The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition. While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity. Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes. 89 The concept of the archetype, which is an indispensable correlate of the idea of the collective unconscious, indicates the existence of definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere. Mythological research calls them "motifs"; in the psychology of primitives they correspond to Lévy-Bruhl's concept of "représentations collectives," and in the field of comparative religion they have been defined by Hubert and Mauss as "categories of the imagination." Adolf Bastian long ago called them "elementary" or "primordial thoughts." From these references it should be clear enough that my idea of the archetype-literally a pre-existent form-does not stand alone but is something that is recognized and named in other fields of knowledge. 90 My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), 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.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung is drawing a boundary here that most psychology still refuses to cross. The personal unconscious is biographical — it holds what was once known and then lost, the forgotten and the repressed. But the collective unconscious was never personal to begin with. It carries no individual history because it precedes individuality. This is the move that unsettles: not that we have depths, but that those depths are not ours.
The archetype, Jung insists, is not his invention. Lévy-Bruhl's *représentations collectives*, Hubert and Mauss's "categories of the imagination," Bastian's "primordial thoughts" — he is pointing at a convergence, a recognition across disciplines of something that keeps showing up before culture can account for it. The archetype is a pre-existent form, not a content. It is the shape that psychic material pours into, not the material itself.
What this means practically is that when a figure appears in dream or fantasy with a weight that exceeds its personal associations — when the old woman is not your grandmother, when the hero does not resolve into your father — you are not in biographical territory anymore. The image is drawing on a grammar older than your life. That grammar does not belong to you. But it speaks, and recognizing that it speaks in you without being you is where the work of depth psychology actually begins.
Carl Gustav Jung·The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious·1959