The Collective Unconscious

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The collective unconscious is Carl Jung’s name for a layer of the mind that no one acquires. Beneath the personal unconscious — the cellar of forgotten and repressed experience that psychoanalysis had mapped — Jung posited a second psychic system: collective, universal, impersonal, identical in all individuals, owing nothing to anyone’s biography and everything to heredity. The personal unconscious is made of what a person once knew and lost; its units are complexes. The collective unconscious was never anyone’s to lose; its units are archetypes. The claim is among the boldest in twentieth-century psychology: below each private mind, a common one, as old as the species.

The idea began as a clinical puzzle. As a psychiatrist at the Burghölzli, the Zurich asylum, Jung kept finding motifs in the delusions of psychotic patients whose nearest parallels lay in mythologies they had apparently never read. Borrowing between cultures struck him as too weak an explanation; the images, he concluded, sprout natively in every psyche from a shared substrate. A dream of 1909, aboard ship returning from America with Freud, gave the conviction its architecture: a house with a cellar, beneath the cellar an older vault, and beneath that a cave littered with prehistoric pottery and skulls. Jung took the lowest level for a stratum Freud’s psychology did not contain, and later recalled that the dream was already preparing him for Freud’s refusal to follow him down.

The term first appeared in 1916; the text reached print as a French translation, “La structure de l’inconscient,” published in the Archives de Psychologie. The contents took longer to name: first primordial images, borrowed from Jacob Burckhardt; then dominants; from 1919, archetypes. For the stratum itself Jung also said objective psyche — a thing met, not owned — now the more common term among his heirs.

What an archetype is, Jung specified with more care than the word’s later career suggests — no concept of his, he complained, was more misunderstood. Archetypes are not inherited ideas, still less inherited images: they are, in the 1936 formulation, “forms without content,” each representing only the possibility of a certain type of perception and action. The form stands to its realizations as a crystal’s axial system to the crystal — determining structure with no material existence of its own. Strictly, no one has ever seen an archetype: the archetype-in-itself is irrepresentable, knowable only through its effects, and what appears in dream, vision, and myth is always the archetypal image, the form filled with the material of a time and a life. A distinction, sympathetic commentators concede, not always maintained — even by Jung. He anchored the hypothesis to biology by analogy: instincts are impersonal, inherited, universal patterns of behaviour, and archetypes, he argued, are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves — so that positing a collective unconscious is no bolder than positing instinct.

The doctrine marks the deepest line of the break with Freud — the break itself is biography, told elsewhere. Freud’s psychology, as Jung characterized it, was a psychology of the person: causes personal, contents personal, the unconscious a sediment of the individual past. Jung’s worked example was Leonardo’s St. Anne with the Virgin: Freud derived it from the painter’s two mothers; Jung re-read it through a dual-mother archetype running from Heracles through Pharaoh’s divine second birth to baptismal rebirth — active, he noted, in countless people who had only one mother. The contrast flattered Jung less than he implied. Freud too posited an archaic heritage — the primal horde of Totem and Taboo, mental forms inexplicable from any individual life — and Jung acknowledged it. The difference was mechanism: Freud’s archaic remnants were acquired once and inherited as traits, a Lamarckian sediment, where Jung’s contents arise newly in every psyche from a structure all share. Jung allowed, with a barb, that Freud had discovered an archetype — the Oedipus complex, the first and only one.

For evidence Jung relied half a century on one showpiece. Emil Schwyzer, a store clerk with no higher education, committed to the Burghölzli in 1901, saw a phallus hanging from the sun whose movements made the wind blow. In the Mithras Liturgy, an ancient Greek magical text, Jung found the parallel: a tube hanging from the sun’s disk, origin of the ministering wind. As Jung told it — in print, and on BBC television as late as 1959 — he had heard the vision in 1906, and the liturgy was first published in 1910: the patient could not have read his delusion anywhere; it had risen from below. Historians later named the case the Solar Phallus Man, and the name has outlived the proof.

