Are you acquainted with Jungian psychology or interested in exploring its intriguing ideas? If so, the collective unconscious is a vital concept. More than a century ago, Carl Jung formulated this notion based partly on his therapeutic work with psychiatric patients. Buttressed by his investigations of Eastern and Western traditions in art, folklore, and mythology, he asserted that people everywhere share the same inborn ways of experiencing the world. It was a radically unconventional concept for its time, but which Jung systematically advanced. With characteristic wit in responding to its criticisms, he stated:
“We are dealing with a generally human disposition which is instinctual and innate, as instinct is with all animals. Do you really believe that every chick invents its own way of breaking out of the egg? Or that every eel makes an individual decision to start journeying for the Bermuda Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, as though the idea was entirely new?”
What makes the collective unconscious so important, Jung argued, is that it’s the source of our archetypal experiences of nature, as well as human relationships. These include love, friendship, and even warfare. “The archetypes are…dynamic,” Jung wrote, “They are instinctual images that are not intellectually invented. They are always there and they produce certain processes in the unconscious that could be best compared with myths. That’s the origin of mythology.”
Perhaps catalyzed by the blockbuster success of the first Star Wars films, followed by literary scholar Joseph Campbell’s influential TV series, The Power of Myths (with journalist Bill Moyers), the term archetype entered popular English language by the 1990s. Unfortunately, the term has often been distorted from Jung’s original meaning. For example, if you peruse the Internet, you’ll find many dubious websites seemingly finding archetypes everywhere–a trend which Jung foresaw decades earlier in simplistic depictions of his ideas.
The Personal Unconscious
Though Sigmund Freud never accepted Jung’s work on the collective unconscious, both strongly agreed that we each have a personal unconscious that largely reflects our individual childhood experiences, especially involving our parents. For this reason, Jung always obtained a family history for every new patient. He also insisted that analytic treatment, such as dreamwork, must always uncover the patient’s personal unconscious before exploring the far deeper, collective unconscious, with its timeless archetypal figures and symbolic images.
The Cultural Unconscious
For everyone interested in Jung work, it’s important to know that he also identified a third, intermediary layer of our psyche. Known as the cultural unconscious, it lies between the collective unconscious that all humanity shares and the more accessible personal unconscious unique to each of us. Though Jung and his early circle said little about this intermediary realm, an exception was the Romanian scholar of religion Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). Examining cultural differences involving the archetypes, he participated actively in the annual Eranos conferences that Jung had helped to organize.
As Maslow’s biographer, I discovered that he resonated strongly with Eliade’s cultural research. In Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences, Maslow applied it to such topics as healthy adolescent development, romantic love, and marriage. Alluding to Eliade’s notions, Maslow suggested that pre-industrial cultures “often manage the unitive life better than we do, at least as far as relations between the sexes are concerned, and also between adults and children…(These cultures) have kept their sense of the sacred about the basic biological things of life.”
Central to Jungian psychology today on the cultural unconscious has been the more recent work of Joseph Henderson (1903-2007). In such books as Shadow and Self, he argued that, whether we recognize it or not, we’re unconsciously impacted by our particular culture’s rites, rituals, and patterns of social interaction. These encompass family life, work, and leisure.
This impact begins in our early childhood and continues through our teenage years into adulthood. Such contemporary Jungian theorists as Thomas Singer regard the cultural unconscious as not only influencing our individual behavior, but also wider relations among ethnic groups and even entire nations. To better understand the cultural unconscious is therefore an urgent urgent task before us–bearing on social conflict versus harmony, war versus peace.
Unconscious Essential Reads
Accessing your Cultural Unconscious
To recognize our cultural unconscious is difficult, for it typically requires an act of will. It might even be compared to awakening from sleep-walking, or what the British writer Colin Wilson called the “robotic state.” However, if you’ve ever traveled abroad, a remedy is available: Think back to your immediate, gut reaction when you returned to your home milieu–and what struck you as most different in the demeanor, body language, mood, and social behavior of your compatriots compared to their counterparts in the foreign country you’d just visited. In focusing on this contrast, you may catch glimpses of our cultural unconscious–and how it daily affects you.
