Carl Jung’s collective unconscious, why should we be interested?

Sensations, thoughts, memories, rituals, myths… Humanity shares common elements that, according to Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, make up a kind of psychic inheritance.. We would therefore be faced with a “trunk” of meanings that we inherit as a social group and that, in some way and according to this theory, impacts our behavior and emotions.

We have all heard about this contribution that Jung made to the world of philosophy and psychology at the beginning of the 20th century.. The same one that motivated the break with psychoanalytic theory and that somehow put even more distance between him and Sigmund Freud. Thus, while for the latter the unconscious was only that part of the mind where all the experiences that were conscious one day and that were later repressed or forgotten were stored, Carl Jung went much further and transcended the individual level.

This psychiatrist, psychologist and essayist did not see the unconscious as a personal manifestation of the individual himself. On the contrary, in his clinical practice and in his own experience he rather sensed a kind of much deeper universal consciousness. The collective unconscious was more like the cosmic night or that primordial chaos from which the archetypes and that psychic inheritance that we all share as humanity emerge.

Few theories have been so controversial within the world of psychology. Jung’s thought constitutes one of the first attempts to reveal the mechanisms that act below our level of consciousness about our thoughts and behaviors.

Does Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious have any practical use?

Carl Jung himself once said that the theory of the collective unconscious is one of those ideas that, because transcendent and important, projects the feeling of being crazy. However, when you delve deeper into it you begin to find familiar and even revealing elements.

We are talking about one of the cornerstones of Jung’s thought. However, at the same time it was also the origin of many of his problems, because as explained in his own books He spent half his life defending this notion of the unconscious from those voices that criticized him for not having given it shape through the scientific method.

Now, at this point many will wonder what the collective unconscious really is and what use it has. To understand it in a simple way, we will use an analogy. Carl Jung’s collective unconscious can be understood as an inherited database. Like a cloud of information where the essence of our experience as humanity is stored and that we would all have in the unconscious.

In addition, This collective unconscious would be made up of certain elements: the archetypes. These psychic phenomena are like units of knowledge, mental images and thoughts that we all have about what surrounds us and that emerge instinctively. An example of this would be “motherhood” and the meaning that the “person” has for us, another archetype understood as that image of ourselves that we want to share with others, the “shadow” or that which, on the contrary, we desire. hide and even repress for ourselves.

Archetypes, emotions and purpose of Carl Jung’s theory

Knowing this and returning to the question raised above about the usefulness of this theory, it is important to make the following reflection. Carl Jung’s collective unconscious proposes to frame a fact. None of us develop in isolation and separate from that envelope called society. We are cogs in a cultural machine, a sophisticated entity that transmits schemes to us, that instills in us meanings that we inherit from each other.

Carl Jung’s theory and his proposal on the collective unconscious actually reflects many of our instincts, our deepest drives as human beings: there is love, fear, social projection, sex, wisdom, good and evil… Thus, one of the objectives of the Swiss psychologist was to get people to build an authentic and healthy “I” where all those energies , where all those archetypes were in harmony.

In addition, A no less interesting aspect about Carl Jung’s collective unconscious is that, as he explained, this psychic energy changes over time. In each generation there are cultural, sociological and environmental variations. All of this would impact our mind, and those unconscious strata where new archetypes are formed.

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