Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology originally coined by Carl Jung. While Freud did not distinguish between an "individual psychology" and a "collective psychology", Jung distinguished the collective unconscious from the personal unconscious particular to each human being.

Definition

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The collective unconscious refers to that part of a person's unconscious which is common to all human beings. It contains archetypes, which are forms or symbols that are manifested by all people in all cultures. They are said to exist prior to experience, and are in this sense instinctual. Critics have argued that this is an ethnocentrist view, which universalized Jung's European-styled archetypes into human beings' archetypes.

Less mystical proponents of the Jungian model hold that the collective unconscious can be adequately explained as arising in each individual from shared instinct, common experience, and shared culture. The natural process of generalization in the human mind combines these common traits and experiences into a mostly identical substratum of the unconscious.

For example, the archetype of "the great mother" would be expected to be very nearly the same in all people, since all infants share inherent expectation of having an attentive caretaker (human instinct); every surviving infant must either have had a mother, or a surrogate (common experience); and nearly every child is indoctrinated with society's idea of what a mother should be (shared culture). The amalgam of all these effects could be the source of the shared figure, or archetype, which reportedly appears very nearly the same in most peoples' dreams.

Regardless of whether the individual's connection to the collective unconscious arises from mundane or mystical means, the term collective unconscious describes an important commonality that is observed to exist between different individuals' dreams. It was simply formulated by Jung as a model.

Timothy Leary's 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness includes the collective unconscious as being the 7th circuit, or the neurogenetic circuit of consciousness.

Collective unconscious in Jung's works

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In his earlier writings, Jung called this aspect of the psyche the collective unconscious. He later changed the term to objective psyche. The objective psyche may be considered objective for two reasons: it is common to everyone; and it has a better sense of the self's ideal than the ego or conscious self does. It thus directs the self, via archetypes, dreams, and intuition, and drives the person to make mistakes on purpose. In this way, it moves the psyche toward individuation, or self-actualization.

In the "Definitions" chapter of Jung's seminal work Psychological Types, under the definition of "collective" Jung references representations collectives, a term coined by Levy-Bruhl in his 1910 book How Natives Think. Jung says this is what he describes as the collective unconscious.

Collective unconscious in Fiction

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On the television show Voyager, the crew encounters an alien race that places them all in a massive, shared dream. Character Seven of Nine describes this as a "collective unconscious".

In the Hitchhiker novel Life, the Universe and Everything, the game of Cricket is a "collective unconscious" memory of the Krikkit Wars.

In the Steven King novel Cell, after an apparent terrorist attack wipes the minds of a majority of humanity, Collective Unconscious is used as the premise behind the basic instinct to kill, adapt and survive after the "Phoners" transition from humanity into a new species. Telepathy is also noted as a continuance of the Collective Unconsciousness.

See also

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• Archetype
• Collective consciousness
• Pantheism
• Paramatman
• Synchronicity
• Subconscious mind

Further reading

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• Jung, Carl. The Development of Personality
• Jung, Carl. "Psychic conflicts in a child.", Collected Works of C. G. Jung, 17, Princeton University Press, 1970. 235 p. (p. 1-35).
• Whitmont, Edward C. (1969). The Symbolic Quest. Princeton University Press.
• Gallo, Ernest. "Synchronicity and the Archetypes," Skeptical Inquirer 18 (4), Summer 1994.

External links

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• for Research in Archetypal Symbolism A pictorial and written archive of mythological, ritualistic, and symbolic images from all over the world and from all epochs of human history.

Jungian psychology

Kollektives Unbewusstes | Inconsciente colectivo | Inconscient collectif | Inconscio collettivo | תת מודע קולקטיבי | 集合的無意識 | Nieświadomość zbiorowa | Inconsciente coletivo | Коллективное бессознательное | Kollektiva omedvetna | 集体潜意识