Carl
Jung is a doubly paradoxical thinker. His thought is both about paradoxes
and in itself paradoxical. Jung, unlike
other psychoanalytic thinkers such as Freud and Lacan who focused on
interpersonal subject-object relations, focused on the self contained individual
psyche and its relations with itself. On the other hand, the emphasis he placed
on the Collective Unconscious makes the subject for Jung anything but self
contained. Jung held that the collective unconscious is no less, even more, important
than Freud's personal biographical unconscious.
Laying
on his sofa, Freud might ask you about your relationships with your mother. Jung
might not be as interested in your mother as he is with the
mother. Jung is not so much concerned with how concrete individuals populate
our mind; he is more interested with how our mind is populated with abstract
figures that represent primeval elements of human existence. What we are
dealing with here are the gods.
Much
like Freud, Jung divides the psych into three parts: the I (ego), the personal
unconscious and the collective unconscious. Centering his thought on the collectiveunconscious is what distinguished Jung from other psychoanalytical thinkers
and their view of the subject. For Jung, the collective unconscious
plays a role which is no less and perhaps even more important than the personal
unconscious in determining our personality.
According
to Jung the collective unconscious is something inherited, meaning we are
already born with certain ancient knowledge or mental content. The collective unconscious
for Jung explains the continuity of culture and our sense of common experience
with previous generations.
Jung's
collective unconscious is populated by archetypes. Archetypes for Jung
are amorphous shapes which are manifested with culture specific content. To understand
Jung's concept of archetypes consider the fact that every human being has a
mother, and every culture has to relate to the mother in some fashion or the
other and assign her with meaning. For Jung, we are born with the idea of a
mother (otherwise we wouldn't have been able to survive) that later takes shape
in the form that native society perceives and represents the mother archetype. Jungian
archetypes are such universal forms like the father, mother, hero, shadow and
more.
The
"shadow" archetype is one of the central concepts in Jung's theory. The
shadow archetype for Jung somewhat resembles Freud's unconscious. The shadow is
a form which takes on content perceived by us a negative. The more we are
disengaged with the shadow the more it accumulates potency and causes damage to
the psyche.
Understand Better: Jung's Collective Unconscious - Examples
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