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Jung The Collective Unconscious

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The unconscious is an aspect of the human psyche that still baffles psychologist today. In our unconscious, we potentially contain repressed memories, desires, and behaviors. The individual unconsciously executes many of the behaviors or desires. However, there is more to the unconscious than our personal memories and behaviors. Carl G. Jung, a psychologist, was one of Freud’s friends and student. Jung diverged from Freud because his perception that the unconscious mainly contains repressed memories. Freud had his understanding of these instinctual behaviors, but mostly dismissed the concept as insignificant. Although, Freud did not particularly accept the collective unconscious, Jung developed his theories despite disapproval. Jung explains …show more content…

“The collective unconscious is different from and in addition to the personal unconscious in that it is a stratum of reality that does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn...universal...[and] more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals.” (Tresan, 2005) This clearly illustrates that the personal unconscious is all that we experience and understand as we go through our life, from childhood to old age. However, the unconscious is much more than our personal experiences and memories. It is far greater than this. The collective unconscious is a pool of information “inborn” into every human being. All living creatures experience the collective unconscious though. For example, a bird has innate abilities keen to flying. The bird knows nothing about lift or air pressure, when to glide and when to flap its wings. The bird instinctively acts on these concepts without every picking up an aviation manual. Like the bird, humans contain instinctive behaviors in many different ways. Therefore, we see that the collective unconscious differs from the personal unconscious. This is because it the collective unconscious that contains the human archetypes and instinctual behaviors. These behaviors are not developed over the course of someone’s …show more content…

These fundamental images have lasted since the far reaches of time. The archetypal images are concepts regarding nature, interpersonal relationships, religion, and a whole range of other aspects of human society. For example, we all innately understand the concept of water. This is something that we are not taught or trained to know and accept. Nevertheless, the idea of water in dreams and visions has held meaning for men all throughout history. The individual may not be conscious of the significance from water. Over the course of Jung’s life, he studied thousands of dreams comparing and contrasting their significances and found many common themes, like the concept of water. Now to be clear the archetypal images are only representations of the inherent archetypes. “These images are not archetypes themselves; they are the experienced expression of the archetype. The archetype itself is an inherited mode of psychic functioning analogous to inherited behavior patterns.” (Sills, 1968) Therefore, fairy tales and myths are representations of these innate “modes of psychic functioning.” Carl Jung understood that we all have these archetypal images in our lives, but an individual can

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