The Collective Unconcious

By: Kassandra Moskovis


The concept of collective unconscious is a term of analytical psychology (Jungian psychology) and was ideally noted by Carl Jung, a Swiss Psychiatrist. The theory of collective unconscious is a part of the unconscious mind, shared by a society, humanity, and all life forms, that is the product of ancestral experience and contains such concepts as science, religion, and morality. It was distinguished from the personal subconscious of each person. The concept contains archetypes which are mental predispositions with no relation to experience. These archetypes are spontaneously arisen in the mind and in time of crisis, the collective unconscious lets them out to reveal truth that is hidden from one’s consciousness. Our unconscious mind is not accessible and contains our repressed thoughts, feelings, and memories and also contains the Id, which is the part of our mind completely out of awareness. I do believe this concept is valid because we know to do, say, and feel certain things without being taught or told to do so. We just do it because they are instincts: complex behaviors that have fixed patterns throughout different species and are not learned.
Carl Jung had a knack for making sense of the unconscious through symbols. Symbols such as mud cloth patterns, the Celtic gold braid, the medical symbol, the symbol of department of sanitation, and a DNA strand all relate back to the collective unconscious because they give us meaning without directly stating it. We look at these symbols and whether we’ve seen them before or not we immediately have some knowledge as to what they mean or where they originated from. Not only is the recognition of symbols and myths tied in with this theory but experiences such as; love at first sight, déjà vu, dreams, fantasies, and fairy tales also show the effects of this “psychic inheritance”. It is a type of knowledge that we are born with but never exactly conscious of which further leads to an influence on the way we act and the experiences we run into.
The validity of Carl Jung’s belief of the collective unconscious has been proven through a countless amount of examples. Is it not true that when you hear a smoke detector go off you immediately leave your house? Or when you go to a public restroom, you enter the door with the symbol of the female or the male based upon which sex you inherit? These instincts were never taught, they were simply picked up over time through our everyday encounters. Our unconscious mind provides us with feelings, skills, perceptions, thoughts, habits, reactions, phobias, pleasures, and many other mental phenomena that we manifest, however, are unaware of at the time they occur. Whether people recognize it or not, we use this theory of the collective unconscious every single day. It is not something we can control or shut off, it is stuck with us forever. Carl Jung, although thought to be mentally ill due to his accusations, was a very smart man. His theory is still alive today due its legitimacy. Next time you go to turn the light off before hopping into bed at night or turn the water off when you’re about to get out of the shower, take a minute to think to yourself, was I taught to do that or did I just do it because of my unconscious mind?