What is Collective Unconscious?

The concept of the Collective Unconscious was created by the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Jung, at the beginning of the last century (from 1907 to 1912) collaborated with Freud, writing several articles and books on psychoanalysis.

Later, he disagreed with some of Freud’s ideas and created his own approach called Analytical Psychology or Deep or Archetypal Psychology.

The best definition I know to say what the unconscious is is: the unconscious is what we don’t know about ourselves. Many behaviors, feelings, and thoughts are not governed by the self. There is indeed a large region of our soul which is unconscious or, in other words, governed by the unconscious.

Jung expanded the concept of the unconscious by making a distinction. In that large region of our soul, which is unconscious, there is the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious.

The personal unconscious is what Freud had studied. In it we find what was repressed, hidden, forgotten. What I lived and what I forgot, hid from myself or repressed is still there. Sometimes it reappears in dreams, faulty acts or even physical or psychological symptoms.

The collective unconscious, on the other hand, does not represent what I experienced, but what humanity as a whole experienced. In Studies in Analytical Psychology, Jung writes:

“…the unconscious contains not only personal, but also impersonal, collective components in the form of inherited categories or archetypes. I have already proposed the hypothesis that the unconscious, at its deepest levels, has collective contents in a relatively active state, which is why I called it the collective unconscious” (JUNG, p. 127)

And how do we recognize, in ourselves and in others, the collective unconscious? How does the collective unconscious appear in practice?

You must have heard: “my life would make a book!” or else, a novel, a movie… and it’s true. Every life story could turn into a book. When telling a personal story, we can notice parallels (similarities, similar factors) with stories present in myths, fairy tales, legends, fables, parables.

In the same way, when we tell a dream we will find elements that are archetypal, that is, elements that are collective.

Jung noticed, in his travels around the world, that an individual who did not (consciously) know a Greek myth, for example, dreamed about it.

Without being aware of a particular mythological story, legend or religious experience, we dream, fantasize, experience similar elements.

The important thing for the concept of the collective unconscious is that we all participate in humanity. The whole of humanity is in us, with its forgotten myths, legends, fables, fairy tales and experiences.

Bibliographic references:

CG JUNG. Studies in Analytical Psychology. Petrópolis, Editora Vozes: 1978

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