav Jung.
Whereas Freud postulated an individual unconscious, containing the unknown desires
and conflicts of one person, Jung hypothesized a collective unconscious, which is in
everyone the "deposit of ancestral experiences from untold millions of years" (Jung,
1928). In this realm are all of humanity's past experiences, not only in human history
but also in the earlier evolutionary stages of animal life. This collective unconscious is
potentially inherited by all human beings, and the underlying similarities among
different cultures are regarded as support for this idea.
The collective unconscious includes a feminine side of the male, called the
anima, and a masculine side of the female, called the animus. These conditions are due
partly to hormones and other aspects of human physiology, but they are also shaped
by the experiences of men and women living together through countless centuries. As
men associate with women, they become feminized in outlook and values, and as females
share life and work with men, they become masculinized. In Jenny's case the
animus presumably was overdeveloped, prompting not only her somewhat masculine
ways but also her inability to understand and relate successfully to those of her own
sex. Freud, incidentally, emphasized that each sex possessed both male and female
hormones, though at that time there was no way to verify this viewpoint.