Collective Unconscious: What It Is And How Carl Jung Defined It
The concept of the collective unconscious was proposed by Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, in the mid-19th century. Broadly speaking, it refers to a dimension that is beyond consciousness and that is common to the experience of all human beings.
Although the term collective unconscious has been the subject of much criticism, it has also been positioned as a theory that offers important elements to understand many human phenomena. In this article We will see what the Collective Unconscious is and how it has impacted psychodynamic psychology.
The history of psychology has been marked by different theories that address the relationship between the dimension of consciousness and its opposite or complementary dimension. There are many proposals that have emerged to resolve this issue.
Among these is the concept of the unconscious from the psychodynamic perspective, emerged at the end of the 19th century within Freudian psychoanalysis but taken up and reformulated some time later, both by his followers and by his deserters.
One of the most popular is Carl Jung, who after having collaborated closely with Sigmund Freud, decided to form his own tradition outside of psychoanalysis. which we know as “analytical psychology”. Among the main concepts that are part of this tradition is that of the collective unconscious.
What is the collective unconscious?
Within traditional psychology it is understood that what is complementary to the “individual” is “the social”. However, for analytical psychology, what is complementary to the individual is not precisely the social, but the collective, which not only refers to the group of people that make up a society, but also places emphasis on what these people have in common.
According to Jung, just as the individual has a psychic dimension that is beyond consciousness (the unconscious); The collective, insofar as it belongs to a suprapersonal dimension, also has its own unconscious. Unlike the individual unconscious, which is acquired through lived experiences, The collective unconscious is a common platform, composed of archetypes that shape our individuality.
In other words, according to Jung, there are a series of psychic experiences, imaginaries and symbols, whose existence is not given by acquired learning, but rather are experiences that all human beings share, regardless of our individual life stories.
These are experiences that obey another order, which is why Jung defines the collective unconscious as a second psychic system whose nature is universal and impersonal.
Just as the physical characteristics of an individual are more or less common to those of all individuals belonging to the human species, the psyche also has common characteristics that exist independently of the culture and history of societies. It is an instance that transcends age, life and even death; It is an experience that has accompanied humanity since its existence.
First definitions since Carl Jung
In his early works, Jung described the Collective Unconscious as that substrate that makes it possible to understand why people who belong to such apparently different cultures share some psychic characteristics.
The latter could be seen, for example, in repetitive dreams, in art, in myths and religions, in children’s stories, in psychic symptoms, among other areas. For this reason, the collective unconscious served Jung to offer explanations about the common meanings of symbols and myths that apparently differ between cultures.
Formally, the concept of the collective unconscious emerged in 1936, after a conference that Jung gave in London, precisely with the title The Concept of the Collective Unconscious.
The archetypes
The collective unconscious is fundamentally composed of archetypes, which are pre-existing and universal forms (ideas, images, symbols) that give shape to a large part of psychic content.
According to Jung, just as human beings have instinctive behavior patterns mediated by biological activity, we have instinctive behavior patterns mediated by psychic activity which draws on the mythical aspect through which experiences are mapped and narrated.
In this sense, archetypes and the collective unconscious are transmitted by the very condition of being human, and their effects are visible in the formation of the individual psyche. And it is so because, For Jung, the unconscious also has purposes, intuitions, thoughts, feelings etc., just as it happens with the conscious mind.
To develop the concept of archetype, Jung took as reference different anthropological and philosophical works, especially from authors such as Mauss, Lévy Bruhl and A. Bastian. Some of the archetypes that he developed in an important way and that have been taken up by different authors are the anima, the shadow or the great mother.
Impact on psychology and related areas
Among other things, the concept of the collective unconscious has served to formulate explanations about different human experiences that the most traditional and rational science can explore little. For example, in specific questions about mystical experiences, artistic experiences or some therapeutic experiences.
Furthermore, the concept of the collective unconscious has impacted much of the specialized language in areas that are not specifically psychology, because it serves to talk about what we know we share, regardless of culture, although we do not know exactly what it is. For the same reason it has been a concept that has often been problematic, ambiguous and subject to various criticisms, without ever ceasing to be present even in the most everyday language.
