How did Jung distinguish between personal unconscious and collective unconscious?

Few people have had as much influence on modern psychology as Carl Jung; we have Jung to thank for concepts like extroversion and introversion, archetypes, modern dream analysis, and the collective unconscious. Psychological terms coined by Jung include the archetype, the complex, synchronicity, and it is from his work that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) was developed, a popular staple of personality tests today.

Among Jung’s most important work was his in-depth analysis of the psyche, which he explained as follows: “By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious,” separating the concept from conventional concept of the mind, which is generally limited to the processes of the conscious brain alone.

Jung believed that the psyche is a self-regulating system, rather like the body, one that seeks to maintain a balance between opposing qualities while constantly striving for growth, a process Jung called “individuation”.

Jung saw the psyche as something that could be divided into component parts with complexes and archetypal contents personified, in a metaphorical sense, and functioning rather like secondary selves that contribute to the whole. His concept of the psyche is broken down as follows:

The ego

To Jung, the ego was the center of the field of consciousness, the part of the psyche where our conscious awareness resides, our sense of identity and existence. This part can be seen as a kind of “command HQ”, organizing our thoughts, feelings, senses, and intuition, and regulating access to memory. It is the part that links the inner and outer worlds together, forming how we relate to that which is external to us.

How a person relates to the external world is, according to Jung, determined by their levels of extroversion or introversion and how they make use of the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Some people have developed more of one or two of these facets than the others, which shapes how they perceive the world around them.

The origin of the ego lies in the self archetype, where it forms over the course of early development as the brain attempts to add meaning and value to its various experiences.

The ego is just one small portion of the self, however; Jung believed that consciousness is selective, and the ego is the part of the self that selects the most relevant information from the environment and chooses a direction to take based on it, while the rest of the information sinks into the unconscious. It may, therefore, show up later in the form of dreams or visions, thus entering into the conscious mind.

The personal unconscious

The personal unconscious arises from the interaction between the collective unconscious and one’s personal growth, and was defined by Jung as follows:

“Everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things which are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness; all this is the content of the unconscious… Besides these we must include all more or less intentional repressions of painful thought and feelings. I call the sum of these contents the ‘personal unconscious’.”

Unlike Freud, Jung saw repression as just one element of the unconscious, rather than the whole of it. Jung also saw the unconscious as the house of potential future development, the place where as yet undeveloped elements coalesced into conscious form.

By Steven Gimbel, Ph.D., Gettysburg College

The 20th century witnessed the destruction of the notion we had about ourselves as human beings. Rather than the dividing line on the Great Chain of Being, we were nothing more than the products of our childhood traumas suggested by Sigmund Freud’s tripartite theory of mind.

According to Freud, a person’s subconscious is shaped through their relations with certain people in their life. He also thought that organized religion, like the state and the culture, works as a collective superego that controls and represses the human urge to be a self. This notion of collective superego was extended by Carl Gustav Jung.

Jung’s Theories about Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung was Freud’s best student and closest disciple, who continued Freud’s psychoanalytic movement. Jung did not see eye to eye with Freud about the notion of organized religion. He considered the religious impulse to be naturally and universally a part of human consciousness. His belief in the universal consciousness was the central difference between him and Freud, which permanently separated the two.

While Freud did not tolerate any ideas that were against his, Jung had different views. He agreed with Freud about the subconscious as a repository of primal desires. He also believed in the Freudian concept that many forms of neurosis were the result of the conflicts between the conscious and the unconscious. But he held that Freud had failed to take into account what he called the ‘collective consciousness’ as an expansion of the id. The human subconscious is not only the repository of personal experiences and memories but also those of the whole of humanity. All human beings share a subconscious mind that stores the memories of all human beings, alive and dead.

According to Jung, we carry the memories of our ancestors in our subconscious. We use this collective unconscious to assign structure and meaning to the world.

This is a transcript from the video series Redefining Reality: The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science. Watch it now, on Wondrium.

What are Jungian Archetypes?

Jung had observed similar patterns in images, characters, and events recurring in myths, religions, and cultural beliefs. These communities and societies were unlikely to have been in contact with each other, but their central stories featured the same elements with the same roles.

Jung refers to these central elements as archetypes. Also, he called the repeated occurrences of these archetypes in cultures isolated from each other synchronicities.

We can’t get specific detail of human history form the collective unconscious. What we get is a set of vague patterns, or archetypes. Our mind interprets the world and events using these archetypes and gives meaning to the world.

The differences we see in the specific features of each culture stems from the fact that each culture applies these shared archetypes based on their own geographical and historical peculiarities. But the central values are peculiarly common, so much so that, we cannot believe these cultures are independent of each other.

According to Jung, these patterns are both seen in the human mind and the whole world. He calls them collective unconscious noumena.

Learn more about the wisdom of crowds.

The Noumena and the Phenomena

The noumena had been distinguished from the phenomena by Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. According to this German philosopher, the phenomena are the experience of a thing by the human, and the noumena are the actual thing.

For example, when we look at a pen, we get an image of it and think we know something about the pen. But the image does not have a physical manifestation; it is just in our mind. There is no way of knowing that what is in the mind is similar to the real thing creating that image. Does it really have the same features, or do we just think that the features are the same? According to Kant, metaphysics is of no use since we only have access to phenomena. We can never get outside of our minds. Therefore, we can’t be sure about the reality.

But Jung had a different idea. For him, the collective unconscious connects the mind to the world. We can get to reality through the collective unconscious, to which all the human species are all connected. Jung stated that there were curious coincidences that could not be explained while they were not completely random. They cannot be happening randomly and must have some explanation. We take them as signals sent by the universe to us. Jung believed that these synchronicities show that this collective unconscious connects us.

Another similarity between Freud and Jung’s ideas is that both of them study humans not in a vacuum but in relation to other entities. For Freud, the relation between father and child determines the nature of the human mind and behaviors.

Jung’s final step is that he dismisses the object as an individual and considers a unified whole. The object does not matter in its own right; it is just a mode of the larger collective reality.

Learn more about where do people’s personalities come from?

Common Questions about Carl Jung and the Concept of Collective Consciousness

Q: What is Carl Jung’s theory?

Carl Jung’s theory is the collective unconscious. He believed that human beings are connected to each other and their ancestors through a shared set of experiences. We use this collective consciousness to give meaning to the world.

Q: What did Freud and Jung disagree on?

Freud and Jung disagreed on some key aspects. For example, Jung believed that religion was a natural part of human consciousness, but Freud thought of religion as a form of collective neurosis. Also, Jung believed in the collective consciousness, which permanently split the two.

Q: What is the best definition of archetype?

According to Jung, archetypes are similar patternsin image, characters, and events that repeat in myths, religions, and cultural beliefs from different communities that were unlikely to have been in contact with each other.

Q: What are synchronicities?

Jung considers synchronicities as the repeated occurrences of archetypes. Since these occurrences are seen in isolated cultures with no connection between them, Jung concludes that humans are connected through a collective unconscious.

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