Unconscious

The unconscious is the general term by which Freud and Jung, and after them the whole tradition of depth psychology, name the psychic domain outside the field of ordinary consciousness — the contents that influence conscious life without being available to it: the repressed for Freud, the vastly larger collective substrate for Jung. The postulate that such a domain exists, and that its contents have their own structure and their own purposes, is the founding move of the depth-psychological tradition.

Jung divided the unconscious into a personal-unconscious — the residue of the individual’s forgotten and repressed experience, organized around complexes — and a collective-unconscious whose contents are the archetypes, the inherited patterns of human psychic life. The unconscious expresses itself through dreams, symptoms, slips, fantasies, and the autonomous figures that appear in active imagination; the task of analysis is to bring the ego into relation with these contents so that the psyche’s self-regulation — its prospective and compensatory functions — can operate without being distorted by repression. See collective-unconscious and personal-unconscious.

Relationships

• collective-unconscious
• personal-unconscious
• archetype