Psychology of the Unconscious, by Carl Jung: A Summary and Discussion

Tackling Jordan Peterson’s Reading List

Gemini image of Dr. Jordan Peterson discussing the unconscious mind with Carl Jung

I’ve been tackling Dr. Jordan Peterson’s book list and this was one of my favorites. It might not be particularly because of the content itself, but because it helped lay down some fundamentals and tie so many other ideas from other books together.

I’m thinking of his student Erich Neumann who wrote Origins and History of Consciousness and The Great Mother, as well as Mircea Eliade’s three volumes of A History of Religious Ideas among others. All of these readings tie back into the framework for understanding the psyche, especially the unconscious, as these ideas are mostly tied to our unconscious minds.

I’ll start with an overview of the main themes and then get into the ideas I had while reading this.

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Overall Themes of Psychology of the Unconscious:

• Broadening the concept of Libido: Jung fundamentally redefines “libido” not as solely sexual energy (as in Freud), but as a more general psychic energy or life force that manifests in various forms, including creative, spiritual, and instinctive drives.

• The Collective Unconscious and Archetypes: This book is where Jung truly introduces and elaborates on his groundbreaking concepts of the collective unconscious — a deeper, universal layer of the psyche shared by all humanity, containing primordial images and patterns called archetypes.

• Symbolism as a Key to the Unconscious: Jung argues that the unconscious communicates through symbols, particularly in dreams, fantasies, myths, and religious imagery. These symbols are not merely disguised representations of repressed desires (as Freud might see them) but rather expressions of deeper, universal psychic processes.

• Differentiation from Freud: The book explicitly showcases Jung’s theoretical break with Freud, particularly on the nature of libido and the interpretation of incest fantasies. Jung views incest not as a literal sexual desire, but as a symbolic longing for psychological rebirth or a return to the maternal unconscious to gain new life.

• The Process of Transformation/Individuation: While the term “individuation” is more fully developed later, this book lays the groundwork for understanding the psyche’s inherent drive towards wholeness and the integration of conscious and unconscious contents.

Now my favorite part: My thoughts! (I started these ideas in a previous group of essays but wanted everything here in one place.)

The Unseen Architecture of the Mind: Jung, Myth, and Modernity

My wife’s a therapist, which means our social circle is full of other therapists. When I’m in their homes or offices, I confess, I can’t resist a quick scan of their bookshelves. What people choose to read, for me, is a window into their world. And what I’ve noticed, time and again, is a striking absence: no Carl Jung. No Freud. No Erich Neumann. Barely a whisper of anything related to the deep, historical, symbolic landscape of the unconscious mind.

Now, this isn’t a scientific study, just an observation. But it’s telling. In most psychology programs today, Jung is often relegated to a historical footnote, his direct works rarely studied unless a student specifically dives into Jungian or depth psychology. And those numbers? Miniscule. Especially in fields like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or neuroscience, where the focus is almost entirely on empirically measurable, evidence-based modalities — the kind insurance companies are happy to pay for. And, of course, that’s understandable from a practical standpoint.

The Neglect of the Unconscious in a Secular Age

But why this pervasive neglect of the unconscious? It’s estimated that 90 to 95 percent of our mind’s functions operate outside of conscious awareness. Wouldn’t that massive majority demand our constant attention? Shouldn’t we be obsessively focused on what this vast, hidden part of our mind produces, and what it means for us, individually and collectively?

Yet, we’re not. And I’m starting to suspect there’s a profound reason for this, something that goes deeper than just therapeutic modality. It feels like a fundamental societal shift. The rejection of the sacred, the religious, the church, the concept of God — it strikes me as inextricably linked to the rejection of the unconscious mind itself.

Because here’s the core idea that Jung, especially in his seminal work “Psychology of the Unconscious” (or “Symbols of Transformation” as it was later revised), lays bare: symbols, mythology, and religion are the products of the conscious mind expressing the contents of the unconscious mind. If you reject religion, if you reject God, you are, by extension, rejecting a crucial dimension of your own unconscious.

Myths: The Language of the Unseen World Within

Think about it: myths and religions aren’t attempts to explain the external world, as we often mistakenly believe. They are attempts to understand and explain the world inside our heads — the world our minds have created.

This is why Jung spends so much time in “Psychology of the Unconscious” dissecting ancient mythologies and analyzing the dreams of his clients. Reading the book can feel like a journey through the history of human storytelling, with Carl as your guide, translating these grand narratives into profound psychological terms. It’s dense because ancient mythology operates on a totally different frame of reference than our modern, rationalistic one.

