Neo-Freudians

[Ready for Fall 2026]

Modified: 2026-08-03 8:55 PM CDST

• Freud's effect on the intellectual community was major.
  • Soon after he first proposed his theory, he began to attract others to Vienna, the city where he lived.
  • Eventually, a group formed with Freud as its head, called the "Vienna Circle."
  • Many of the members of the Vienna Circle later became influential in psychoanalytic theory.
    • Freud, however, as the founder of psychoanalysis, looked at any modifications of his original notions as improper.
    • The disagreements between Freud and anyone who would change psychoanalysis often led to the latter's expulsion from the Vienna Circle.
  • The term Neo-Freudians (New Freudians) is often used to describe those psychoanalysts who changed Freud's original theory in some way, both before and after Freud's death.
  • Realize however, that all of the Neo-Freudians accepted the bulk of Freud's ideas; they simply made some modifications. Below we will look at a few Neo-Freudians.

• Carl Jung was the first major figure to come to Vienna to visit Freud.
  • Their first meeting at Freud's house lasted many hours because they were so taken with each other.
    • They began a close collaboration but it did not last.
    • Jung began to modify Freud's original notions, and Freud could not abide it.
    • Jung and Freud parted company so bitterly that there is no known instance of their communicating further for the rest of Freud's life.
    • Jung's ideas have survived, however, nearly as well as Freud's have.
    • Jung developed a more complex version of psychoanalysis, introducing more terms and constructs.
      • These include:
        • the shadow,
        • anima, animus,
        • and persona.
        • But the most radical idea that Jung introduced was probably the collective unconscious.
    • The collective unconscious existed alongside Freud's personal unconscious, according to Jung.
      • The collective unconscious served as a reservoir of inherited unconscious memories from one's ancestors.
      • Thus, Jung could account, in his mind, for topics like national differences in personality.
      • Needless to say, the collective unconscious aroused much controversy.
      • Jung, especially late in life, developed an interest in universal symbols.
      • He believed hey could be used as evidence for the existence of the collective unconscious.
      • He described the mandala as one of those symbols.
      • Mandalas consist of a combination of a circle and a cross.
      • Jung did find mandalas in cultures around the world, but simpler explanations, such as development of children's progressive ability to draw crossed lines and circles, may suffice to explain their prevalence.
• Afred Adler was another major Neo-Freudian.
  • He was an early member of the Vienna Circle, and he was later evicted from that group .
    • Adler's sin, in Freud's eyes, was his introduction of social factors into psychoanalytic theory.
      • Adler drew upon the concepts of inferiority and superiority, and named complexes after both.
      • He argued that social interactions lead to such feelings.
      • Children who are consistently treated as special by their peers and parents, for example, will develop feelings of superiority.
      • While children who were consistently treated as unwanted would develop feelings of inferiority.
        • Imagine, for example, the social consequences on a child of always being among the first to be picked to play, and then imagine the consequences of always being the last to be picked.
    • Adler became quite influential in psychoanalytic theory.
      • He was one of the first to examine birth-order effects in personality.
    • A group known as the psychosocial Neo-Freudians also emerged.
      • Members of that group thought that Freud had invested too heavily in psychosexual motivation as an explanatory tool in his theory.
      • They offered, much as Adler did, a more psychosocial approach to psychoanalysis.
      • Psychosocial meant that those theorists gave more emphasis to the effects of social interactions on personality development than Freud did.
      • Erikson, for example, proposed an influential set of eight lifelong stages to replace Freud's five childhood stages.
      • Fromm and Horney emphasized the effects of interpersonal factors on the personality.
• Today, psychoanalysis is not the force it once was.
  • One reason for its decline is its less than scientific character.
  • Another reason for its decline may be perceptual.
    • Freudian concepts have wound themselves into our culture so tightly that we hardly even notice them anymore.
    • In the intellectual community today, one is more likely to find Freudian theory discussed in literature and criticism than in psychology.