The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

“Our intellect has achieved the most tremendous things, but in the meantime our spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair.”

Jung warns against viewing empirical science as an antithesis to spiritual exploration. He suggests that the pervasiveness of archetypes across mythologies is concrete evidence of the existence of a collective unconscious, making it worthy of scientific examination. His focus on wholeness and integration extends to his understanding of spiritual and scientific realms. He seeks to unite the two to gain a more comprehensive understanding of human experience.

“The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one’s own shadow.”

The process of individuation and Confronting the Self requires embracing the Shadow, or the parts of the self that are hidden from conscious awareness. Jung believes that true psychological transformation and healing begins by bringing the hidden parts of the psyche into consciousness.

“In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.”

Here, Jung distinguishes between the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious, thereby separating himself from the work of his contemporaries in the field of psychology. He asserts that the collective unconscious is part of a shared and veiled experience—a type of universal psyche inherent to all people. During Jung’s lifetime, his contemporaries like Freud believed that repressed desires and memories lived within the personal unconscious, but Jung offered a new theory that postulated an even deeper layer to the psyche.

“The main source, then, is dreams, which have the advantage of being involuntary, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche and are therefore pure products of nature not falsified by any conscious purpose.”

Jung proposes the technique of active imagination for the process of confronting the self. In this process, a patient shares dreams and visions, which are then interpreted by the psychoanalyst. Jung asserts that dreams are the fodder of the collective unconscious—they are the closest humans get to tapping into this deeper part of the psyche.

“The only thing that can be established with certainty in the present state of our knowledge, is our ignorance of the nature of the psyche.”

Throughout the work, Jung champions the embracing of dualities and contradictions to achieve self-awareness, and this quote highlights the paradox inherent in knowledge: He says the only “certainty” at present is “ignorance.” His framing of this idea underscores his overall belief that true understanding can only come from embracing the unknown, and confronting the self —even the repressed, hidden parts—is the key to finding meaningful experience and balance. Individuation is the culmination of this process.

“The anima is a factor of the utmost importance in the psychology of a man wherever emotions and affects are at work. She intensifies, exaggerates, falsifies, and mythologizes all emotional relations with his work and with other people of both sexes.”

In his discussion of the Anima, which is the feminine aspect of the male psyche, Jung highlights The Duality of Archetypes. He expresses the idea that the Anima contributes to positive qualities in a person’s life while simultaneously causing the individual to be overemotional or untrustworthy. Jung’s concept of these two sides of the feminine archetype is influenced by his personal history and historical bias.

“There is an a priori factor in all human activities, namely the inborn, preconscious and unconscious individual structure of the psyche.”

In this section, Jung enters a philosophical debate between two key principles: a priori versus the tabula rasa. The latter concept refers to the idea that all humans are born as blank slates, and that knowledge is then applied to the mind through experience. However, a priori suggests that humans are born with innate knowledge that taps into a more collective state of being. Jung offers the archetypes of the collective unconscious as empirical evidence of this type of inherent knowledge.

“The figure of the personal mother looms so large in all personalistic psychologies that, as we know, they never got beyond it.”

In his personal practice, Jung focuses on the archetype of the Great Mother and the personal experiences of an individual with the mother figure as the source of complexes and neuroses. He argues that this archetype is so inherent to human experience that it is the wellspring of most psychological illnesses, as well as the source of psychological fortitude.

“Whether he understands them or not, man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of Nature and relates to his own roots. A view of the world or social order that cuts him off from the primordial images of life not only is no culture at all but, in increasing degree, is a prison or a stable.”

Jung is critical of religious and scientific perspectives which downplay the importance of exploring the unconscious or that ignore the existence of the collective unconscious. He believes that by confronting the self, humans can gain more satisfying and meaningful lives. Furthermore, a collective focus on individuation creates cultural healing. He argues that the experience of being human is inherent to its association with archetypes. The metaphor of the “prison or a stable” emphasizes that disconnecting an individual from archetypes is akin to imprisonment or a confined animalistic existence that keeps them from true fulfillment.

“Consciousness can only exist through continual recognition of the unconscious, just as everything that lives must pass through many deaths.”

Confronting the self is not a singular experience of transformation or rebirth. Instead, Jung suggests that it is an ongoing process that requires consistent work and effort. He practiced this in his own life, spending years recording his dreams and psychic visions in his journals and interpreting them, viewing the exploration of the unconscious as a continuous meditative practice. The “many deaths” he refers to are the continuous psychological transformations that all humans undergo.

“I am of the opinion that the psyche is the most tremendous fact of human life. Indeed, it is the mother of all human facts; of civilization and of its destroyer, war.”

An important theme to Jung’s work is the integration of dualities, including the convergence of the large and small, internal and external. In this passage, Jung shows an incorporation of the psyche with culture. He sees the two as explicitly intertwined, each impacting the other. By calling it the “mother of all human facts,” he highlights that it is the source of culture.

“We are confronted with that inner friend or foe, and whether he is our friend or our foe depends on ourselves. You need not be insane to hear his voice. On the contrary, it is the simplest and most natural thing imaginable.”

