Carl Jung The Archetypes of the Collective

Unconscious summary, review and analysis

Carl Jung is a doubly paradoxical thinker. His thought is both about paradoxes
and in itself paradoxical. Jung, unlike other psychoanalytic thinkers such as
Freud and Lacan who focused on interpersonal subject-object relations,
focused on the self contained individual psyche and its relations with itself.
On the other hand, the emphasis he placed on the collective unconscious
makes the subject for Jung anything but self contained. Jung held that the
collective unconscious is no less, even more, important than Freud's personal
biographical unconscious.

Laying on his sofa, Freud might ask you about your relationships with your
mother. Jung might not be as interested in your mother as he is with the
mother. Jung is not so much concerned with how concrete individuals
populate our mind; he is more interested with how our mind is populated with
abstract figures that represent primeval elements of human existence. What
we are dealing with here are the gods.

Much like Freud, Jung divides the psych into three parts: the I (ego), the
personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. Centering his thought
on the collectiveunconscious is what distinguished Jung from other
psychoanalytical thinkers and their view of the subject. For Jung, the
collective unconscious plays a role which is no less and perhaps even more
important than the personal unconscious in determining our personality.

According to Jung the collective unconscious is something inherited, meaning

we are already born with certain ancient knowledge or mental content. The
collective unconscious for Jung explains the continuity of culture and our
sense of common experience with previous generations.

Jung's collective unconscious is populated by archetypes. Archetypes for Jung

are amorphous shapes which are manifested with culture specific content. To
understand Jung's concept of archetypes consider the fact that every human
being has a mother, and every culture has to relate to the mother in some
fashion or the other and assign her with meaning. For Jung, we are born with
the idea of a mother (otherwise we wouldn't have been able to survive) that
later takes shape in the form that native society perceives and represents the
mother archetype. Jungian archetypes are such universal forms like the
father, mother, hero, shadow and more.

The "shadow" archetype is one of the central concepts in Jung's theory. The
shadow archetype for Jung somewhat resembles Freud's unconscious. The
shadow is a form which takes on content perceived by us a negative. The
more we are disengaged with the shadow the more it accumulates potency
and causes damage to the psyche.