Collective Mythological Images
Jung distinguished between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. To find the positive therapeutic direction as impartially as he could, Jung identified and interpreted dream images generated by the collective unconscious in a constructive way rather than reducing them to personal indications. Since collective themes are common to all humanity, they find their counterpart in mythological motifs.
rest on an exclusively causal and reductive procedure which resolves the dream (or fantasy) into its memory components and the underlying instinctual processes. I have indicated above the justification as well as the limitation of this procedure. It breaks down at the point where the dream symbols can no longer be reduced to personal reminiscences or aspirations, that is, when the images of the collective unconscious begin to appear (Jung, 1966: par. 122).
Read more about this topic: Jung's Theory Of Neurosis
Famous quotes containing the words collective, mythological and/or images:
“Anyone who is kind to man knows the fragmentariness of most men, and wants to arrange a society of power in which men fall naturally into a collective wholeness, since they cannot have an individual wholeness. In this collective wholeness they will be fulfilled. But if they make efforts at individual fulfilment, they must fail for they are by nature fragmentary.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Both magic and religion are based strictly on mythological tradition, and they also both exist in the atmosphere of the miraculous, in a constant revelation of their wonder-working power. They both are surrounded by taboos and observances which mark off their acts from those of the profane world.”
—Bronislaw Malinowski (18841942)
“No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)