Where do these mythological fantasies come from, if they do not spring from the personal unconscious and hence from the experiences of personal life? Indubitably they come from the brain-indeed, precisely from the brain and not from personal memory-traces, but from the inherited brain-structure itself. Such fantasies always have a highly original and "creative" character. They are like new creations; obviously they derive from the creative activity of the brain and not simply from its mnemonic activity. We receive along with our body a highly differentiated brain which brings with it its entire history, and when it becomes creative it creates out of this history-out of the history of mankind. By "history" we usually mean the history which we "make," and we call this "objective history." The truly creative fantasy activity of the brain has nothing to do with this kind of history, but solely with that age-old natural history which has been transmitted in living form since the remotest times, namely, the history of the brain-structure. And this structure tells its own story, which is the story of mankind: the unending myth of death and rebirth, and of the multitudinous figures who weave in and out of this mystery.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung is making a claim that cuts against the dominant therapeutic habit of chasing origins in personal biography. The brain that thinks was not assembled in a single life. It arrived carrying every confrontation with darkness and morning that preceded yours — not as memory, since memory requires a witness, but as structure, as the very grammar of what the organ can do when it stops retrieving and starts generating. This is the distinction he wants: mnemonic versus creative, and the creative is not innovation in the modern sense but eruption from the deep archive of the species.
What this means practically is that the strange images — the ones that feel neither borrowed nor invented, that arrive with a peculiar authority — are not symptoms of private pathology but reports from a longer story. The "unending myth of death and rebirth" is not a motif the dreamer chose; it is what the brain has always done, the only story ancient enough to hold the weight of disappearance and return. To reduce such an image to a childhood trauma, a family complex, is not wrong exactly, but it is like hearing an orchestra and noting only the oboe. The passage is making room for the fuller sound: inherited, structural, older than any individual grief, and still — in ways that can catch a person entirely off guard — alive.
Carl Gustav Jung·Civilization in Transition·1964