Second Psychic System

Jung’s structural claim — sharper than the popular reading of the “collective unconscious” allows — is that the psyche is not one continuous field with conscious and unconscious zones, but two systems: the ego-personal system on one side, and an autonomous, impersonal system on the other. The 1916 lecture “The Structure of the Unconscious” already draws the line: the personal unconscious is “elements acquired during one’s lifetime, together with elements that could equally well be conscious”; the impersonal unconscious or collective psyche is inherited, containing contents “a priori collective, and identical with the object-imago” (Jung 1953, CW 7 Appendix §§503–506; Red Book ed. intro p. 209).

The stratification is not metaphor. In CW 8 Jung writes that the unconscious “yields the singular fact that they proceed from an unconscious, i.e., objective, reality which behaves at the same time like a subjective one — in other words, like a consciousness” (Jung 1960). This is the reason the doctrine of the unconscious cannot be reduced, in Jung’s view, to repression: a repressed content is personal and can in principle return to the ego from which it came. A content of the second system has no such prior residence in the ego. It arrives.

The clinical consequence is the transcendent function: the psyche’s self-regulating production of compensatory symbols when the ego and the objective system stand in tension. Without the postulate of a second system, this production cannot be explained — it has no source. With it, the symbol is the bridge.

Relationships

• objective-psyche
• collective-unconscious
• personal-unconscious
• archetype
• transcendent-function

Primary sources

• jung-two-essays-analytical (Jung 1953, CW 7 §§503–506)
• The Red Book editorial introduction (Jung 2009, p. 209)
• CW 8 Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Jung 1960)