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The collective unconscious is a concept originally defined by psychoanalyst Carl Jung and is sometimes called the objective psyche. It refers to the idea that a segment of the deepest unconscious mind is genetically inherited and is not shaped by personal experience.
According to Jung’s teachings, the collective unconscious is common to all human beings and is responsible for a number of deep-seated beliefs and instincts, such as spirituality, sexual behavior, and life and death instincts.
Whether we understand them or not, man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it is still a part of Nature and is connected with his own roots. A view of the world or a social order that cuts him off from the primordial images of life not only is no culture at all, but in increasing degree, is a prison or a stable. If the primordial images remain conscious in some form or other, the energy that belongs to them can flow freely into man.
Short History of the Unconscious
The unconscious was first introduced in connection with the phenomenon of repression. Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) (buy his books from Amazon) investigated numerous cases of traumatic hysteria and observed situations where the behaviour of patients could not be explained without accepting the existence of thoughts or ideas of which the patients themselves were unaware of.
He also noticed that similar behaviours could be artificially induced using hypnosis with much of the same results. This lead to the conclusion that the original ideas people’s minds possess without awareness were indeed operative and active.
Although, at the time, its importance as an active subject began to be acknowledged, the unconscious was severely limited to being a segment that encapsulates suppressed experiences and, therefore, had an exclusively personal nature. Later on, Freud began to admit observing the archaic and mythological features and nuanced his initial position. But is was Carl Jung (buy his books from Amazon) who focused on studying the reoccurrence of the unconscious and elaborated several theses to prove its existence and demonstrate the empirical effects it has on our perception of what we call reality.
The Collective Unconscious
The term collective unconscious was originally coined by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) and has been elaborately explained in his book Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. It represents a form of the unconscious ( the part of the mind containing memories and impulses of which the individual is not aware) common to mankind as a specie and it originates in inherited structures of the psyche, passed on from generation to generation.
It is distinct from the personal unconscious, which arises from the experience of the individual and is made of contents that were once conscious that were either forgotten or suppressed. According to Jung, the collective unconscious is comprised of two main parts: instincts and archetypes, or primordial images and ideas.
Carl Jung book recommendations
Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.
Archetypes
The concept of archetype is inevitably correlated to the unconscious collective and it indicates the presence of certain forms of universality in the psyche. These forms appear in different disciplines and in each of one they bear a separate terminology, but, in essence, they define the basic ideas, representations, motives or elementary categories that stand at the foundation of our interpretation of the world.
There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will, or else produces a conflict of pathological dimensions, that is to say, a neurosis.
Jung describes different types of archetypes depending on the empirical manifestations they preferred, such as motifs, events and figures.
Motifs
- Creation
- Deluge
- Apocalypse
Figures
- The Self
- The Shadow
- The Persona
- The Animal
- Anima & Animus
- The Mother
- The Child / Infans
- The Maiden
- The Trickster
- The Sage
Events
- Birth
- Death
- Separation from parents
- Second pair of parents
- Initiation
- Marriage
- Union of the opposites
Conclusion
A common situation when the unconscious collective becomes uncontrollable and wreaks havoc in a person’s life is when he or she mistakenly identify themselves with a particular archetype. As a result they mindlessly embrace its emotional and cognitive particularities; they might temporarily seem to forget other perceptions, memories, behaviours and thoughts which they usually have. This is an effect of the momentarily exclusion from the mental landscape of the contents that are not consistent with the particular archetype which, for the time being, reigns over perception. A circumstance like this can lead to great amounts of suffering and confusion as it robs its subject of the most significant gift and responsibility of life: freedom.
Jung’s answer to this problem is what he called the process of individuation. To achieve individuation and realise one’s true self, he claimed that, rather than repressing these traits, we must ‘integrate’ them by allowing them to surface from the shadow and to coexist with those in the ego, or true self. Analytical psychologists may encourage this integration, or individuation, through therapy including free association.
As a Chinese saying goes: “He who between freedom and security chooses security, deserves neither.”
