Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious distinguishes his psychology not only from that of Freud, but from all others. It implies the existence of a link between the individual and humanity conceived as a totality, a link that cannot be understood within a mechanistic framework, but is in close agreement with the systemic conception of the mind.
It was a dream that led Jung to the concept of the collective unconscious. He dreamed of visiting an old house and knew it was his house, but he realized that he didn’t know it. He discovers dusty and old openings, rooms, storage rooms. The older they are, the newer it is for him.
In this Psychology-Online article, we will deepen this concept together to better understand what is the collective unconscious according to Jung.
What does the collective unconscious consist of according to Carl Jung?
The collective unconscious is a concept of analytical psychology coined by, who confronted it with the Freudian personal unconscious, considering it shared by all men and derived from their common ancestors through the so-called archetypes.
One of Jung’s most suggestive discoveries is having located deep in the psyche archaic images, archetypes, constituents of a world of its own and which the psyche itself takes for mental and sentimental life.
While for Plato they are the ideas, types or primordial models of things, for Jung they are forms without content that represent the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. Let’s see the characteristics of the archetypes according to Jung:
- The archetype is a mythological figure, a kind of result of countless experiences typical of all past generations.
- In each of these archetypes there is a fragment of psychology and human destiny, a fragment of the pains and joys that have happened again and again.
- Jung considers these archetypes as part of the collective unconscious and from there the individual unconscious begins. They project their images into the collective unconscious and, through the same images or other symbolic representations, they go from the collective to the individual unconscious.
Just as the family environment and the first years of life are fundamental for the “images” and “states” that will influence psychic development, the collective unconscious is the basis of the individual’s psychic lifewith those instinctive forms that are also represented in mythical images that form its essential background.
Examples of the collective unconscious
Jung brings as an example of the existence of the collective unconscious his experience with a schizophrenic patient and the story of a vision-hallucination which they describe by looking at the sun. The psychologist, however, discovered only four years later, in a text by the philologist A. Dieterich, called “Eine Mithrasliturgie”, that the account of the illusion of this patient of his coincided with an ancient Mithrian ritual reported in the Papyrus of Leida. .
In fact, according to Jung’s intuition, some behavior patterns and archaic symbols They have always been part of human heritage and can be channeled by the individual psyche, both in the most archaic and incomprehensible forms for civilized man, as in the case of visions and schizoids and in the most acceptable rituals that adhere to the values of the historical era.
Difference between personal unconscious and collective unconscious
What is the personal and collective unconscious? Jung distinguished accordingly two realms of the unconscious psyche: a personal unconscious that belongs to the individual and a collective unconscious that represents a deeper layer of humanity. Jung’s amazing idea is that they resort, in effect, to archetypes that structure a dimension of the psyche that he defines as the collective unconscious, a psychic and innate sphere that permeates the individual unconscious, which extracts the personal unconscious of each individual in each era. and under certain conditions.
In a 1936 lecture for the Abernethian Society at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, Carl Jung clarified how his definition of the collective unconscious differed from the personal unconscious:
- What is the unconscious for Jung? A part of the psyche that can be distinguished from the personal unconscious by the fact that does not owe its existence to personal experience and, therefore, it is not a personal acquisition.
- While the personal unconscious is essentially made up of contents that were once conscious, but then disappeared from consciousness because they were forgotten or eliminated, the contents of the collective unconscious were never in consciousness. Thus, they have never been acquired individually, but owe their existence exclusively to inheritance.
- The personal unconscious consists above all of complexes. On the other hand, the content of the collective unconscious is essentially made up of archetypes.
We can better understand what the individual and collective unconscious is if we think of the individual unconscious as a root that sinks deeply into and into the collective unconscious like the plant that sprouts from it, with the set of branches and leaves that intertwine with others. branches and leaves forming a forest. Or consider the collective unconscious as a great river that flows, touching each point of its banks with the same water.
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Bibliography
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