1.02 - The Concept of the Collective Unconscious

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object:1.02 - The Concept of the Collective Unconscious
book class:The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter

THE CONCEPT OF THE
COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS 1

8 7 Probably none of my empirical concepts has met with so
much misunderstanding as the idea of the collective uncon-
scious. In what follows I shall try to give (1) a definition of the
concept, (2) a description of what it means for psychology, (3) an
explanation of the method of proof, and (4) an example.

1. Definition

88 The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can
be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the
fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal
experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition.
While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of con-
tents which have at one time been conscious but which have
disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten
or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have
never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been
individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to
heredity. Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the
most part of complexes, the content of the collective uncon-
scious is made up essentially of archetypes.

8 9 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-Bruhl's concept of "representations collectives," and in
the field of comparative religion they have been defined by

l [Originally given as a lecture to the Abernethian Society at St. Bartholomew's
Hospital, London, on Oct. 19, 1936, and published in the Hospital's Journal,
XLIV (1936/37), 46-49, 64-66. The present version has been slightly revised by
the author and edited in terminology. Editors.]

42

THE CONCEPT OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

Hubert and Mauss as "categories of the imagination." Adolf
Bastian long ago called them "elementary" or "primordial
thoughts." From these references it should be clear enough that
my idea of the archetype literally a pre-existent form does not
stand alone but is something that is recognized and named in
other fields of knowledge.
9 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 imper-
sonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collec-
tive unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited.
It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only
become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to
certain psychic contents.

2. The Psychological Meaning of the Collective Unconscious

9 1 Medical psychology, growing as it did out of professional
practice, insists on the personal nature of the psyche. By this I
mean the views of Freud and Adler. It is a psychology of the
person, and its aetiological or causal factors are regarded almost
wholly as personal in nature. Nonetheless, even this psychology
is based on certain general biological factors, for instance on
the sexual instinct or on the urge for self-assertion, which are
by no means merely personal peculiarities. It is forced to do
this because it lays claim to being an explanatory science.
Neither of these views would deny the existence of a priori in-
stincts common to man and animals alike, or that they have a
significant influence on personal psychology. Yet instincts are
impersonal, universally distributed, hereditary factors of a dy-
namic or motivating character, which very often fail so com-
pletely to reach consciousness that modern psycho therapy is
faced with the task of helping the patient to become conscious
of them. Moreover, the instincts are not vague and indefinite
by nature, but are specifically formed motive forces which, long
before there is any consciousness, and in spite of any degree of
consciousness later on, pursue their inherent goals. Conse-
quently they form very close analogies to the archetypes, so

43

THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

close, in fact, that there is good reason for supposing that the
archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts them-
selves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual
behaviour.

92 The hypothesis of the collective unconscious is, therefore,
no more daring than to assume there are instincts. One admits
readily that human activity is influenced to a high degree
by instincts, quite apart from the rational motivations of the
conscious mind. So if the assertion is made that our imagina-
tion, perception, and thinking are likewise influenced by in-
born and universally present formal elements, it seems to me
that a normally functioning intelligence can discover in this
idea just as much or just as little mysticism as in the theory of
instincts. Although this reproach of mysticism has frequently
been levelled at my concept, I must emphasize yet again that
the concept of the collective unconscious is neither a specu-
lative nor a philosophical but an empirical matter. The ques-
tion is simply this: are there or are there not unconscious,
universal forms of this kind? If they exist, then there is a
region of the psyche which one can call the collective uncon-
scious. It is true that the diagnosis of the collective uncon-
scious is not always an easy task. It is not sufficient to point out
the often obviously archetypal nature of unconscious products,
for these can just as well be derived from acquisitions through
language and education. Cryptomnesia should also be ruled
out, which it is almost impossible to do in certain cases. In
spite of all these difficulties, there remain enough individual
instances showing the autochthonous revival of mythological
motifs to put the matter beyond any reasonable doubt. But if
such an unconscious exists at all, psychological explanation
must take account of it and submit certain alleged personal
aetiologies to sharper criticism.

