Assigning IQs to Freud and Jung

Psychology has taken to assigning IQs to people who have never taken IQ tests. Einstein only garners an IQ of 160, thus we have to put up with an article every week that declares a kid “smarter than Einstein”. Who knows what biases reign supreme while assigning an IQ without an IQ test?

I guess there is nothing to stop psychologists from assigning however arbitrary an IQ to whomever they want. I do draw the line somewhere. Psychologists should be banned from assigning IQs to psychologists. This is reasonable. Like the fact that police should never be in charge of investigating police.

So I have taken it upon myself to assign IQs to both Freud and Jung. I have never taken a psychology course. To ensure that there is no monkey business, I will clearly show my assumptions.

The first thing to do is to look at the most prevalent ideas of both men. We will then decide how old you have to be to come up with such a theory. Then we will divide that age by the actual age of the esteemed psychologist when they came up with that theory. We will then multiply that number by 100 to get the actual IQ of the psychologist. In theory, IQ or intelligence quotient is mental age over actual age multiplied by 100. Thus someone of average intelligence has a score of about 100.

Many of Freud’s theories concerned sex. Even what some say is his best work, The Interpretation of Dreams, has parts that later would become his theory of the Oedipus complex. So I have to ask myself, what age group can’t help but concern itself with sex, no matter the topic? Why middle school kids. They have just awakened to their own sexual desires and wonder if absolutely everything has a sexual side they hadn’t considered when they were younger.

So, despite all his training, I think Sigmund Freud had a mental age about 12 years old. Wait a second, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and say his theories showed a mental age of 13.

He willingly published books and papers that allowed sexuality to dominate them as early as 1895 when he was about 40 years old.

So 13 divided by 40, times 100 gives Freud an IQ of about 33.

Carl Jung is best known for his archetypes. He first mentioned them in 1919 when he was about 43 years old.

The age you are when you first realize that humans come in certain varieties is about 6 years old. You have reached your second teacher so you realize that is a type and you find out your friends each have a mother and a father. Obviously people fit into various types, again and again.

So Jung’s mental age of 6, divided by 43, times 100 gives an IQ of 14.

So let’s say you’ve just taken an IQ test and you realize it says you are about average because you only got 100. Well now you can say, “I’m three Freuds!” Or “I’m 7 times smarter than Jung.” Isn’t psychology so comforting?