The Cultural Unconscious is Real |
What Is the Unconscious
Take our Can You Spot Defense Mechanisms?
Find a therapist near me
Jung remains highly influential for his notion of the collective unconscious.
Jungian psychology is now giving increasing attention to the cultural unconscious too.
The cultural unconscious affects individual as well as group, ethnic, and national behavior.
Therefore, it too needs to be brought into our conscious awareness.
Are you acquainted with Jungian psychology or interested in exploring its intriguing ideas? If so, the collective unconscious is a vital concept. More than a century ago, Carl Jung formulated this notion based partly on his therapeutic work with psychiatric patients. Buttressed by his investigations of Eastern and Western traditions in art, folklore, and mythology, he asserted that people everywhere share the same inborn ways of experiencing the world. It was a radically unconventional concept for its time, but which Jung systematically advanced. With characteristic wit in responding to its criticisms, he stated:
"We are dealing with a generally human disposition which is instinctual and innate, as instinct is with all animals. Do you really believe that every chick invents its own way of breaking out of the egg? Or that every eel makes an individual decision to start journeying for the Bermuda Islands in the Atlantic Ocean, as though the idea was entirely new?"
What makes the collective unconscious so important, Jung argued, is that it's the source of our archetypal experiences of nature, as well as human relationships. These include love, friendship, and even warfare. "The archetypes are...dynamic," Jung wrote, "They are........