93 What I mean can perhaps best be made clear by a concrete
example. You have probably read Freud's discussion 2 of a
certain picture by Leonardo da Vinci: St. Anne with the Virgin
Mary and the Christ-child. Freud interprets this remarkable
picture in terms of the fact that Leonardo himself had two
mothers. This causality is personal. We shall not linger over
the fact that this picture is far from unique, nor over the minor

2 Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, sec. IV.

44

THE CONCEPT OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

inaccuracy that St. Anne happens to be the grandmo ther of
Christ and not, as required by Freud's interpretation, the
mother, but shall simply point out that interwoven with the
apparently personal psychology there is an impersonal motif
well known to us from other fields. This is the motif of the
dual mother, an archetype to be found in many variants in
the field of mythology and comparative religion and forming
the basis of numerous "representations collectives." I might
mention, for instance, the motif of the dual descent, that is,
descent from human and divine parents, as in the case of
Heracles, who received immortality through being unwittingly
adopted by Hera. What was a myth in Greece was actually a
ritual in Egypt: Pharaoh was both human and divine by
nature. In the birth chambers of the Egyptian temples Phar-
aoh's second, divine conception and birth is depicted on the
walls; he is "twice-born." It is an idea that underlies all re-
birth mysteries, Christianity included. Christ himself is "twice-
born": through his baptism in the Jordan he was regenerated
and reborn from water and spirit. Consequently, in the Roman
liturgy the font is designated the "uterus ecclesiae," and, as
you can read in the Roman missal, it is called this even today,
in the "benediction of the font" on Holy Saturday before
Easter. Further, according to an early Christan-Gnostic idea,
the spirit which appeared in the form of a dove was inter-
preted as Sophia-Sapientia Wisdom and the Mother of Christ.
Thanks to this motif of the dual birth, children today, instead
of having good and evil fairies who magically "adopt" them
at birth with blessings or curses, are given sponsors a "god-
father" and a "godmother."

94 The idea of a second birth is found at all times and in all
places. In the earliest beginnings of medicine it was a magical
means of healing; in many religions it is the central mystical
experience; it is the key idea in medieval, occult philosophy,
and, last but not least, it is an infantile fantasy occurring in
numberless children, large and small, who believe that their
parents are not their real parents but merely foster-parents to
whom they were handed over. Benvenuto Cellini also had this
idea, as he himself relates in his autobiography.

95 Now it is absolutely out of the question that all the individ-
uals who believe in a dual descent have in reality always had

45

THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

two mothers, or conversely that those few who shared Leo-
nardo's fate have infected the rest of humanity with their
complex. Rather, one cannot avoid the assumption that the
universal occurrence of the dual-birth motif together with the
fantasy of the two mothers answers an omnipresent human
need which is reflected in these motifs. If Leonardo da Vinci
did in fact portray his two mothers in St. Anne and Mary
which I doubt he nonetheless was only expressing something
which countless millions of people before and after him have
believed. The vulture symbol (which Freud also discusses in
the work mentioned) makes this view all the more plausible.
With some justification he quotes as the source of the symbol
the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo, 3 a book much in use in Leo-
nardo's time. There you read that vultures are female only
and symbolize the mother. They conceive through the wind
(pneuma). This word took on the meaning of "spirit" chiefly
under the influence of Christianity. Even in the account of
the miracle at Pentecost the pneuma still has the double mean-
ing of wind and spirit. This fact, in my opinion, points with-
out doubt to Mary, who, a virgin by nature, conceived through
the pneuma, like a vulture. Furthermore, according to Hor-
apollo, the vulture also symbolizes Athene, who sprang, un-
begotten, directly from the head of Zeus, was a virgin, and
knew only spiritual motherhood. All this is really an allusion
to Mary and the rebirth motif. There is not a shadow of
evidence that Leonardo meant anything else by his picture.
Even if it is correct to assume that he identified himself with
the Christ-child, he was in all probability representing the
mythological dual-mother motif and by no means his own per-
sonal prehistory. And what about all the other artists who
painted the same theme? Surely not all of them had two
mothers?
9 6 Let us now transpose Leonardo's case to the field of the
neuroses, and assume that a patient with a mother complex
is suffering from the delusion that the cause of his neurosis
lies in his having really had two mothers. The personal inter-
pretation would have to admit that he is right and yet it
would be quite wrong. For in reality the cause of his neurosis
would lie in the reactivation of the dual-mother archetype,

3 [Cf. the trans, by George Boas, pp. 6%ft., and Freud, Leonardo, sec. II. Editors.]

