Professor David Peimer
Freud and Jung: Two Giants Too Big for Their World
Summary
Professor David Peimer compares the lives and worlds of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and Carl Jung (1875–1961) and discusses their relationship with one another, which was both incredibly rich and ultimately rather sad.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
There’s a joke an old friend of mine used to make, I’m a Freud, you’re too young to know. I don’t know if, yeah, probably go with Freud first and then Jung. But not necessarily. You can look at the symbols, the images from a cultural perspective and historical perspective and understand them in that way. Freud would be looking from a more personal, the neurosis and the unconscious. But both of them are dreams. They’re both coming out of that world. It’s just what’s in the dreams.
Well, I don’t think Freud was unaware of these ancient, you know, sculptures or images and so on. And I think, as I said later in his life, and obviously “Totem and Taboo” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,” I mean there’s a lot of culture and history and the story’s going way back and Freud used it. I mean, he said he called Jung the Joshua to him being Moses. I don’t think there’s a discounting or an unawareness of it, but I think Freud, the primary focus was the personal and the personal unconscious. Jung, the collective.