Collective unconscious

The collective unconscious is a concept of Jungian psychoanalysis. Carl Jung proposed it to designate a special class of mental phenomena, which, unlike the individual (personal) unconscious, are carriers of the experience of the phylogenetic development of mankind, which is inherited through brain structures. The contents of the collective unconscious, according to Jung, are archetypes — universal a priori patterns of behavior, which in a person’s real life are filled with specific content.

According to Jung, there is not only the unconscious of the subject, but also the family, tribal, national, racial and collective unconscious. The collective unconscious carries information from the mental world of the whole society, while the individual unconscious carries information from the mental world of a particular person. Unlike psychoanalysis, Jungianism considers the unconscious as a collection of static patterns, patterns of behavior that are innate and only need to be actualized. The unconscious is also divided into latent, temporarily unconscious and suppressed processes and states of the psyche, forced out of the boundaries of consciousness.

Psychologists of scientific orientation do not use this idea of ​​C. Jung, because it is not verifiable: it is impossible to prove or disprove it experimentally. You can either believe in him or not — like in God or Santa Claus, and therefore this concept does not apply to the field of scientific psychology. According to psychologists of scientific orientation, the collective unconscious is rather a beautiful myth, a notion. And there is a fear that the notion is more harmful than useful, since the practice of using it suggests that with its help people are usually relieved of responsibility for their antisocial behavior. Serious researchers, instead of the collective unconscious, talk about the influence of the culture within which we are born and which we soak every day.

History of the term

The term «collective unconscious» was introduced into psychoanalytic literature by the Swiss psychotherapist C.G. Jung, who in his work «Psychology of the Unconscious Process» paid attention to the consideration of not only personal-human characteristics, but also mythological figures expressing the feelings of patients. In a section he called «The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious», he emphasized that some attributes cannot be attributed entirely to the human personality, but should be considered as contents of the «superpersonal or collective unconscious.» Explaining his point of view, Jung noted that «the collective unconscious is something like a sediment of experience and at the same time — an image of the world as a kind of its a priori.» This image contains certain features, the so-called dominants, or archetypes. In another section of this work, entitled «Personal, Supra-Personal, or Collective Unconscious», he wrote that in the deep layer of the collective unconscious, the original universal images are dormant, and in itself it represents the objective-psychic, in contrast to the subjective-psychic individual unconscious.

In Jung’s understanding, the content of the collective unconscious is not only the sediments of archaic ways of functioning of people, but also the sediments of the functioning of the animal series of ancestors. In contrast to the individual, personal unconscious, which consists of contents that were once conscious, but disappeared from consciousness due to repression, the collective unconscious is characterized by the fact that its contents have never been conscious, have never been acquired individually, but owe their existence to the universal inheritance.

In the report «The Concept of the Collective Unconscious», read by Jung at the Abernathy Society (England) in 1936, and in a number of his subsequent publications, ideas about the collective unconscious are presented to one degree or another. According to these ideas, the collective unconscious can be characterized as follows:

• it does not develop individually, but is inherited;
• consists of archetypes as some pre-existing forms that are a model and model of instinctive behavior;
• includes products of an archaic nature, i.e. contents and patterns of behavior that are the same for all individuals;
• identical in all people and thus forms the universal basis of the spiritual life of everyone;
• has mythological content;
• consists of images that do not have blood or racial heredity, but belong to humanity as a whole;
• is a repository of relic remains and memories of the past;
• represents a single sub-foundation for all, on which an indissoluble integrity and fundamental identity is preserved;
• incorporates such contents that cannot be the object of arbitrary intention and are not subject to the control of the will;
• can be activated in a large social group, resulting in a collective insanity — a spiritual epidemic that can lead to revolution, war, catastrophe.

Introducing the concept of “collective unconscious” into the conceptual framework, Jung admitted that, based on the analysis of dreams, Z. Freud was the first to draw attention to the fact that there are elements in dreams that are not individual and are not derived from the personal experience of dreamers. The founder of psychoanalysis called them «primal fantasies», «archaic remnants», thereby emphasizing their collective rather than individual nature. More broadly than dreams, in Totem and Taboo, Freud spoke of the «inheritance of psychic dispositions» and, later, of «archaic legacies of the past» and «inherited schemas.» In particular, in his work “The Man Moses and Monotheistic Religion”, he drew attention to the fact that “in the mental life of an individual, not only personally experienced, but also learned at birth content, elements of phylogenetic origin, archaic heritage can be effective.” In his opinion, the archaic heritage of man includes both predispositions and «traces of memory of the experiences of previous generations.»

At the same time, unlike Jung, Freud did not use the concept of «collective unconscious» in his works, believing that such an expression is nothing more than a tautology. In this regard, he emphasized that «the content of the unconscious is generally collective, it is the common property of people.» Therefore, without resorting to the concept of «collective unconscious», Freud preferred to talk about the phylogenetic origin of the unconscious, about the inherited, reduced repetition of the development that all mankind has gone through for a long time, starting from primitive times, about the «psychic condensate», which has become an inalienable heritage, which with each generation needs only awakening, not acquisition. A typical example of such a heritage is, in his opinion, the “innate” symbolism inherited by people from the era of language development and the same in meaning for all peoples, despite the difference in languages.