You can’t measure mythology in a lab. You can’t quantify it. You can only gather it, much like an archaeologist unearths material remnants to understand ancient cultures. Jung does the same, but for the mind. What our minds have produced, cross-culturally for thousands upon thousands of years — whether it’s pottery and arrowheads, or symbols, mythologies, and religions — reflects their purpose, function, and potential.

Consider cave art. We often assume those ancient paintings of bulls and other animals were just literal depictions of what early humans saw on the plains. But as David Lewis-Williams argues in The Mind in the Cave, many of these drawings are actually visions that haunted their dreams or trances. He points out that the animals often lack feet — a curious omission if you’re just painting what you see. But in a vision or dream, the symbol isn’t necessarily grounded, and feet wouldn’t be expressed.

As language developed, these visions became stories, then myths. The modern mistake is to think these paintings and mythologies were attempts to explain the material world. No, they were attempts to understand and explain the world inside our minds.

Creation mythologies, for instance, aren’t literal blueprints for how the Earth came into being. Instead, they describe how the inner world of our mindscame into being, using the external world as a powerful analogy. The rising and setting of the sun, the formlessness of the seas, life emerging from the unknown and leading to death — these are all used to analogize our internal, psychological process of creation. This journey, from a primitive, undifferentiated state to a complex, individuated consciousness, mirrors humanity’s development as a whole, and our own personal journey from childhood into adulthood. And, as Jung notes, the failure to navigate this journey is often a source of neuroticism.

Religion, then, is the grand narrative of those visions, those deep unconscious insights. To reject myth and religion as mere superstition or useless relics of the past is to dismiss a huge, vital part of our own minds. A part responsible for framing our morality, our philosophy, our understanding of good and evil, and ultimately, pointing us in a direction that can make or break us. It’s the part that operates for roughly eight hours every night when we dream. And its absence, through severe sleep deprivation, can even lead to psychotic breaks.

The Collective Unconscious: Not Supernatural, But Inherently Human

I once had a conversation about Jung with someone who had a psychology background, and I sensed a dismissive tone. They seemed to view him as a “new-age, supernatural theory mystic,” using the term “collective unconscious” derisively, as if it were some silly, far-out concept. I think this misunderstanding is a major reason why people dismiss these incredibly important ideas. But what sounds supernatural is, in fact, entirely natural.

Think of it this way: My family member is a retired plastic surgeon. She traveled the world, helping children with cleft palates. An American-trained surgeon doesn’t need a special anatomy class for European children, or African children, or Central American children. Human anatomy and physiology are universal. We have a collective anatomy and physiology.

The concept of the collective unconscious is no different.

As humans, we’ve evolved to have brains made of the same fundamental stuff, with a collective anatomy and physiology. And that biological matter produces ideas, visions, symbols, and thoughts that are strikingly similar in their content, though they vary in their specific expression based on environment. A culture without donkeys won’t have donkey myths, but the underlying concept or drive represented by the donkey in another culture’s myth would still be present, just expressed differently.

This is precisely why so many religions and mythologies across the globe share uncanny similarities in their fundamental concepts, even as they use different characters and symbols. All humans possess the same basic neural architecture, which has evolved to create similar unconscious drives, expressed similarly in fundamental concepts, but with different symbols drawn from their unique cultures.

That’s the collective unconscious. It’s not some mystical connection where I can dream about something and link telepathically with spirits in foreign lands. It’s nothing supernatural at all; it is purely natural. Your unconscious is similar to mine in the same way we both likely have ten fingers and ten toes. It’s a shared heritage encoded in our very being.

Religion as a Narrative of the Unconscious

Jung puts it beautifully: he describes mythology and religion as our conscious minds explaining, through symbols and stories, the content of our unconscious minds. We dream, we have visions, and then we strive to explain and rationalize those experiences. We evolve these reflections from mere symbols into complex stories and narratives, which ultimately form the bedrock of religious ideas.

As Jung writes, these are “primitive figures of phantasies and religious myths streaming up from the unconscious.”

A religion, in this light, is simply a sophisticated narrative that our conscious mind uses to communicate the profound contents of our unconscious minds. It’s an advanced result of our innate human drive to rationalize, explain, and understand the vast majority of what our minds produce.

Jung offers us a liberating perspective here: “I think belief should be replaced by understanding; then we would keep the beauty of the symbol, but still remain free from the depressing results of submission to belief. This would be the psychoanalytic cure for belief and disbelief.”

So, when I hear people say, “People created religion in order to…,” I can’t help but think it’s as fundamentally silly as saying, “People created fingers and toes in order to….” The contents of our unconscious minds are as native and natural to us as the contents of our physical bodies. They are universal in their basic forms, even if expressed using different symbols and stories based on different environments. As Jung observes, “Nature has first claim on man; only long afterwards does the luxury of intellect come.” Our intellect explains us; it doesn’t create our fundamental nature.

