The great insight of psychological analysis, including Freud’s psychoanalysis, Adler’s individual psychology, Jung’s analytical psychology, and James’s “stream of thought” analogy; is that consciousness can be explained. However, there exists a gulf between the Jamesian understanding of consciousness and the traditional psychoanalytical approach, epitomized by the contrast between functionalism and structuralism, respectively. Whereas structuralism has sought to explain the mind as a reducible set of basic elements (i.e. Freud, Adler, Jung), functionalism seeks to understand the human mind as a deliberate agent of change able to effect the environment, evolutionary adaptation, and, especially in reference to James, itself.
Carl Jung was not one of the original members of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, such as Alfred Adler, but rather met Freud as the result of several exchanged correspondences (Goodwin, 2005). Freud was interested in Jung’s development of a technique for divulging unconscious associations, called word association. Word association consists of presenting a patient with a word and asking them to say the first word that comes to mind. During this exercise reaction time and breathing is measured in order to understand unconscious elements, much the same as a modern-day polygraph. At any rate, Jung was quickly admitted into Freud’s inner circle subsequently joining Freud on his 1909 trip to America during the Clark conference. Jung was also named the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Society in 1911, in no small part because of Freud. By 1913 though, Jung had started to part ways with Freud just as Adler had done earlier. As with Adler, Jung did not believe that early sexual development was paramount to the understanding of human behavior. Jung proposed analytical psychology as an alternative. In many ways Jung’s theory went beyond