Understanding the Collective Unconscious

The collective unconscious, originally defined by Carl Jung and sometimes called the objective psyche, refers to a segment of the deepest unconscious mind not shaped by personal experience. It's genetically inherited and common to all human beings. Sexual instincts (life and death instincts) are a good example.

It may be easier to understand collective unconsciousness if you first understand some basics of personal consciousness. This concept is akin to Sigmund Freud's concept of the Id and its contents are the repressed or forgotten experiences that were at one time in your conscious mind.

In a therapeutic setting, a clinician might use psychoanalysis as part of her treatment plan to uncover a repressed memory of a past traumatic event that currently affects your life. This is generally necessary to successfully treat some psychological disorders, including specific phobia, that stem from a past memory.

Instincts highly influence human behavior and are separate from the conscious mind's rational motivations. A core tenant of evolutionary psychology, these impersonal, universally distributed and hereditary factors are so unconscious a therapist has to help the client to become aware of them and how they affect behavior. The field of analytical psychology, which views behaviors as stemming from unconscious beliefs essentially looks at a person's relationship to her collective unconscious.

The content of your collective unconsciousness consists of archetypes, which are basic and fundamental pre-existing images, or forms. Archetypes are indispensable in explaining this concept. You can only become aware of them through conscious learning. These images include an innocent child, an old wise person, femininity, and masculinity. A good example of a nature archetype is fire.

Genetic memory may explain specific phobias, a fear of a specific object or situation. A phobia of snakes (ophidiophobia) manifests in children even when there is no apparent traumatic origin for their fear.

For example, a study found one-third of British children at age six are afraid of snakes even though it's rare to encounter a snake in the British Isles. The children had never come in contact with a snake in a traumatic situation, but snakes still generated an anxious response.

Once brought up when discussing the history of psychology or the goals of psychotherapy, collective unconscious is being examined in a different, and difficult-to-comprehend light in recent years. Psychiatric research is now looking at the role of bacteria in collective unconscious. Considering that genes belonging to microbes in the bacteria present in the gut outnumber the genes in the human body, and the fact that these bacteria may produce neuroactive compounds, it's thought by some that these microbes may be part of the unconscious which regulates human behavior—the collective unconscious. If so, studies of gut microbes may be a very important part of the psychiatric research of the future,

Carl Jung was born in Switzerland in 1875 and founded the school of analytical psychology. He is responsible for proposing and developing the psychological concepts of collective unconscious and archetypes, along with introverted and extroverted personality.

His family expected him to follow in the footsteps of many family members and join the clergy, but instead, he pursued medicine and studied many subjects including, biology, zoology, and archaeology, as well as philosophy, early Christian literature, and mythology.

Jung worked with Freud. In the beginning, Jung's work affirmed many of Freud's ideas. In the end, the two split, Jung contested Freud's principles of psychoanalysis, and their relationship terminated when Jung published "Psychology and Unconscious" in 1912.

Examples: Deep-seated beliefs regarding spirituality and religion may be partially due to the collective unconscious.