Beyond the Personal: Jung, Freud, and the Collective Unconscious

The idea of the collective unconscious refers to Carl Jung's belief that humanity shares an underlying, biologically inherited storehouse of collective experience and knowledge. Unlike the personal unconscious, which contains an individual's repressed, forgotten, or acquired memories built up during a single lifetime, the collective unconscious is entirely universal and shared by all human beings regardless of personal history.

From his considerable study of world myth and religion, Jung came to the conclusion that this collective data is cross-cultural. In fact, he didn't just see the collective unconscious in myth and religion. He saw universally recognizable motifs among dreams, myth, religion, the arts and architecture. One leading example he provides is the mandala. For Jung, the circular shape of the mandala represents the potentially limitless self.

Jung calls these hypothesized patterns of human existence archetypes.¹ Existing in a larger time frame than most people's daily awareness, the archetypes of the collective unconscious apparently connect the past, present and future. Through practices like art, dream analysis, and active imagination—a deliberate technique for engaging with fantasy and inner imagery—individuals interact directly with these autonomous psychic contents as part of individuation, the lifelong psychological process of integrating conscious and unconscious elements to achieve wholeness.

Jung speaks to the arbitrary nature of the term collective unconscious. Towards the end of his career he writes that he rendered essentially spiritual ideas in scientific-sounding language for the sake of professional and societal legitimacy. So this, in a sense, makes him something of a postmodern thinker way before the term became popular.

Because he was, in part, doing a sell job, his insistence on the bio-genetic base of the collective unconscious seems confusing to some, especially when he says:

"The unconscious has no time. There is no trouble about time in the unconscious. Part of our psyche is not in time and not in space. They are only an illusion, time and space, and so in a certain part of our psyche, time does not exist at all."²

Could a timeless psyche be entirely biological? Perhaps Jung was saying that, although grounded in the body, the archetypes exhibit or resonate with a spiritual component. That is, a bio-genetic ground is necessary for the interplay of body and spirit.

What About Sigmund Freud and the Unconscious?

Freud and Jung’s views about the unconscious differ, but not so much as many believe. Some pop psychologists and New Age gurus quickly dismiss Freud’s ideas, unaware that his model of the unconscious also contains collective elements.

As we've seen in the above, Jung describes the archetype as a component of mankind’s psychological substratum—the collective unconscious. Freud similarly spoke of phylogenetic “schemata” and “prototypes.” And borrowing from ancient Greek and Jewish literature, Freud also devised the “Oedipus complex,” a “primal father” and likened the shadowy contents of the unconscious to archaeological ruins.

In addition, late in his career Freud revised his libido theory to include the general ideas of eros (life instinct) and thanatos (death instinct). Because Freud maintained that the fundamental aspects of the unconscious are universal, aspects of his model of the self, like Jung’s, point to a collective unconscious.³ And not only that. Freud, himself, said that Jung introduced nothing new with the idea of the collective unconscious. He wrote that the “content of the unconscious is collective anyhow.”⁴

Despite their overlapping recognition of a deep, shared psychic foundation, Freud and Jung famously suffered a bitter professional break around 1913. This parting of ways was heavily catalyzed by Jung’s rejection of Freud's strictly pansexual definition of the libido, alongside Jung's broader integration of teleological, religious, and mythological dimensions into his psychological framework.

The Lasting Legacy of a Shared Horizon

Ultimately, while Jung focused on universal archetypes and Freud remained anchored in the clinical framework of the personal unconscious—only occasionally gesturing toward shared prototypes—their historic divergence is clear. Yet that very tension highlights a shared fundamental intuition: both pioneers recognized that while individual life provides the immediate theater of our desires and conflicts, it operates against the backdrop of an ancient, shared human inheritance.

—

¹ Jung’s notion of the archetypes borrows from ideas previously found in anthropology, sociology, philosophy, religion and theology. The term archetype is traceable to St. Augustine, 354-430 CE.
² C. G. Jung Collected Works vol. 18, para. 684, cited in "Time and Space" at http://www.fundacion-jung.com.ar.
³ Michael V. Adams illustrates this point in The Cambridge Companion to Jung, (ed.) Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 101.
⁴ Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, p. 209, cited in R. J. Lifton with Eric Olson (eds.), Explorations in Psychohistory: The Wellfleet Papers, New York: Simon and Shuster, 1974 p. 90.