He noticed that within the hallucinations and delusions of his patients were images and symbols that were bigger than their possible personal experiences, and even had mythic proportions. Later, Jung worked in a psychiatric hospital where he had the chance to study up close patients with schizophrenia and make his observations scientific. From childhood he was fascinated by an instinct that he was connected to something bigger than himself, and he noticed that his dreams contained things were beyond his own knowledge and experiences. How did Jung come up with the idea of the collective unconscious?ĭreams played a big part in Jung forming his theory of the collective unconscious. For Jung, personal experience exists to develop what is already within us. So for Freud, personal experience exists to develop who we are.
We have an ‘archetypal potential’ that we can choose to activate and develop or not. Jung found this viewpoint limiting and decided we arrive into the world with the collective unconscious already in place. It’s just that he didn’t believe, as Freud did, that we arrive like a blank slate into the world and are only a product of our experiences, meaning each thing in our psyche is unique to us. It’s not that Jung didn’t share Freud’s idea that personal experience shapes us.
Why did Freud hate the idea of the collective unconscious so much? And because what happens to each one of us is unique, we will use and manifest parts of the collective unconscious in a way that is individual as well. Like blueprints, archetypes only become experience when we unconsciously choose to act them out, triggered by something that happens to us, like a challenge or life crisis. As Jung said, they can be seen as “the deposits of all our ancestral experiences, but they are not the experiences themselves”. The archetypes contained in the collective unconscious are also essentially dormant. If this is all true, then why are we not perfectly intelligent and more alike?įor starters, it’s in the word ‘unconscious’ - the collective unconscious, works in a way that is beyond our mental control. Nobody tells us what a mother is, but we react in a certain way to a mothering figure, regardless where we were born in the world or what our culture, religion, or race is.
The collective unconscious contains what are called ‘archetypes’.Īrchetypes are universal concepts we seem to instinctively know, or what Jung described as “identical psychic structures common to all”.Īrchetypes mean that we can have the same thoughts and ideas as other people we have never met even though they come from an entirely different background and culture.Īn example would be the mother child relationship. What does the collective unconscious contain? It is a vast field of information going back to ancient times that we can all access should we so need, and that allows us to have experiences that are typical of humanity. The idea crystallised for Jung after a dream that the was in a house, with the first floor well decorated and organised (conscious personality), then the ground floor more medieval and dark (personal unconscious), and finally a basement with signs of primitive culture and with ancient skulls in it (collective unconscious).Ī modern analogy could be to imagine the collective unconscious rather like an inherited ‘database’, or like the computing ‘Cloud’. Jung proposed that the collective unconscious is a layer of our unconscious mind we come into this world containing, that connects each one of to the history of thoughts and behaviours of all of mankind. While the alliance between Freud and Jung didn’t stand the test of time, Jung’s idea itself ultimately did, and the collective unconscious arguably became his most important contribution to psychology.Īlthough now couched in other theories and rarely attributed to Jung, the ideas first set forth by the collective unconscious are now an acceptable and highly useful part of many different kinds of scientific thought. The collective unconscious was a radical concept in its time.Ĭreated by Carl Jung, it was the idea that separated Jung from the theories - and ultimately friendship – of Sigmund Freud.
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