![]() As Jung points out, the alternative is a void (Jung, 1948). In his review of Jung's autobiography, Winnicott says that the positing of a collective unconscious results from Jung's split psyche and "was part of his attempt to deal with his lack of contact with what could now be called the unconscious-according-to-Freud." (Winnicott, 1964) With this criticism, Winnicott dismissed Jung's and perhaps all efforts to speculate about and derive heuristic guidelines consonant with an ultimate ground against which lie subjectivity, consciousness, and the very mystery of life. In spite of his avoidance of ontological affirmations, Jung often appears to suggest that the collective unconscious is a metaphysical reality, which invites less sophisticated analysts to engage in ideological thinking and inflated claims to transcendent knowledge. Jung's proof is phenomenological, and he avoids claiming a priori truths whether or not he believes they exist. ![]() What justifies Jung's notion as psychology and not philosophy is his insistence that the collective unconscious is an empirical fact attested to by the common experiences of humankind over many ages and cultures. It also calls to mind the Pleroma of the Gnostics, the Categories of Emmanuel Kant, and the Will of Arthur Schopenhauer. It shares characteristics with the Apeiron of Anaximander, the One of Parmenides, and the Forms of Plato. Jung's collective unconscious can be seen as a variation within the tradition of philosophical idealism. The personal unconscious of Freud is regarded as the shadow of the ego. For Freud such experiences were phylogenetic recapitulations unrelated to a transcendent structure such as the collective unconscious, but for Jung they arise anew from the collective unconscious in each person in each instance just as they did in one's ancestors.īy 1925 Jung had theorized that the collective unconscious and the external world are opposites between which lies the observing ego which accesses the collective unconscious through the anima or animus and the world through the persona. In fact, Freud acknowledged primordial ancestral patterns but regarded them as simply inheritable traits (Lamarckianism) posited in each individual (the biogenetic law). "I thought, of course, that he would accept the cellars below this cellar, but the dreams were preparing me for the contrary" (McGuire, 1989). The dream depicted a house that had a cellar below the normal cellar and below that a repository of prehistoric pottery, bones, and skulls. The notion of the collective unconscious first came to Jung from a dream he had in 1909 on board a ship returning from the United States with Freud. When the energies of the collective unconscious break through into consciousness, consciousness itself is altered, and reactions vary from insanity to a significant reordering of major attitudes. The components of the collective unconscious were first said by Jung to be primordial or ancestral images and later archetypes that manifest in consciousness through images, strong affects, and behavioral patterns. Jung's notion of the collective unconscious ranges from a passive repository that records the history of all human reactions to the world to an active substratum that is the ground out of which all reality emerges. The earliest written appearance of the term was found in the French translation of the Zurich talk published in 1916 in the Archives de Psychologies (Jung, 1916). The term collective unconscious was first introduced by Carl Gustav Jung in 1916 in a talk to the Zurich School for Analytical Psychology entitled "Uber das Unbewesste und seine Inhalte." The German manuscript for this talk was not found until 1961, after Jung's death. ![]() more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals." (Jung, 1934 ). The collective unconscious is different from and in addition to the personal unconscious in that it is a stratum of reality that "does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn.universal. The "collective unconscious" is the part of the collective psyche that is unconscious, the other parts beingĬonsciousness of the perceptible world and consciousness itself. COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS (ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY)
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