Collective unconscious in psychology and philosophy

The collective unconscious is mysterious by its nature, it expresses itself through many forms: dreams, myths and tales, of one or another behavior in situations, premonitions, or when a person decides to engage in some new business and the hands seem to recognize this "doing" . The sages correctly said: "All the answers in you!".

The concept of the collective unconscious

The concept of the collective unconscious assumes that each person is the bearer of the general experience of the phylogenetic development of mankind as a whole. The collective unconscious is transmitted through the brain structures and is the deepest layer of the psyche, and the content expresses itself through certain archetypes - patterns of behavior that are included in response to specific situations. In the deep layer of the collective unconscious, not only the archaic forms of human existence, but also the sediments of the functioning of animal ancestors doze.

Who first introduced the term of the collective unconscious?

Author of the concept of the collective unconscious famous Swiss psychoanalyst Karl Gustav Jung, the most famous and controversial disciple of Freud. For the first time the term was sounded in 1916 in a published article by Jung "The Structure of the Unconscious," where he stressed that in the analysis of the dreams of patients, Freud first discovered elements that are not from the individual unconscious, but emphasize the archaic, collective nature. Later K.G. Jung began to use the term "objective psyche", then "transpersonal unconscious."

The problem of the collective unconscious

Theory of the collective unconscious Jung was derived from the ideas of the "collective representations" of the ethnologist Levi-Bruhl associated with the processes of socialization of man, but Jung went further by relying on biological and, in some places, mystical interpretations of human existence. Religious relations, mythological relations were represented by K.G. Jung is one of the important elements of the human psyche, fixed in the form of symbols of the collective unconscious, in contrast to Freud, who did not give the person's spiritual experience due attention.

Individual and collective unconscious

The concept of the collective and individual unconscious in man has some difference. The individual unconscious discovered by Freud is always personal, based on innate instincts of self-preservation, reproduction, genetic material transmitted by parents. The collective unconscious is identical with all mankind, it forms the deepest layer of the psyche and is the prerequisite of the individual unconscious of each individual person.

Collective unconscious for Jung

The collective unconscious in the concept of Jung consists of a conglomerate of archetypes, and the archetypes themselves are as many as typical life situations, repeated and fixed in the psyche in the form of a form not filled with content, but containing opportunities for a certain type of perception or action. Archetypes themselves are activated in the form of an image in the subconscious, when the corresponding situation is played for them and manifested during dreams, spontaneous creative expression.

Structure of the collective unconscious

In order to understand what forms the structure of the collective unconscious for Jung, it is important to seek explanations for the work of the psychoanalyst himself. KG Jung denoted the contents of the collective unconscious relying on the following parameters:

Archetypes of the collective unconscious

Jung, on the archetypes of the collective unconscious, said that this is a kind of help to a person to adapt to the external environment. People obey three basic patterns of behavior:

There are many archetypes, but CG Jung distinguishes basic or basic, which determine the existence, tactics of behavior, interaction with the world in most people:

  1. Anima and Animus . Female and male duality in man.
  2. The shadow is a dark part of the psyche, carefully guarded by the unconscious.
  3. The hero - solves the problems associated with the danger, descends into the dungeon, defeats the dragons.
  4. Wise elder - Father, positive Animus, today K.G. Jung can be attributed to this archetype.
  5. Trickster - he's a Joker, a Fool, an archetype of cunning, insidiousness, but of incredible power and energy, always pops up in tales of Heroes.
  6. Person - how a person shows himself to society, the "protective skin" of a person .

Collective unconscious in M. Foucault

The collective unconscious in psychology is the totality of archetypes, and the collective unconscious in philosophy is the historical or cultural unconscious, according to Michel Foucault, a philosopher and psychologist, a representative of antipsychiatry who created the first psychoanalytic chair in France. Foucault defines the unconscious as a text. When studying different epochs, Foucault noticed that for every period of time there is a "problem field" formed from existing discourses of scientific disciplines, but they all form a single episteme (a system of knowledge).

Episteme is realized in the speech of contemporaries as a definite language code with prescriptions, norms and prohibitions, unconsciously defining behavior and thinking characteristic of a given epoch forming a single collective historical unconscious. In contrast, M. Foucault opposes the individualists of outsiders of "socially excluded" thinkers, artists, madmen who are able to destroy the existing epiconstruction.

Collective unconscious - examples

Collective unconscious - examples in life can be found in analyzing the behavior of people who are in a crowd, and here the collective or transpersonal unconscious manifests itself through two kinds of behavior:

  1. Combining mass behavior - the crowd becomes a single whole as a result of infection with the same emotional background, ideas - as happens during a rally where a group of people defends their rights, or it is a crowd of fanatics in a state of universal ecstasy.
  2. Disconnecting mass behavior - here the collective unconscious acts as a "sowing" panic and chaos. People are emotionally shocked, and behavioral mechanisms in an unfamiliar situation work at the level of survival instinct , people act irrationally - outwardly it looks like a person does not realize his behavior.

An example from psychiatric practice K.G. Cabin boy. One of the patients was influenced by the Savior's archetype and called the doctor to look with him in the sun to contemplate the solar phallus, and if you try to shake your head from side to side, the phallus will also swing, creating a wind. In 1910, Jung, studying mythology, came across a description of the ancient liturgy of the cult of Mithras, which described the vision of a solar tube on a light that generates wind. The similarity between these descriptions is obvious, and in the patient information from collective unconscious antiquity has awakened.