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Personal Unconscious

Personal Unconscious

The personal unconscious is, in Jung’s stratified topography of the psyche, “a more or less superficial layer of the unconscious” composed of contents that have once been conscious and have since been forgotten or repressed (Jung, CW 9i §3). Its contents are “chiefly the feeling-toned complexes, as they are called; they constitute the personal and private side of psychic life” (CW 9i §4). It corresponds approximately to what Freud called the unconscious tout court — “the gathering place of forgotten and repressed contents” (CW 9i §2) — but for Jung it is only the upper stratum.

Its empirical foundation is the Word Association Experiments of 1902–1909. In the laboratory of the Burghölzli, Jung demonstrated that the prolonged reaction-times, slips, and failures of reproduction which clustered in a subject’s performance revealed “extensive and personally important complexes,” and that the constellating complex “plays the part of a quasi-independent entity — a ‘second consciousness’” (Jung, CW 2 §621). The personal unconscious, in its earliest and most technical sense, is the region in which such feeling-toned complexes reside.

Beneath it lies the collective unconscious, “a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn” (CW 9i §3). The two-layer model, first comprehensively set out in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW 7), is Jung’s most consequential departure from psychoanalytic orthodoxy. In The Red Book years, the differentiation of the personal and impersonal unconscious gave Jung the theoretical vocabulary for what his own confrontation with the unconscious had shown him: that what rose from the deep could not be accounted for by biography.

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