Notes on Jung: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Very much notes in progress.

Jung differentiates between the personal unconscious and collective unconscious.

The Personal Unconscious: formed of forgotten or repressed memories of experiences the person has had.

The Collective Unconscious: a universal portion of the unconscious that is not derived from personal experiences but "has contents and modes of behaviour that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals" (pp4).

The unconscious can only be studied in as much as it can be brought to consciousness or demonstrated by its (maybe reflexive) effects on the consciousness, just as one can define a hole in the darkness only by feeling around its edges. The contents of the collective unconsciousness which impact the conscious psyche are called Archetypes.

Archetypes appear to be archaic or primordial. Esoteric teachings, folk lore, myth and traditions are typical means of expression of collective archetypes. But having been stamped with cultural meaning, they are no longer the archetypes themselves. When we encounter the archetypes in individual psychic, psychotic and dream experiences their meaning is much less elaborated than in the legend or esoteric tradition. For this reason we should be wary of applying what we have learned from one person's dream symbolism to another, and individual signs and symbols should only be considered in comparison to the individual's idiosyncratic catalogue of signs and symbols. As such, archetypes, when brought into consciousness, are always changed by the individual's consciousness.*

Jung says that "myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul"... "all the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy seasons, and so forth, are in no sense allegories** of these occurences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner, unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection - that is, mirrored in the events of nature." pp 6

Jung deviates at this point into a three paragraph smack down on Astrology ending with the quote "The stars of thine own fate lie in thy breast." pp 7. He also unwittingly explains (an aspect of) cultural appropriation. He claims that religious iconography is a highly developed and authoritarian depiction of primitive symbols, which are far more meaningful and comprehensive than personal experiences thereof. They in fact stand in for direct experiences of the divine, and to some degree prevent them. We are too familiar with them, so their symbolism holds no power over us. As such he claims that we look to external symbolism precisely because it is unknown, exotic, and therefore more interpretable, projectable. Dogmatic symbols can have a strong effect on those experiencing direct visions however, and cause the person to interpret them through the lens of dogma, even if initially very counter to the usual dogmatic interpretation. Jung seems to feel that this is a positive aspect of them. "Dogma takes the place of the collective unconscious by formulating its contents on a grand scale... Mankind has never lacked powerful images to lend magical aid against all the uncanny things that live in the depths of the psyche. Always the figures of the unconscious were expressed in protecting and healing images and in this way expelled from the psyche into cosmic space." pp 12. Jung claims that "the alarming poverty of symbols that is now the condition of our life came about" due to the collapse of the Catholic church in the face of Protestant reformations, which then carries on through the splintering of the Protestant church into hundreds of denominations, leading to the then search for cultural symbols of other places. He recommends that instead of looking for foreign symbols we should, as it were, 'own' our spiritual poverty.

Pp16-17 are a two page metaphoric abstract poem that I don't know how to interpret. The soul goes down to the water and the spirit is an angel that is the wind, approximately. It seems that he's saying that having found ourselves at a spiritual nadir, we should not look for a new rising 'up' but continue downwards in our own descent to Hades. Or something.

18. "Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.. The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness, so that it is often referred to as the "subconscious," usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness. Water is the "valley spirit," the water dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water - a yang embraced in the yin. Psychologically, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious... the descent in the depths always seems to precede the ascent."

19. "The unconscious is the psyche that reaches down from the daylight of mentally and morally lucid consciousness into the nervous system that for ages has been known as the "sympathetic". This does not govern perception and muscular activity like the cerebrospinal system, and thus control the environment; but, though functioning without sense-organs, it maintains the balance of life and, through the mysterious paths of sympathetic excitation, not only gives us knowledge of the innermost life of other being but also has an inner effect upon them..."





[Freud called the 'instinctual psyche the "id", and "super-ego" denotes the collective consciousness, of which the individual is partly conscious and partly unconscious (because it is repressed)']

*There is the archetype and the archetypal idea. Archetypes are hypothetical, Jung says "something like the "pattern of behaviour" in biology."

**Allegory = "paraphrase of a conscious content, whereas a symbol is the best possible expression for an unconscious content whose nature can only be guessed, because it is still unknown".