Collective Unconscious and Classical Anamnesis

Jung locates the lineage of his own concept in the Platonic tradition. The term archetype, he writes, is “an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic εἶδος” (CW 9i §5); the archetypes are “universal images that have existed since the remotest times.” This places the collective-unconscious doctrine in continuity with the Platonic teaching that what the soul knows it has known before — the doctrine of anamnesis developed in the Meno and the Phaedo. To recollect the eternal forms is, structurally, to recover what was already inherent in the soul rather than to acquire it from outside.

Vernant draws the parallel still more explicitly in his account of the soul’s circular journey: “the soul that, through the anamnesis of its previous lives, has managed to ‘join the end to the beginning,’ becomes like the stars, whose circular course — a moving image of immobile eternity — forever preserves them from destruction” (Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks). The Platonic soul, like Jung’s psyche, contains an order older than its individual incarnation. The doctrine of the collective unconscious reads as a modern, empirically chastened reformulation of this ancient claim that the deepest layer of the psyche is not the property of the individual.

Sources

• Jung, CW 9i §5.
• Plato, Meno 81c-86c; Phaedo 72e-77a.
• Vernant, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, ch. on the cycle of the soul.