Collective unconscious

Collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology, and was originally coined by Carl Jung. He distinguished the collective unconscious from the personal unconscious, which is particular to each human being. The collective unconscious refers to that part of a person's unconscious which is common to all human beings. It contains archetypes, which are forms or symbols that are manifested by all people in all cultures. Some have pointed out that this is essentially metaphysics since it is a hypothesis that can never be empirically confirmed or falsified.

Related Topics:
Analytical psychology - Coined - Carl Jung - Unconscious - Archetype - Metaphysics - Hypothesis

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Less mystical proponents of the Jungian model hold that the collective unconscious can be adequately explained as arising in each individual from shared instinct, common experience, and shared culture. The natural process of generalization in the human mind combines these common traits and experiences into a mostly identical substratum of the unconscious.

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For example, the archetype of "the great mother" would be expected to be very nearly the same in all people, since all infants share inherent expectation of having an attentive caretaker (human instinct); every surviving infant must either have had a mother, or a surrogate (common experience); and nearly every child is indoctrinated with society's idea of what a mother should be (shared culture). The amalgam of all these effects could be the source of the shared figure, or archetype, which appears very nearly the same in most persons' dreams.

Related Topics:
Archetype - Dream

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Regardless of whether the individual's connection to the collective unconscious arises from mundane or metaphysical means, the term collective unconscious describes an important commonality that is observed to exist between different individuals' dreams. It was simply formulated by Jung as a model.

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The difference in their conceptualization of the unconscious is one of the more conspicuous differences between the psychologies founded by Jung and Freud.

Related Topics:
Jung - Freud

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In his earlier writings, Jung called this aspect of the psyche the collective unconscious; later, he changed the term to the objective psyche. The objective psyche may be considered objective for two reasons: it is common to everyone; and it has a better sense of the self ideal than the ego or conscious self does, and thus directs the self, via archetypes, dreams, intuition, and making mistakes on purpose, to self-actualization.

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