The Ultimate Orientation: Voluntary Self-Sacrifice

Near the conclusion of “Psychology of the Unconscious,” Jung delves deeply into the concept of sacrifice, naturally discussing the Passion of Christ. Here, the idea of sacrifice, continually explored throughout the Bible, reaches its pinnacle in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice.

Jung states, and I find this passage absolutely critical:

“The comparison of the Mithraic and the Christian sacrifice plainly shows wherein lies the superiority of the Christian symbol; it is the frank admission that not only are the lower wishes to be sacrificed, but the whole personality. The Christian symbol demands complete devotion; it compels a veritable self-sacrifice to a higher purpose, while the Sacrificial Mithriacum, remaining fixed on a primitive symbolic stage, is contented with an animal sacrifice. The religious effect of these symbols must be considered as an orientation of the unconscious by means of imitation.”

This quote powerfully links several crucial themes: the contents of the unconscious mind, its profound connection to religion, the universalism of sacrifice and its mythological development, and, critically, the need for imitation by humanity.

This is where the ideas resonate strongly with those explored by Jordan Peterson. Both Jung and Peterson suggest that our unconscious mind is trying to orient us towards an ultimate goal, a fundamental posture towards the world that demands not just understanding, but action. And that action, expressed supremely in the story of Christ, is voluntary self-sacrifice for the benefit of humanity.

This is the mindset, the orientation that our unconscious mind directs us towards. It’s the ultimate antidote for the neuroticism, anxiety, listlessness, and malaise that so many feel in the modern world. Our advanced consciousness, our ability for introspection and self-recognition, creates a distance between our minds and physical reality. This distance creates the unknown, and the unknown creates anxiety.

To quell that anxiety, we need direction. We need a target. And that target, when properly placed, is voluntary self-sacrifice for the benefit of other humans. How we define “benefit” and which humans we choose is a secondary, ethical problem, as history has tragically shown us that the most dangerous individuals are often oriented towards what they believe is the benefit of humanity, but only for a select few.

But what is sacrifice? Why did God tell Abraham to kill his own son? Why did Christ allow himself to be killed? Why is the Christian symbol a man murdered in the most painful and humiliating way? Why did the Aztecs do it?

To sacrifice is to delay gratification now in order to fulfill a greater purpose in the future. Right now, you are sacrificing whatever else you could be doing to watch this video, because you’ve placed whatever benefit you’re gaining from it higher in your value hierarchy. Our entire lives are built on this. We’re constantly sacrificing other opportunities for what we choose to do in the present.

And here’s the key: the greater the sacrifice, the greater the potential benefit. This is the essence of Cain and Abel — different levels of sacrifice yielding different results. Abraham’s ultimate test was the sacrifice of his son — what greater sacrifice could there be, promising what greater benefit? And Christ, of course, “upped that game” by sacrificing his entire being: the Father and the Son, a complete surrender for a higher purpose.

When Jung states that “The religious effect of these symbols must be considered as an orientation of the unconscious by means of imitation,” he means precisely this. Our unconscious mind produces these profound concepts, which we then articulate and explain through language, creating stories that are sharpened over thousands of years into more exacting narratives and personalities for us to imitate. The Christian symbol of Christ on the cross is a daily, potent reminder that the ultimate personality to adopt is one of constant, voluntary self-sacrifice to serve others.

Individuation: The Hero’s Journey from the Collective Womb

Goethe, captured this quest for understanding succinctly:

“He whose vision cannot cover
History’s three thousand years,
Must in outer darkness hover,
Live within the day’s frontiers.”

This quote, which opens Erich Neumann’s The Origins and History of Consciousness, deeply resonates with Jung’s approach in Psychology of the Unconscious. Jung himself states in his introduction:

“Up to the present time the psychoanalytic investigator has turned his interest chiefly to the analysis of the individual psychologic problems. It seems to me, however, that in the present state of affairs there is a more or less imperative demand for the psychoanalyst to broaden the analysis of the individual problems by a comparative study of historical material relating to them… For, just as the psychoanalytic conceptions promote understanding of the historic psychologic creations, so reversely historical materials can shed new light upon individual psychological problems.”

This highlights a fundamental dichotomy: understanding the individual versus understanding the collective. They aren’t disconnected. Jung argues that even with our innate drive for individuation — the process of becoming a whole, unique self — there are fundamental similarities across humanity that allow us to study the whole for the sake of the one, and the one for the sake of the whole.

