Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes. The concept of the archetype, which is an indispensable correlate of the idea of the collective unconscious, indicates the existence of definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere. Mythological research calls them motifs; in the psychology of primitives they correspond to Levy-Bruhls concept of representations collectives, and in the field of comparative religion they have been defined by Hubert and Mauss as categories of the imagination... My thesis, then, is as follows: 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. - C.G.Jung / The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious p.42-43
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 07:37:05 +0000