4 6

THE CONCEPT OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

quite regardless of whether he had one mother or two mothers,
because, as we have seen, this archetype functions individually
and historically without any reference to the relatively rare
occurrence of dual motherhood.

97 In such a case, it is of course tempting to presuppose so
simple and personal a cause, yet the hypothesis is not only
inexact but totally false. It is admittedly difficult to under-
stand how a dual-mother motif unknown to a physician
trained only in medicine could have so great a determining
power as to produce the effect of a traumatic condition. But if
we consider the tremendous powers that lie hidden in the
mythological and religious sphere in man, the aetiological
significance of the archetype appears less fantastic. In numerous
cases of neurosis the cause of the disturbance lies in the very
fact that the psychic life of the patient lacks the co-operation of
these motive forces. Nevertheless a purely personalistic psy-
chology, by reducing everything to personal causes, tries its
level best to deny the existence of archetypal motifs and even
seeks to destroy them by personal analysis. I consider this a
rather dangerous procedure which cannot be justified medi-
cally. Today you can judge better than you could twenty
years ago the nature of the forces involved. Can we not see how
a whole nation is reviving an archaic symbol, yes, even archaic
religious forms, and how this mass emotion is influencing and
revolutionizing the life of the individual in a catastrophic
manner? The man of the past is alive in us today to a degree
undreamt of before the war, and in the last analysis what is
the fate of great nations but a summation of the psychic
changes in individuals?

9 8 So far as a neurosis is really only a private affair, having its
roots exclusively in personal causes, archetypes play no role at
all. But if it is a question of a general incompatibility or an
otherwise injurious condition productive of neuroses in rela-
tively large numbers of individuals, then we must assume the
presence of constellated archetypes. Since neuroses are in most
cases not just private concerns, but social phenomena, we must
assume that archetypes are constellated in these cases too. The
archetype corresponding to the situation is activated, and as a
result those explosive and dangerous forces hidden in the
archetype come into action, frequently with unpredictable

47

THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

consequences. There is no lunacy people under the domination
of an archetype will not fall a prey to. If thirty years ago anyone
had dared to predict that our psychological development was
tending towards a revival of the medieval persecutions of the
Jews, that Europe would again tremble before the Roman
fasces and the tramp of legions, that people would once more
give the Roman salute, as two thousand years ago, and that
instead of the Christian Cross an archaic swastika would lure
onward millions of warriors ready for death why, that man
would have been hooted at as a mystical fool. And today? Sur-
prising as it may seem, all this absurdity is a horrible reality.
Private life, private aetiologies, and private neuroses have be-
come almost a fiction in the world of today. The man of the
past who lived in a world of archaic "representations collec-
tives" has risen again into very visible and painfully real life,
and this not only in a few unbalanced individuals but in many
millions of people.
99 There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations
in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into
our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with
content, but at first only as forms without content, represent-
ing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception and
action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given
archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsive-
ness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way
against all reason and will, or else produces a conflict of patho-
logical dimensions, that is to say, a neurosis.

3. Method of Proof

100 We must now turn to the question of how the existence of
archetypes can be proved. Since archetypes are supposed to
produce certain psychic forms, we must discuss how and where
one can get hold of the material demonstrating these forms.
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. By questioning the individual one
can ascertain which of the motifs appearing in the dream are
known to him. From those which are unknown to him we must

48

THE CONCEPT OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

naturally exclude all motifs which might be known to him, as
for instance to revert to the case of Leonardo the vulture
symbol. We are not sure whether Leonardo took this symbol
from Horapollo or not, although it would have been perfectly
possible for an educated person of that time, because in those
days artists were distinguished for their wide knowledge of
the humanities. Therefore, although the bird motif is an arche-
type par excellence, its existence in Leonardo's fantasy would
still prove nothing. Consequently, we must look for motifs
which could not possibly be known to the dreamer and yet
behave functionally in his dream in such a manner as to coin-
cide with the functioning of the archetype known from histori-
cal sources.