Jung, in his very introduction, diagnoses a key ill of the modern mind: our centuries-long obsession with the individual, as if we are completely separated from a collective unconscious. This, he suggests, is at the root of our disconnection from human meaning, potential, and purpose. Our unconscious minds constantly draw from perceived reality to create analogies through myth and religion, whose very purpose is to point us in a direction. But an increased focus solely on the conscious and the individual reduces our inquiry into that deeper meaning and purpose, making the conscious mind, the emissary, a master over the deeper, unconscious message.

Throughout Psychology of the Unconscious, Jung meticulously describes the fantasies and dreams of a specific client, a Ms. Frank Miller, and then, with astonishing breadth, weaves in a treasure trove of ancient mythologies and religious narratives to explain them. It’s a masterclass in scholarship, demonstrating how Jung could pull and connect numerous stories, symbols, and visions into a coherent description of one person’s inner, unconscious theater. This isn’t something you pick up from a few YouTube videos.

And speaking of complexity, let’s address the elephant in the room that often makes people cringe when Jung or Freud comes up: their “weird obsession with mothers” and the Oedipus complex.

Oedipus and the Symbolic Mother: Not What You Think

What’s the simple conclusion? The tweetable version? Is it just a sexual attraction to one’s own mother?

No. Like anything truly worth understanding, it’s far more complicated than that. And no, for Jung, it is not a literal sexual attraction to one’s own mother. (Though Freud might have had different emphasis there.)

In Jung’s view, our unconscious minds continually point us towards individuation — towards becoming a unique individual, distinct from all others. The fundamental means to do this is to separate oneself from that which is common, from our origins. And our universal origin, psychologically as well as biologically, is the mother. So, we analogize our psychological origins with literal birth.

Our unknown origins, the primal place from which all new things arise, is the mother, the womb. Those who fear individuation and growth, those who recoil from the challenges of becoming a unique self, desire the opposite: to return to the common origins, to the undifferentiated, infantile state. This infantile desire is analogized, symbolically, through an obsession with the mother.

Jung puts it clearly:

“The object of psychoanalysis has frequently been wrongly understood to mean the renunciation or the gratification of the ordinary sexual wish, while, in reality, the problem is the sublimation of the infantile personality, or, expressed mythologically, a sacrifice and rebirth of the infantile hero.”

This “renunciation or gratification” describes a fork in the road: Will a person separate from these common origins and become a fully-fledged individual? Or will they remain fixated in an infantile state, under the psychological care of the “mother”? Think of the trope of the grown person living in the basement, playing video games, while their mom heats up Hot Pockets. They might even treat their mother with derision, but they remain utterly dependent.

And notice the symbolism of the basement — it’s no mistake. The basement, deep and dark, hidden away in the bosom of the home, is akin to returning to the womb. The stairs the mother traverses with that Hot Pocket are an umbilical cord, facilitating sustenance. Only by leaving that dark, hidden world of the “mother” — getting out of the basement and into the light — can this infantile personality be truly conquered. Moving up from the depths, aiming upwards, moving towards the light and out into the world are all universal mythological tropes embedded in this seemingly mundane scenario.

Nobody ever mentions the basement might belong to the father too, because in this symbolic context, the “father” represents a different set of challenges and principles, often associated with structure, consciousness, and the outer world. But the primal return is to the mother.

Conclusion: Embracing the Full Spectrum of the Mind

So, what does all of this mean for us today? It means that to truly understand ourselves, and to navigate the complexities of our existence, we cannot afford to neglect the vast, powerful, and symbolic landscape of the unconscious mind. To dismiss myth, religion, and the archetypal patterns they embody as mere superstition or outdated beliefs is to cut ourselves off from a profound source of meaning and direction that has guided humanity for millennia.

Jung, building on millennia of human experience and expressed through the very structure of our minds, offers us a path towards wholeness. It’s a path that recognizes the necessity of confronting our inner world, understanding its symbols, and ultimately, striving for individuation through a process of voluntary self-sacrifice — for a higher purpose, for the benefit of others.

The unconscious isn’t some supernatural realm; it’s the very ground of our being, as natural and universal as our shared anatomy. And its ancient wisdom, expressed through myth and symbol, continues to call us towards growth, integration, and meaningful action. Perhaps it’s time we started listening again.

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What do you think? Is there a societal imbalance between our focus on the unconscious versus the conscious mind? Do you think one is more important the other? If so, why?

The way I now understand the way our mind and culture and ideas work, I think there definitely is a societal imbalance that needs a heavy dose of our roots. It’s only a question of how far down the wrong path we will go before we make that adjustment.