The collective unconscious refers to
that part of a person's unconscious which is common
to all human beings. It contains archetypes, which are
forms or symbols that are manifested by all people in
all cultures. They are said to exist prior to experience,
and are in this sense instinctual. Critics have argued
that this is an ethnocentrist view, which universalized
Jung's European-styled archetypes into human beings'
archetypes.
Less mystical proponents of the Jungian model hold that
the collective unconscious can be adequately explained
as arising in each individual from shared instinct,
common experience, and shared culture. The natural process
of generalization in the human mind combines these common
traits and experiences into a mostly identical substratum
of the unconscious
For Jung then, the Collective Unconscious is not, as
many of his popularisers claim, a kind of "Universal
Mind" or metaphysical reality, like the Platonic World
of Forms, but rather an ultimately biological reality.
The Spiritual concepts of Platonism are not seen as
metaphysical, but biological, or rather, psycho-biological.
The Jungian schema can thus be represented as follows:
Everyone has their own Personal Unconscious. The Collective
Unconscious in contrast is universal. It cannot be built
up like one's personal unconscious is; rather, it predates
the individual. It is the repositary of all the religious,
spiritual, and mythological symbols and experiences.
Its primary structures - the deep structures of the
psyche, in other words.
Jung called "Archetypes"; a later-Hellenistic Platonic
and Augustinian Christian term that referred to the
spiritual forms which are the pre-existent prototypes
of the things of the material world. Interpreting this
idea psychologically, Jung stated that these archetypes
were the conceptual matrixes or patterns behind all
our religious and mythological concepts, and indeed,
our thinking processes in general.
