Collective Unconscious

Collective Unconscious Carl Jung’s idea that humanity shares an underlying, biologically inherited storehouse of collective experience and knowledge.

Jung believes this information is cross-culturally present whenever universally recognizable motifs arise in dreams, myth, religion, the arts and architecture. A primary example is the mandala, which for Jung is a circular representation of the self, a self that is potentially absolute.

He calls these hypothesized patterns of human existence archetypes. Existing in a larger time-frame than our everyday awareness, the archetypes of the collective unconscious apparently bridge the past, present and future.

Jung acknowledges the arbitrary nature of the term “collective unconscious.” Towards the end of his career he admits to having rendered essentially spiritual ideas in scientific-sounding terms for the sake of professional and societal legitimacy.

As a result, his insistence on the collective unconscious’ bio-genetic base seems confusing to some, especially when he says:

“…the unconscious has no time. There is no trouble about time in the unconscious. Part of our psyche is not in time and not in space. They are only an illusion, time and space, and so in a certain part of our psyche, time does not exist at all” (C. G. Jung Collected Works vol. 18, para. 684, cited in  “Time and Space” at http://www.fundacion-jung.com.ar/ingles/citas.htm).

Could such a psyche be entirely biological? Perhaps Jung was suggesting that, although grounded in the body, the archetypes exhibit or relate to a spiritual component–i.e. a bio-genetic ground is necessary for the interplay of spirit and body. » Archetypal images, Sheldrake (Rupert), Synchronicity

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