Collective Unconscious

The collective unconscious is the stratum of the psyche that “does not, like [the personal unconscious], owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition.” Its contents “owe their existence exclusively to heredity” and “have never been in consciousness” (Jung, CW 9i §88). Where the personal unconscious consists of complexes formed from repressed or forgotten material, the collective unconscious consists of archetypes — “definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere” (CW 9i §89).

“In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature… there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.” (CW 9i §90)

Jung’s most persistent correction is against the Lamarckian misreading: what is inherited is form, not content. The archetype is “empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori” (CW 9i §155). The analogy Jung returns to is the crystal lattice — invisible in the mother liquor, yet present as the axis around which ions aggregate into crystalline structure (cf. Jung, Letters I, 8 February 1946). The instincts and the archetypes together constitute the collective stratum: instinct patterns action, the archetype patterns apprehension; both are universal and inherited only in form.

The concept is load-bearing for every other Jungian structure: the archetype is its content, the Self its center, the ego-Self axis the route of its relation to waking life, dreams the via regia by which it speaks. Neumann extends the concept developmentally: ego consciousness emerges from the uroboric collective ground through successive stages of centroversion. The Heraclitean xynos logos — “the common” — is the nearest classical precedent: a supra-personal principle in which all individual thinking participates.

Relationships

• archetype
• personal-unconscious
• objective-psyche
• self
• archaic-remnants
• centroversion
• uroboros
• world-soul
• platonic-anamnesis

Primary sources

• the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious (Jung, CW 9i §§87–90, §155)
• jung-structure-dynamics-psyche (Jung, CW 8 §§229–230, §§270–271)
• jung-two-essays-analytical (Jung, CW 7 §§116–118)
• the-undiscovered-self (Jung, CW 18 §§521–524)
• neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann, 1949)