What is the COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS according to Jung

Jung's concept of the collective unconscious distinguishes his psychology not only from Freud's, but from all others. It implies the existence of a link between the individual and humanity conceived as a totality, a link that does not can be understood within a mechanistic framework, but is in close agreement with the systemic conception of 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 home, but realized that he did not know it. Discover dusty and old openings, environments, storage rooms. The older, the newer to him.

In this Psychology-Online article, we will deepen this concept together to better understand what is the collective unconscious according to Jung.

Index

1. What is the collective unconscious according to Carl Jung
2. Examples of the collective unconscious
3. Difference between personal unconscious and collective unconscious

The collective unconscious is a concept from analytical psychology coined by Carl Gustav Jung, which confronted him 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 within the psyche images archaic, the archetypes, constituents of a world to itself and to which the psyche itself takes for the mental life and sentimental.

While for Plato the archetypes are the original ideas, types or 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 innumerable typical experiences of all past generations.
• In each of these archetypes there is a fragment of human psychology and destiny, a fragment of the joys and pains that have happened over and over again.
• Jung considers these archetypes as part of the collective unconscious and that from there the individual begins. They project their images onto the collective unconscious and, through the same images or other symbolic representations, pass 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 life, with those instinctive forms that are also represented in mythical images that form their essential baggage.

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 that these describe 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 mithriac ritual reported in the Papyrus of Leida.

In fact, according to Jung's intuition, some archaic symbols and behavior patterns have always been part of the 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 from hallucinations schizoid and in the most acceptable rituals and adherents to the values ​​of the historical epoch.

What is the personal and collective unconscious? Jung distinguished accordingly two kingdoms 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 astonishing idea is that they resort, in effect, to the 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, that extracts the personal unconscious of each individual in each time and in certain terms.

At a 1936 conference for the Abernethian Society at St Bartholomew's Hospital in London, Carl Jung clarified how his definition of the collective unconscious differed from the unconscious personal:

• 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 they owe their existence exclusively to heredity.
• The personal unconscious consists mostly of complexes. Instead, 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 deep into the human being and in the collective unconscious as the plant that sprouts from it, with the set of branches and leaves that intertwine with other 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.

This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.

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