archetype.guide

Concept

Collective unconscious

Jung’s name for a layer of the unconscious he held to be shared by everyone rather than built from personal experience, and whose contents are the archetypes. A hypothesis in his own words, not a finding.

Separate minds, each with its own column of personal material; beneath them all one sea. Now and then the same shape rises into three minds that have never met.

What was written

Definition

The collective unconscious is the part of the psyche that Jung proposed is not acquired in a lifetime. Freud’s unconscious was personal: made of what an individual had forgotten, repressed or never noticed. Jung kept that layer and placed another beneath it, impersonal and the same in everyone, whose contents are the archetypes. He used “collective” to mean common to the species, not belonging to a group, and he sometimes preferred “impersonal”. The hypothesis was his explanation for a clinical observation he returned to again and again: patients with no knowledge of mythology produced dreams and fantasies that matched myths closely.

It is a hypothesis, and Jung called it one. The site’s entries treat it as the central organising idea of analytical psychology and as a historical claim about the mind whose empirical standing is discussed on the methodology page. The mechanism Jung sometimes gave for it, genetic inheritance of complex symbolic patterns, has been set aside by the field’s own leading theorists.

History

Jung first distinguished a personal from an impersonal unconscious in the years after his break with Freud, and by 1917 he was describing the collective unconscious as expressing itself through “dominants”, nodal points around which imagery gathers (Samuels, 1985). The idea had precursors he acknowledged, among them Adolf Bastian’s Elementargedanken of 1881 and the “categories of imagination” of Hubert and Mauss, which Jung cited as independent of his own work.

He stated it plainly to a London audience in 1935:

From these layers derive the contents of an impersonal, mythological character, in other words, the archetypes, and I call them therefore the impersonal or collective unconscious. — C. G. Jung, Tavistock Lectures (1935), Lecture Two, CW 18

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The evidence he offered in the same lecture is typical of the whole corpus: a patient’s dream of a man crucified on a wheel, which Jung read as the Greek motif of Ixion and took to be beyond the dreamer’s learning. He conceded at once that a single example proves nothing.

The 1939 Eranos lectures, published in English as The Integration of the Personality, give the clearest statement of why he needed the idea. Faced with the same symbols appearing in unrelated patients, he wrote that the most sensible explanation was “the hypothesis of the collective unconscious”, meaning a universal similarity of the basic structure of the human psyche containing a number of patterns, archetypes, common to the whole of humanity. The essay “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” (1934, revised 1954) opens CW 9i, and in Aion (1951) Jung drew the line between the two layers in a sentence: the contents of the personal unconscious are acquired during a lifetime, the contents of the collective unconscious are archetypes that were present from the beginning (CW 9ii ¶13).

Later writers have narrowed and reworked the idea. Anthony Stevens (2003) treats it as synonymous with a phylogenetic psyche shaped by evolution. Murray Stein (1998) separates a cultural unconscious, shared by people raised in the same traditions, from the collective unconscious proper. Jean Knox (2003) and Christian Roesler (2012) argue that what is shared across humanity is a small set of embodied developmental schemas and the stories cultures tell around them, not an inherited store of symbolic content.

Sources

  • Jung, C. G. (1935). Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice (The Tavistock Lectures). Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968. Lecture Two. Also CW 18 ¶1–415.
  • Jung, C. G. (1939). The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans.). Farrar & Rinehart. Chapters 1–3. The lectures were revised into CW 9i and CW 12.
  • Jung, C. G. (1934/1954). Archetypes of the collective unconscious. CW 9i ¶1–86.
  • Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. CW 9ii ¶13.
  • Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapter 2.
  • Stein, M. (1998). Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction. Open Court. ISBN 978-0-8126-9376-8. Chapter 4.
  • Stevens, A. (2003). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9.
  • Knox, J. (2003). Archetype, Attachment, Analysis. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-129-7.
  • Roesler, C. (2012). Are archetypes transmitted more by culture than biology? Journal of Analytical Psychology, 57(2), 223–246. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5922.2011.01963.x