101 Another source for the material we need is to be found in
"active imagination." By this I mean a sequence of fantasies pro-
duced by deliberate concentration. I have found that the exist-
ence of unrealized, unconscious fantasies increases the frequency
and intensity of dreams, and that when these fantasies are made
conscious the dreams change their character and become weaker
and less frequent. From this I have drawn the conclusion that
dreams often contain fantasies which "want" to become con-
scious. The sources of dreams are often repressed instincts
which have a natural tendency to influence the conscious mind.
In cases of this sort, the patient is simply given the task of con-
templating any one fragment of fantasy that seems significant to
him a chance idea, perhaps, or something he has become con-
scious of in a dream until its context becomes visible, that is
to say, the relevant associative material in which it is embedded.
It is not a question of the "free association" recommended by
Freud for the purpose of dream-analysis, but of elaborating the
fantasy by observing the further fantasy material that adds itself
to the fragment in a natural manner.

1Q 2 This is not the place to enter upon a technical discussion of
the method. Suffice it to say that the resultant sequence of
fantasies relieves the unconscious and produces material rich in
archetypal images and associations. Obviously, this is a method
that can only be used in certain carefully selected cases. The
method is not entirely without danger, because it may carry the
patient too far away from reality. A warning against thoughtless
application is therefore in place.

49

THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

10 3 Finally, very interesting sources of archetypal material are
to be found in the delusions of paranoiacs, the fantasies ob-
served in trance-states, and the dreams of early childhood, from
the third to the fifth year. Such material is available in profu-
sion, but it is valueless unless one can adduce convincing mytho-
logical parallels. It does not, of course, suffice simply to connect
a dream about a snake with the mythological occurrence of
snakes, for who is to guarantee that the functional meaning of
the snake in the dream is the same as in the mythological set-
ting? In order to draw a valid parallel, it is necessary to know
the functional meaning of the individual symbol, and then to
find out whether the apparently parallel mythological symbol
has a similar context and therefore the same functional mean-
ing. Establishing such facts not only requires lengthy and
wearisome researches, but is also an ungrateful subject for
demonstration. As the symbols must not be torn out of their
context, one has to launch forth into exhaustive descriptions,
personal as well as symbological, and this is practically impos-
sible in the framework of a lecture. I have repeatedly tried it at
the risk of sending one half of my audience to sleep.

4. An Example

10 4 I am choosing as an example a case which, though already
published, I use again because its brevity makes it peculiarly
suitable for illustration. Moreover, I can add certain remarks
which were omitted in the previous publication. 4

10 5 About 1906 I came across a very curious delusion in a
paranoid schizophrenic who had been interned for many years.
The patient had suffered since his youth and was incurable. He
had been educated at a State school and been employed as a
clerk in an office. He had no special gifts, and I myself knew
nothing of mythology or archaeology in those days, so the situa-
tion was not in any way suspect. One day I found the patient
standing at the window, wagging his head and blinking into the
sun. He told me to do the same, for then I would see something
very interesting. When I asked him what he saw, he was aston-

4 Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (orig. 1912). [Trans, as Psychology of the
Unconscious, 1916. Cf. the revised edition, Symbols of Transformation, pars. 149ft.,
223. Editors.]

50

THE CONCEPT OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

ished that I could see nothing, and said: "Surely you see the
sun's penis when I move my head to and fro, it moves too, and
that is where the wind comes from." Naturally I did not under-
stand this strange idea in the least, but I made a note of it. Then
about four years later, during my mythological studies, I came
upon a book by the late Albrecht Dieterich, 5 the well-known
philologist, which threw light on this fantasy. The work, pub-
lished in 1910, deals with a Greek papyrus in the Biblio theque
Nationale, Paris. Dieterich believed he had discovered a Mith-
raic ritual in one part of the text. The text is undoubtedly a
religious prescription for carrying out certain incantations in
which Mithras is named. It comes from the Alexandrian school
of mysticism and shows affinities with certain passages in the
Leiden papyri and the Corpus Hermeticum. In Dieterich's text
we read the following directions:

