The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Volume 9, part 1 of Jung’s Collected Works gathers the canonical essays on the structure and contents of the deep psyche. The opening paper, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” (1934/1954), states the thesis that the unconscious is stratified: a personal layer of forgotten and repressed material rests upon a “deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn” (§3). The second paper, “The Concept of the Collective Unconscious” (1936), reformulates the doctrine for an English-speaking audience and observes that “probably none of my empirical concepts has met with so much misunderstanding as the idea of the collective unconscious” (§87).

The volume traces the term “archetype” back through Philo Judaeus, Irenaeus, the Corpus Hermeticum, and Dionysius the Areopagite, presenting it as “an explanatory paraphrase of the Platonic εἶδος” (§5). Subsequent essays treat the archetypes of the anima, the shadow, the wise old man, and the self, and show their bearing upon dreams, individuation, and alchemical symbolism. The volume is the indispensable reference for Jungian psychology of the deep psyche.

Sources

• Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9i, Bollingen Series XX, 2nd ed. 1968).