Jung describes the voice of the unconscious as its own entity, presenting it as archetypes calling out to the psyche from a deeper realm. He also highlights how this voice can inhabit opposites—it can be “inner friend or foe”—further emphasizing the duality of archetypes. Individuation requires embracing both sides of the duality, allowing the Shadow and the self to become integrated. Jung also insists that it is not “insane” to introspect or pay attention to unconscious thoughts.

“It is my own transformation—not a personal transformation, but the transformation of what is mortal in me into what is immortal. It shakes off the mortal husk that I am and awakens to a life of its own; it mounts the sun-barge and may take me with it.”

In this description of the process of confronting the self through individuation, Jung asserts that the result is the achievement of a higher realm of being. Throughout his work, he walks a fine line between empirical science and the spiritual realm. In this passage, he embraces both, connecting mortal and immortal experience to the psyche.

“There is no longer any question whether a myth refers to the sun or the moon, the father or the mother, sexuality or fire or water; all it does is to circumscribe and give an approximate description of an unconscious core of meaning.”

Jung suggests that archetypes are part of the pervasive nature of the collective unconscious and provide insight into cultural and individual meaning. The cultural language through which archetypes speak is mythology. Instead of examining mythology as singular interpretations of one side of a duality, Jung advocates for the study of mythology as narratives of psychic wholeness.

“The child motif represents not only something that existed in the distant past but also something that exists now; that is to say, it is not just a vestige but a system.”

Jung frequently reiterates that archetypes do not contain singular meanings or interpretations. Instead, they are forms that speak to myriad aspects of human experience. By viewing the Child archetype as a process, Jung highlights the duality of archetypes and how their different elements converge to endow human life with meaning and purpose.

“The child motif is capable of numerous transformations mentioned above: it can be expressed by roundness, the circle or sphere, or else by the quaternity as another form of wholeness. I have called this wholeness that transcends consciousness the ‘self.’”

Jung connects two archetypes—the figure of the Child-God archetype (or simply the Child) and the symbol of the mandala. When a child appears in dreams or other visual representations, he says it correlates to the past, present, and future, connecting the archetype to psychic wholeness. The mandala, another symbol of wholeness, also brings these elements together.

“Demeter and Kore, mother and daughter, extend the feminine consciousness both upwards and downwards. They add an ‘older and younger,’ ‘stronger and weaker’ dimension to it and widen out the narrowly limited conscious mind bound in space and time.”

In this examination of the duality of archetypes, Jung reveals that different archetypes can correspond and clash with one another. In the story of Demeter and Kore, the two deities provide opposing elements to psychic meaning. Both are women, but they express different sides of the archetype of the Anima while maintaining their own internal dualities.

“But we have yet to consider that because of its original autonomy, about which there can be no doubt in the psychological sense, the spirit is quite capable of staging its own manifestations spontaneously.”

Jung explains that it is difficult to provide a clear and consistent definition of archetypes. In earlier descriptions, he describes archetypes as illusive forms that take many shapes. In this passage, however, he suggests that archetypes may have their own will and autonomy that allows them to shape unconscious and conscious experiences.

“The grand plan on which the unconscious life of the psyche is constructed is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil may not be necessary in order to produce good.”

In Jung’s discussion of the duality of archetypes, he is careful not to assign a moral value to either side of a binary. Instead, he views both as necessary and integral parts of human and collective experience. Both must be integrated to achieve psychic wholeness.

“The disastrous idea that everything comes to the human psyche from outside and that it is born a tabula rasa is responsible for the erroneous belief that under normal circumstances the individual is in perfect order. He then looks to the State for salvation, and makes society pay for his inefficiency.”

Jung asserts that archetypal knowledge is a priori. This philosophical concept of innate knowledge stands in contrast to the tabula rasa, which suggests that all humans are born with minds like blank slates, waiting to be filled with knowledge through experience. Jung argues that belief in the tabula rasa creates a system in which individuals never engage with their unconscious selves and, therefore, become suspended in a cycle of blame and illness.

“The unconscious has a Janus-face: on one side its contents point back to a preconscious, prehistoric world of instinct, while on the other side it potentially anticipates the future.”

The duality of archetypes and the motif of syzygy is extended into the psyche itself, revealing that even the unconscious contains opposing and integral forces. The metaphor comparing the unconscious to the “Janus-face” in this quotation refers to the Roman god Janus who has two faces that face in opposite directions; Jung uses this reference to indicate that the unconscious simultaneously focuses both on the past and the future. It recalls primordial archetypal knowledge while shaping and providing insight into the future.

“The political and social isms of our day preach every conceivable ideal, but, under this mask, they pursue the goal of lowering the level of our culture by restricting or altogether inhibiting the possibilities of individual development.”

In the case study presented in this chapter, Jung emphasizes that the woman’s process of individuation was repeatedly interrupted by external circumstance. He uses this as evidence that social and political climates are often not conducive with psychic wholeness and well-being. This idea contributes to how the collective unconscious seeks both individual wholeness and cultural unity. The pervasive nature of the collective unconscious and the prevalence of archetypes across cultures may be an indication of an unconscious seeking and movement toward cultural healing.

“This problem cannot be solved collectively, because the masses are not changed unless the individual changes.”

Jung provides a roadmap for cultural healing by emphasizing the importance of personal growth and therapy through individuation. He argues for betterment on a personal level as a pathway toward collective growth.