Hidden Personality - The Collective Unconscious

The Collective Unconscious

Many philosophers have advanced the theory that the human mind is a “blank slate,” capable of being molded by our upbringing, which includes social experiences. In working with patients, Carl Jung observed the development of repeated themes in different people’s artwork, dreams and fantasies. Yet he noticed that many of these themes had no relation to and could not have originated from any connection to the person’s own individual life experiences.

Jung concluded that, in addition to our Personal Unconscious, we each possess a deeper aspect of the unconscious. It was in identifying this second unconscious region that Jung’s model differentiated itself from Freud’s. Naming it the Collective Unconscious, Jung theorized that this region contained psychological elements not developed during the course of our own lives, but passed on through our common evolutionary history to all members of our species. There are shared, fundamental elements that make up the Collective Unconscious and generate a limiting framework around which our psychic material organizes. He referred to those as Archetypes. Archetypes are the fundamental elements of the collective unconscious. Jung, states that every human being is born with a psyche that expects to engage, influence, and to undergo certain life milestones. For instance, our psyches have evolved to expect us to be born, to expect us to have parents, to expect us to encounter particular types of other people and creatures with which we share the earth, to expect us to have children, and to expect us to eventually die. These fundamental psychological expectations have become embodied, Jung claimed, in a common set of basic tendencies in the unconscious that predispose us to generate particular ideas, concepts and imagery related to them. These tendencies are the Archetypes (Jung 2009).