The Collective Unconscious

Reviewing Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious Mind, Part 3: Tackling Jordan Peterson’s Reading List

Gemini’s idea, in the style of Michelangelo, of what Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious would look like. I think that little floating head is his.

Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious is not something I can summarize in a short essay, so I decided to create bite-sized chunks of what I’m getting from it.

---

It can be hard to accurately detect tone in text, but a conversation I had about Jung with someone who has a background in psychology gave me the impression that they saw him as kind of a new-age, supernatural theory mystic. She used the term “collective unconscious” more so as a derisive as if the concept is silly and a bit out there. And this is partly why I think people dismiss these ideas. But I think it’s a misunderstanding of what these ideas, which sometimes sound supernatural, really mean.

---

I have a family member who is a retired plastic surgeon. She, before and after retirement, has spent a lot of time traveling the world to help children with cleft palates through her local Rotary Club. It’s a lot of work and a lot of people put a lot of money into it, and it is wonderfully beneficial to those kids.

Now an American trained physician, surgeon or not, wouldn’t have to take any different anatomy and physiology classes once they decided to travel the world and help people on different continents. There is no European anatomy nor African physiology. Traveling to Central America would not require a special class on the palates of foreign children. You could say we, as humans, have a collective anatomy and physiology.

That is no different than the concept of the collective unconscious.

We as humans have evolved to have brains that are made up of the same stuff and have a collective anatomy and physiology. That matter produces ideas, visions, symbols and thoughts that are similar in content but vary based on environment. A culture without donkeys would likely not form dreams, mythologies and symbols with donkeys in them. But the concept relayed by the mythology which contains a donkey would still remain and be expressed differently.

This is why so many religions and mythologies across the world have so many similar concepts, just relayed and described using different characters and symbols. All humans have the same matter in their skulls that has evolved to create similar unconscious drives, expressed similarly in fundamental concepts with different symbols based on their cultures.

That is the collective unconscious. Not some supernatural connection where I can dream about something and connect with the spirit of people in foreign lands. In fact it is nothing supernatural at all, but purely natural. Your unconscious is similar to mine in the same way we both likely have ten fingers and ten toes.