Collective unconscious: what it is and how Carl Jung defined it.

A summary of how Jung's analytical psychology shaped this concept.

The concept of the collective unconscious was proposed by Carl Jung, founder of analytical psychology, in the mid-19th century. Broadly speaking, it refers to a dimension that is beyond consciousness and common to the experience of all human beings.

Although the term collective unconscious has been the subject of much criticism, it has also been positioned as a theory that offers important elements for understanding many human phenomena. In this article we will see what the Collective Unconscious is and how it has impacted psychodynamic psychology..

Brief history of the unconscious

The history of psychology has been marked by different theories that address the relationship between the dimension of consciousness and its opposite or complementary dimension. Many proposals have emerged to resolve this question.

Among these is the concept of the unconscious from the psychodynamic perspective, which arose at the end of the 19th century within Freudian psychoanalysisbut taken up and reformulated some time later, both by its followers and its defectors.

One of the most popular is Carl Jung, who after having collaborated closely with Sigmund Freud, decided to form his own tradition outside of psychoanalysis, which we know as "analytical psychology.". Among the main concepts that are part of this tradition is the collective unconscious.

What is the collective unconscious?

Within traditional psychology it is understood that what complements the "individual" is "the social". However, for analytical psychology, what is complementary to the individual is not precisely the social, but the collective, which not only refers to the group of people that make up a society, but emphasizes what these people have in common.

According to Jung, just as the individual has a psychic dimension that is beyond consciousness (the unconscious); the collective, insofar as it belongs to a supra-personal dimension, also has its own unconscious. Unlike the individual unconscious, which is acquired through lived experiences, the collective unconscious is a platform that is beyond consciousness (the unconscious), the collective unconscious is a common platform, composed of archetypes that shape our individuality. that shape our individuality.

In other words, according to Jung, there is a series of psychic experiences, imaginaries and symbols, whose existence is not given by acquired learning, but rather they are experiences shared by all human beings, independently of our individual life histories.

It is about experiences that obey another order, that is why Jung defines the collective unconscious as a second psychic system whose nature is universal and impersonal..

Just as the physical characteristics of an individual are more or less common to all individuals belonging to the human species, so too the psyche has common characteristics that exist independently of the culture and history of societies. It is an instance that transcends age, life and even death; it is an experience that has accompanied humanity since its existence.

First definitions since Carl Jung

In his early work, Jung described the Collective Unconscious as that substratum which makes it possible to understand why people belonging to such apparently different cultures share some psychic characteristics.

The latter could be seen, for example, in repetitive dreams, in art, in myths and religions, in children's stories, in psychic symptomatology, among other areas. For this reason, the collective unconscious served Jung to offer explanations of the common meanings of symbols. about the common meanings of symbols and myths that are apparently different between cultures..

Formally, the concept of the collective unconscious emerged in 1936, after a conference that Jung gave in London, precisely with the title The Concept of the Collective Unconscious.

The archetypes

The collective unconscious is fundamentally composed of archetypes, which are pre-existing and universal forms (ideas, images, symbols) that give form to a large part of the psychic contents.

According to Jung, just as human beings have patterns of instinctual behavior mediated by Biological activity, we have patterns of instinctive behavior mediated by psychic activitywhich draws from the mythic aspect through which experiences are mapped and narrated.

In this sense, archetypes and the collective unconscious are transmitted by the very condition of being human, and their effects are visible in the shaping of the individual psyche. And this is so because, for Jung, the unconscious also has purposes, intuitions, thoughts, feelings, etc., as is the case in the human psyche.and so on, just as the conscious mind does.

To develop the concept of archetype, Jung took as a reference different anthropological and philosophical works, especially from authors such as Mauss, Lévy Bruhl and A. Bastian. Some of the archetypes that he developed in an important way and that have been taken up by different authors are the anima, the shadow or the great mother.

Impact on psychology and related fields

Among other things, the concept of the collective unconscious has served to formulate explanations about different human experiences that the more traditional and rational science can do little to explore. For example, in specific questions about mystical experiences, artistic experiences, or some therapeutic experiences..

In addition, the concept of the collective unconscious has impacted much of the specialized language in areas that are not properly psychology, because it serves to talk about what we know that we share, regardless of culture, although we do not know what it is. For the same reason it has often been a problematic concept, ambiguous and subject to various criticisms, without having ceased to be present even in the most everyday language.

Bibliographical references:

• Quiroga, M.P. (2010). Art and Analytical Psychology. An archetypal interpretation of art. Art, Individual and Society, 22(2): 49-62.