Do you ever wonder how people and animals sometimes just… things? For example, a baby will automatically hold its breath when submerged in water – but please don’t try this at home with your own baby ( don’t try it with somebody else’s either). And generally speaking, we all share the same sense of right and wrong, don’t we? Where does that come from?
According to psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Carl Jung, this and much, much more comes from something which he called the collective unconscious. Now, it would be wrong to ignore the fact that Jung’s legacy is haunted by the vile spectre of Nazi sympathies. At the very least, it is true that some of his writing was enthusiastically devoured and distributed by Nazis, and finding examples of why isn’t too difficult. This theory, however, has become sufficiently detached from Jung himself, to the extent that it remains to this day easily discussed and debated without needing to delve into the darker corners of its author’s history.
To return to the theory, the collective unconscious was something that Jung thrust into the heart of his psychiatric work. He claimed not only that it is the source of our sense of right and wrong, but that it is the source of archetypes; essentially images and ideas fundamental to belief and life in general. All archetypes, he believed, morphed into different interpretations across time and geography – but the mother is the most influential of all. In addition to a literal mother, this was proposed as the source of belief in and devotion to things such as one’s country or religion as a maternal figure. It is for example an explanation for why various religions, independently developed across the world, share many events and basic beliefs – they are, at least in part, a manifestation of the collective unconscious. No matter where in the world you are, your beliefs and behaviour are (according to Jung anyway) driven by these inherited memories that stem from the same ancient time.
Archetypes played a big part in Jung’s interpretation of dreams. Images and events in dreams are usually described as metaphors which, for Jung, could always be traced back to an archetype. One way or another, he would link any dream event with an archetype, such as birth, death, or the hero. Nonetheless, he believed that dreams could not be well interpreted without an understanding of the individual dreamer, which is something of a contradiction. The collective unconscious does not allow an awful lot of wiggle room for free will.