Jung concept of collective unconscious is based on his experiences with
schizophrenic persons since he worked in the Burgholzli psychiatric hospital.
Though initially Jung followed the Freudian theory of unconscious as the
psychic strata formed by repressed wishes, he later developed his own theory on
the unconscious to include some new concepts. The most important of them is the
archetype.
Archetypes constitute the structure of the collective unconscious - they
are psychic innate dispositions to experience and represent basic human
behavior and situations. Thus mother-child relationship is governed by the
mother archetype. Father-child - by the father archetype. Birth, death, power
and failure are controlled by archetypes. The religious and mystique
experiences are also governed by archetypes.
The most important of all is the Self, which is the archetype of the
Center of the psychic person, his/her totality or wholeness. The Center is made
of the unity of conscious and unconscious reached through the individuation
process.
Archetypes manifest themselves through archetypal images (in all the
cultures and religious doctrines), in dreams and visions. Therefore a great
deal of Jungian interest in psyche focuses on dreams and symbols interpretation
in order to discover the compensation induced by archetypes as marks of psyche
transformation.
The collective unconscious is an universal datum, that is, every human
being is endowed with this psychic archetype-layer since his/her birth. One can
not acquire this strata by education or other conscious effort because it is
innate.
We may also describe it as a universal library of human knowledge, or
the sage in man, the very transcendental wisdom that guides mankind.
Jung stated that the religious experience must be linked with the
experience of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Thus, God himself
is lived like a psychic experience of the path that leads one to the
realization of his/her psychic wholeness.
Jung about the
Collective Unconscious
“The collective unconscious - so far as we can say anything about it at
all - appears to consist of mythological
motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its
real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of
projection of the collective unconscious... We can therefore study the
collective unconscious in two ways, either in mythology or in the analysis of
the individual.”
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