{"id":95,"date":"2020-09-02T02:54:17","date_gmt":"2020-09-02T02:54:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kheper.net\/?page_id=95"},"modified":"2020-09-18T06:49:22","modified_gmt":"2020-09-18T06:49:22","slug":"collective-unconscious","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.kheper.net\/topics\/jung\/collective-unconscious\/","title":{"rendered":"Jung’s Conception Of The Collective Unconscious"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Jung's Conception Of The Collective Unconscious<\/h1>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Jung saw the human psyche as made up of layers or strata (see diagram above).<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0First is the conscious mind.\u00a0 The ego is the term given to the organisation of the conscious mind, being composed of conscious perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings [Calvin S. Hall & Vernon J. Nordby,\u00a0\"Link\u00a0A primer of Jungian Psychology, p.34 (1973,\u00a0 New American Library)].<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0Those mental contents that the ego does not recognise fall into the Personal Unconscious.\u00a0 The Personal Unconscious is made up of suppressed and forgotten memories, traumas, etc.\u00a0 All psychic contents which are either too weak to reach consciousness, or\u00a0 which are actively supressed by the ego, because the latter is threatened by them.<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0Thus far Jung is in agreement with his old teacher Freud, in supposing the existence of the Unconscious mind, which includes all that is not immediately accessible to everyday waking consciousness (i.e. the\u00a0 Conscious mind or Ego).\u00a0 Conscious and Unconscious\u00a0 are thus the two opposed parts of the psyche.<\/p>\n\n

Jung’s great contribution however was to divide the Unconscious itself into two very unequal levels: the\u00a0 more superficial Personal, and the deeper Collective, Unconscious.<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0Everyone has their own Personal Unconscious.\u00a0\u00a0 The Collective Unconscious in contrast is universal.\u00a0\u00a0 It cannot be built up like one’s personal unconscious is; rather, it predates the individual.\u00a0 It\u00a0 is the repositary of all the religious, spiritual,\u00a0 and mythological symbols and experiences.\u00a0 Its\u00a0 primary structures – the deep structures of the\u00a0 psyche, in other words – Jung called “Archetypes”; a\u00a0 later-Hellenistic Platonic and Augustinian Christian\u00a0 term that referred to the spiritual forms which are\u00a0 the pre-existent prototypes of the things of the\u00a0 material world.\u00a0 Interpreting this idea psychologically, Jung stated that these archetypes were the\u00a0 conceptual matrixes or patterns behind all our\u00a0 religious and mythological concepts, and indeed, our\u00a0 thinking processes in general.<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0Actually, Jung’s choice of the term “archetype” is in some senses misleading.\u00a0 For in the late Platonic tradition, the archetypes con-stitute a totally spiritual reality; the original\u00a0 perfect spiritual reality or realities which generates the imperfect physical realities; the “thoughts in the mind of God” of Stoicism and Platonic Christianity.<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0But Jung interprets his archetypes in a biological sense.\u00a0 He says (no doubt due to the\u00a0Darwinian\u00a0influence of his age) that they are\u00a0 “inherited”, and that they “have existed since remotest times”.\u00a0 Yet even “remotest times” can still be located temporally.\u00a0 Such times may have occured an enormously long time ago, but they are\u00a0 still temporal.\u00a0 Plato and his successors would\u00a0 never speak of the Ideas or Archetypes or Spiritual\u00a0 Prototypes coming into being in some primordial\u00a0 past; for they saw these as spiritual realities, and\u00a0 therefore eternal; beyond time altogether.<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0For Jung then, the Collective Unconscious is\u00a0 not, as many of his popularisers claim, a kind of “Universal Mind” or metaphysical reality, like the Platonic World of Forms, but rather an ultimately\u00a0 biological reality.\u00a0 The Spiritual concepts of\u00a0 Platonism are not seen as metaphysical, but biological, or rather, psycho-biological.\u00a0 The Jungian\u00a0 schema can thus be represented as follows:<\/p>\n\n

\n\n\n\n
—————————————————-<\/strong>Cn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cn<\/strong>| |\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 | |\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 | |\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 | |\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 | |\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 | |<\/strong>PUn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 PUn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 PUn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 PUn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 PUn\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 PUn<\/strong>| |_______| |______| |_____| |______| |_____| |<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0 C O L L E C T I V E\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 U N C O N S C I O U S<\/strong>\u00a0[Archetypes = Instincts]<\/strong>BIOLOGICAL INSTINCTS<\/strong>PHYSICAL ORGANISM (DNA or hereditary material)<\/strong>—————————————————-<\/strong><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/figure>\n\n

Jung’s biological theory of the Collective Unconscious.<\/p>\n\n

\u00a0Now, it cannot be denied that there is a subphysical (the biological subconscious) as well as a supraphysical (the psychic unconscious).\u00a0 Yet care must be taken not to confuse the two.\u00a0 And it seems to me logical to assume that the motifs Jung was concerned with – the\u00a0 psycho-spiritual forces of transformation – pertain\u00a0 to the supraphysical rather than the subphysical.<\/p>\n\n

Certainly, later in life Jung downplayed the “biological” aspect of his psychology, and even discarded it altogether, preferring to see the archetypes in a more Platonic sense of prexistent spiritual entities.\u00a0 And in his voluminous alchemical writings he was more concerned with the dynamics of the psyche, and its transformation, than with explaining how the psyche or the archetypes came about in the first place.\u00a0 So it would be unfair to judge Jung on these grounds.\u00a0 Jung himself obviously did\u00a0 not consider abstract theories concerning the\u00a0 metaphysical or cosmological origin of the archetypes as important a practical here-and-now understanding of how the psyche worked, and how spiritual transformation and the growth to greater wholeness occur.<\/p>\n\n

An occult critique of Jung’s conception of the Collective Unconscious<\/p>\n<\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jung’s Conception Of The Collective Unconscious Jung saw the human psyche as made up of layers or strata (see diagram above). \u00a0First is the conscious mind.\u00a0 The ego is the term given to the organisation of the conscious mind, being composed of conscious perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings [Calvin S. Hall & Vernon J. Nordby,\u00a0\u00a0A<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":91,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"elementor_header_footer","meta":{"footnotes":""},"yoast_head":"\nJung's Conception Of The Collective Unconscious - Kheper<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.kheper.net\/topics\/jung\/collective-unconscious\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Jung's Conception Of The Collective Unconscious - Kheper\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Jung’s Conception Of The Collective Unconscious Jung saw the human psyche as made up of layers or strata (see diagram above). \u00a0First is the conscious mind.\u00a0 The ego is the term given to the organisation of the conscious mind, being composed of conscious perceptions, memories, thoughts, and feelings [Calvin S. 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