The record is less clean. The liturgy’s first edition appeared in 1903, not 1910 — 1910 was the second. And the vision was recorded not by Jung but by his student Johann Jakob Honegger, who interviewed Schwyzer in 1910 and presented the case at Nuremberg that March; Honegger died by his own hand the next year, and from the 1952 revision of Jung’s book he has vanished, the hallucination now something Jung once came across himself. On these facts Richard Noll built his 1990s indictment: that Jung appropriated a dead student’s work and shifted dates to protect the case — and that solar-phallus imagery had circulated in German books since Creuzer and Bachofen anyway. The rejoinders have weight. Deirdre Bair, who did obtain Honegger’s notes — Noll said the heirs had refused him — found them “too incoherent” to support the charge of theft, and no evidence that Jung falsified dates. The decisive date, moreover, cuts in Jung’s favour: Schwyzer was committed in 1901, before any edition of the liturgy existed, so a cryptomnesia argument must run through popular books and fellow patients rather than the text itself. The deeper deflation came from the other side. The historian Sonu Shamdasani, recovering Honegger’s papers, found in Schwyzer “a veritable textbook of mythology,” answering the leading questions of a student sent to find exactly that; Carl Alfred Meier, who knew the patient, never established what the solar phallus did in his system — and by then Schwyzer no longer remembered it. Jung himself had warned that he cited the case only to show his method in its simplest form. The simplest form turned out not to be simple.

Whether any of this could be biology is the standing question. Read literally — repetition engraving experiences into the psychic constitution — the theory requires inheritance of acquired characteristics, which is to say Lamarck; Jung’s guard was the forms-not-contents doctrine: inherited possibilities of ideas, not ideas. Interpreters have split the claim in two. The minimal reading — that human minds share inherited, species-typical structure, much as human arms share one anatomy — is hardly contested and hardly distinctive. The maximal reading, on which archetypal experience opens onto something like a world mind, is distinctive and unevidenced — and Jung was visibly drawn to it, which may be why the wider world was drawn to him. The serious mid-century recasting was ethological and evolutionary: Michael Fordham tied archetypes to Lorenz’s innate releasing mechanisms; Anthony Stevens rebuilt them as evolved neuropsychic propensities coordinating the behavioural repertoire of the species. The current state is sober. Christian Roesler’s 2012 review of the genetic and neuroscientific evidence found no firm scientific foundation for the claim that complex symbolic patterns — the hero myth, say — are biologically transmitted to every human being, proposing cultural transmission instead; the Jungian rejoinder has been to reframe archetypes as emergent rather than transmitted, and to note that Jung’s definitions were never univocal.

Set against the longer history of ideas — and this is a reading, though the Jungians made it first — the collective unconscious is the anima mundi argued from the consulting room. The world-soul of Plato’s Timaeus, the Stoic logos, the Neoplatonic World Soul, the living cosmos of the Hermetica: each asserts a single animate substrate beneath individual minds. Marie-Louise von Franz allowed that identifying the collective unconscious with the ancient world-soul was a natural temptation; Jung, in his alchemical years, went further, writing that no psychological concept suited the alchemists’ anima mundi better. The difference he held onto is exact, and it is the whole point. The world-soul was asserted as cosmology; the collective unconscious was offered as empirical psychology — not speculation, Jung insisted, and not philosophy, but a question of observable fact. Every dispute the concept has generated — the Solar Phallus dates, the Lamarckian objection, Noll against the heirs — comes down to whether the clinical evidence carried the weight that lineage required. Jung’s own late work strained the boundary from inside: the psychoid archetype, ordering psyche and matter alike, belongs to the doctrine of synchronicity and stands at the edge of the metaphysics he had forsworn.

He had said the question was simple: such universal forms either exist or they do not. A century of argument has established mainly that it is not simple, and that it has not gone away.

→ Related: Carl Jung · Synchronicity · Morphic Resonance