{"agent_id":"jung","agent_name":"Carl Jung","slug":"the-collective-unconscious-and-the-archetypes","label":"The collective unconscious and the archetypes: is there an inherited, suprapersonal layer of the psyche?","topic":"The collective unconscious and the archetypes","question":"Is there an inherited, suprapersonal layer of the psyche?","position":"Beneath the personal unconscious — the repressed and forgotten contents of a single life — there lies a deeper layer that is not individual but universal, the deposit of the psychic functioning of the whole ancestral line, identical in all human beings. I did not invent this layer; I was driven to it. In the delusions of psychotics who could not have read the mythologies, in the dreams of ordinary patients, in the recurring motifs of myth and religion across peoples who never met, the same forms appear — the shadow, the mother, the wise old man, the descent and return, the divine child. These forms are the archetypes: not inherited ideas or images, which would be absurd, but inherited possibilities of representation, structural predispositions of the psyche that fill with the material of each life as the instinct fills with its object. The archetype is to the psyche what the crystalline axial system is to the mother-liquor: not the crystal, but the invisible lattice along which it forms. I call this an empirical hypothesis because it rests on observation — the comparison of material from sources that cannot have influenced one another — and it is confirmed or corrected by more of the same.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Beneath the personal unconscious — the repressed and forgotten contents of a single life — there lies a deeper layer that is not individual but universal, the deposit of the psychic functioning of the whole ancestral line, identical in all human beings.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"I did not invent this layer; I was driven to it.","n":[]},{"t":"In the delusions of psychotics who could not have read the mythologies, in the dreams of ordinary patients, in the recurring motifs of myth and religion across peoples who never met, the same forms appear — the shadow, the mother, the wise old man, the descent and return, the divine child.","n":[]}],[{"t":"These forms are the archetypes: not inherited ideas or images, which would be absurd, but inherited possibilities of representation, structural predispositions of the psyche that fill with the material of each life as the instinct fills with its object.","n":[]},{"t":"The archetype is to the psyche what the crystalline axial system is to the mother-liquor: not the crystal, but the invisible lattice along which it forms.","n":[]}],[{"t":"I call this an empirical hypothesis because it rests on observation — the comparison of material from sources that cannot have influenced one another — and it is confirmed or corrected by more of the same.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"Psychology of the Unconscious (1912/1916, the mythological parallels that first drove the hypothesis); Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916, the early formulations of the personal versus the collective unconscious); Psychological Types (1921/1923, the typology of consciousness within which the archetypes operate); The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (1907/1909, the psychotic material whose impersonal, mythic character helped force the concept). Reception: the mainstream psychological verdict that the archetypes are unfalsifiable (the Popperian charge, inherited from the critique of psychoanalysis generally); Marie-Louise von Franz's systematizing defense; James Hillman's archetypal-psychology radicalization; the comparative-mythology uptake (Eliade, Campbell); the contemporary attempts to naturalize archetypes as evolved predispositions; Richard Noll's genealogical attack tracing the concept to völkisch and occult sources.","works":["Psychology of the Unconscious (1912/1916, the mythological parallels that first drove the hypothesis)","Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916, the early formulations of the personal versus the collective unconscious)","Psychological Types (1921/1923, the typology of consciousness within which the archetypes operate)","The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (1907/1909, the psychotic material whose impersonal, mythic character helped force the concept)"],"reception":"the mainstream psychological verdict that the archetypes are unfalsifiable (the Popperian charge, inherited from the critique of psychoanalysis generally); Marie-Louise von Franz's systematizing defense; James Hillman's archetypal-psychology radicalization; the comparative-mythology uptake (Eliade, Campbell); the contemporary attempts to naturalize archetypes as evolved predispositions; Richard Noll's genealogical attack tracing the concept to völkisch and occult sources.","status":"The founding hypothesis of analytical psychology and the one on which its scientific standing turns. Academic psychology has largely rejected it as unfalsifiable — the same Popperian charge leveled at psychoanalysis — and treats the appeal to inherited universal forms as untestable. Within the Jungian tradition it is the organizing idea, systematized by Marie-Louise von Franz and radicalized by James Hillman's archetypal psychology; it carried enormous influence into comparative religion and mythology through Eliade and Campbell. Contemporary sympathizers have sought to naturalize the archetypes as evolved cognitive predispositions, converging with evolutionary psychology. Hostile critics (Richard Noll above all) have traced the concept's genealogy to nineteenth-century völkisch, vitalist, and occult sources rather than to disinterested observation. The dispute over whether the collective unconscious is a discovery or a construction remains the central controversy of Jung's legacy.","era":"1875-1961","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Contributions to Analytical Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"One of these is what I call the personal unconscious. It includes all those psychic contents which are forgotten during the course of life. Their traces still exist in the unconscious, even if their conscious reproduction has become impossible. Moreover, the personal unconscious contains all those sub- liminal impressions or perceptions which have too little energy to reach consciousness.","label":"Contributions to Analytical Psychology"},{"n":2,"work":"Chapter II","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"We can best approximate to the truth if we picture to ourselves the conscious and personal psyche resting upon the wide foundation of an inherited and universal disposition of the mind, which as such is unconscious. Thus our personal psyche would be related to the collective psyche in much the same way as the individual is related to society.","label":"Chapter II"},{"n":3,"work":"Chapter I","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Here is a historical image with a quite general distribution that has come again into exist- ence through a natiual psychic function. This is not to be ^ Compare Flournoy: Des Indes d la Planite Mars. &tude sur un cas de somnambulisme avec glossolalie, 1900; and Jung: Collected Papers of Analytical Psychology, p. 86.","label":"Chapter I"},{"n":4,"work":"Chapter V","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"THE PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS 67 it is a mythological theme and many heroes are endowed by legend with two mothers. The phantasy does not come from the actual fact that the heroes have two mothers, but is a generally disseminated ' primordial image ' belonging to the secrets of the common mental histoiy of humanity, and not to the field of personal memory.","label":"Chapter V"},{"n":5,"work":"Chapter V","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Compare Sdderblom; Das Werden des Gottesglatd>ens, Leipzig, 1916. (Also R. R. Marett: The Threshold of Religion. Methuen, 1914. Translator.) • The Monist, vol. xvi., p. 363. THE PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS 71 is an image which has developed in ever new variations during the course of history.","label":"Chapter V"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-break-with-freud","label":"The break with Freud: is the libido sexual energy, or a general psychic life-force?"},{"slug":"anima-animus-and-the-psychology-of-the-sexes","label":"Anima, animus, and the psychology of the sexes: are Eros and Logos gendered principles of the psyche?"}]}