Jungian Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
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Carl Jung is one of the most notable psychiatrists of the 20th century, his work continues to influence the ideas of modern-day thinkers like Jordan Peterson and others. His work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, and religious studies.
In this essay, we will discuss Jung’s ideas about the layers of human consciousness or psyche.
A key to understanding the beauty of Jungian Psychology is the knowledge of what he calls the psyche. The word psyche originally meant ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ but by the turn of the 20th century increasingly came to refer to ‘mind’.
In Jungian psychology, one’s psyche can be seen as their total personality and encompasses one’s thoughts, behaviors, feelings, and emotions. Jung divided the human psyche into two parts—the conscious and the unconscious psyche.
The Conscious Psyche
The conscious realm of human psyche can be described as one’s field of awareness and consists of those psychic contents that one knows. At the center of this field of awareness was what Jung called the ego. The ego is one’s personality as they are aware of it firsthand.
The ego influences what content of your experiences gets reflected into your unconscious and what gets repressed, eliminated, or ignored. It helps to determine the content of the next psyche we are going to talk about—the personal unconscious.
The Unconscious Psyche
The unconscious psyche consists of behavioral traits whose causal explanation you are unaware of. A huge part of the unconscious psyche is inherently present in all human beings, while the rest of it is influenced by your personal experiences. You may not have a precise memory of those experiences, but they have a significant influence on your behavior.
“There are certain events of which we have not consciously taken note; they have remained, so to speak, below the threshold of consciousness. They have happened, but they have been absorbed subliminally.” (Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung)
There are two branches of the unconscious human psyche—the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.
Personal Unconscious
Your personal unconscious is occupied by the events that have been absorbed subliminally. These are the events that the ego represses or disregards, for various reasons, be it that they are too distressing or simply forgotten or deemed insignificant.
However, they do not disappear completely from your psyche, instead, they get stored in your personal unconscious and continue to have the potential influence on your personality.
Collective Unconscious and Jungian Archetypes
Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious was one of his most important contributions to the field of psychology. They lay the foundation for his ideas about archetypes.
What Jung proposed was that in addition to the personal unconscious, which is mainly composed of elements drawn from your life experiences, the collective unconscious contains universal elements which are inherited.
“We can also find in the unconscious qualities that are not individually acquired but are inherited, e.g., instincts as impulses to carry out actions from necessity, without conscious motivation. In this deeper stratum we…find…archetypes… The instincts and archetypes together form the “collective unconscious”. I call them collective because unlike the personal unconscious, it is not made up of individual and more or less unique contents but of those which are universal and of regular occurrence.” (The Essential Jung, Carl Jung and Anthony Storr)
The archetypes of the collective unconscious have a deep evolutionary basis and Jung considered them to be inherited parts of the psyche. Jung thought that just as the body has evolved over long periods of time, so too must the psyche have evolved certain predispositions and inherent tendencies as well throughout our vast evolutionary lineage.
Integration of Archetypes and the Conscious Psyche
Jung believed it was of paramount importance for us to confront and integrate the contents of our unconscious. He thought that the failure to do so would result in a fragmented individual:
“For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or “dissociated,” psychological disturbance follows.” (Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung)
The misalignment of human archetypes and your conscious psyche can cause you a lot of psychological trouble in the long run. This is why the ultimate goal of analytical psychology—the psychotherapeutic practice founded by Carl Jung—is to create a balance between your conscious and unconscious psyche.
Jung suggested a series of archetypes such as the father, the mother, the shadow, the persona, the hero, the trickster, among others. If you want me to discuss them as well, let me know in the comments and I will try to pull off an essay about it sometime later.
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