Draw breath from the rays, draw in three times as strongly as you
can and you will feel yourself raised up and walking towards the
height, and you will seem to be in the middle of the aerial region.
. . . The path of the visible gods will appear through the disc of the
sun, who is God my father. Likewise the so-called tube, the origin
of the ministering wind. For you will see hanging down from the
disc of the sun something that looks like a tube. And towards the
regions westward it is as though there were an infinite east wind.
But if the other wind should prevail towards the regions of the east,
you will in like manner see the vision veering in that direction. 6

106 It is obviously the author's intention to enable the reader to
experience the vision which he had, or which at least he be-
lieves in. The reader is to be initiated into the inner religious
experience either of the author, or what seems more likely
of one of those mystic communities of which Philo Judaeus gives
contemporary accounts. The fire- or sun-god here invoked is a
figure which has close historical parallels, for instance with the
Christ-figure of the Apocalypse. It is therefore a "representa-
tion collective," as are also the ritual actions described, such as
the imitating of animal noises, etc. The vision is embedded in a

5 Eine Mithrasliturgie. [As the author subsequently learned, the 1910 edition was
actually the second, there having been a first edition in 1903. The patient had,
however, been committed some years before 1903. Editors.]

6 Ibid., pp. 6ff.

51

THE ARCHETYPES AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

religious context of a distinctly ecstatic nature and describes a
kind of initiation into mystic experience of the Deity.

7 Our patient was about ten years older than I. In his megalo-
mania, he thought he was God and Christ in one person. His
attitude towards me was patronizing; he liked me probably be-
cause I was the only person with any sympathy for his abstruse
ideas. His delusions were mainly religious, and when he invited
me to blink into the sun like he did and waggle my head he
obviously wanted to let me share his vision. He played the role
of the mystic sage and I was the neophyte. He felt he was the
sun-god himself, creating the wind by wagging his head to and
fro. The ritual transformation into the Deity is attested by
Apuleius in the Isis mysteries, and moreover in the form of a
Helios apotheosis. The meaning of the "ministering wind" is
probably the same as the procreative pneuma, which streams
from the sun-god into the soul and fructifies it. The association
of sun and wind frequently occurs in ancient symbolism.

!o 8 It must now be shown that this is not a purely chance coin-
cidence of two isolated cases. We must therefore show that the
idea of a wind-tube connected with God or the sun exists inde-
pendently of these two testimonies and that it occurs at other
times and in other places. Now there are, as a matter of fact,
medieval paintings that depict the fructification of Mary with
a tube or hose-pipe coming down from the throne of God and
passing into her body, and we can see the dove or the Christ-
child flying down it. The dove represents the fructifying agent,
the wind of the Holy Ghost.

10 9 Now it is quite out of the question that the patient could
have had any knowledge whatever of a Greek papyrus published
four years later, and it is in the highest degree unlikely that his
vision had anything to do with the rare medieval representa-
tions of the Conception, even if through some incredibly im-
probable chance he had ever seen a copy of such a painting. The
patient was certified in his early twenties. He had never trav-
elled. And there is no such picture in the public art gallery in
Zurich, his native town.

110 I mention this case not in order to prove that the vision is
an archetype but only to show you my method of procedure in
the simplest possible form. If we had only such cases, the task of
investigation would be relatively easy, but in reality the proof

52

THE CONCEPT OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

is much more complicated. First of all, certain symbols have
to be isolated clearly enough to be recognizable as typical phe-
nomena, not just matters of chance. This is done by examining
a series of dreams, say a few hundred, for typical figures, and by
observing their development in the series. The same method
can be applied to the products of active imagination. In this
way it is possible to establish certain continuities or modulations
of one and the same figure. You can select any figure which
gives the impression of being an archetype by its behaviour in
the series of dreams or visions. If the material at one's disposal
has been well observed and is sufficiently ample, one can dis-
cover interesting facts about the variations undergone by a
single type. Not only the type itself but its variants too can be
substantiated by evidence from comparative mythology and
ethnology. I have described the method of investigation else-
where 7 and have also furnished the necessary case material.

7 Psychology and Alchemy, Part II.

53

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