What Was The Beguiling Spell Of Jung�s �Collective Unconscious�
by Antonio Melechi
The first decades of the 20th century saw a raft of psychological terms fall into popular
usage.
Freudian notions of �denial� and �displacement�, �projection� and �transference�, were
the first to become part of everyday language; thanks to Alfred Adler, feelings of �inferiority�
and �superiority� (and the forms of compensation that accompanied the former) were soon common
parlance; and courtesy of Carl Jung�s Psychological Types(1921), more than a few educated men
and women in public began to identify themselves as �extraverts� or �introverts�, while
examining the �complexes� that inhibited them.
Another aspect of Jungian theory, barely touched upon in Psychological Types, was destined
to cast a longer and more beguiling spell on popular psychology.
�The collective unconscious,� wrote Jung in his essay �The Structure of the Psyche�
(1927), �appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images � In fact, the
whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious.�
The archetypes that Jung initially had in mind were essentially sub-personalities of
the ego � the persona (a people-pleasing mask) was juxtaposed against the shadow (the
negative qualities hidden by the persona); the anima was the male sexual essence, versus
animus, for females.
Over the course of four decades, this therapeutic symbolism would expand to include mandalas
(expressions of the �the specific centre of the personality�) and UFOs (a fantasy
that swapped heaven for interstellar space).
To ignore these powerful archetypal symbols was, in Jung�s mind, �to rob the individual
of his roots and guiding instincts�, to let her become a mere �particle in the mass�.
According to Jung, his �discovery� of a collective unconscious began in 1910, shortly
after he had left his post at the Burgh�lzli Hospital in Z�rich and set up private practice
in K�snacht, on the edge of Lake Z�rich.
The catalyst was a passage from Albrecht Dieterich�s 1910 translation of the Mithras Liturgy, which
described the wind as emanating from a pipe or tube hanging from the Sun.
The image was uncannily familiar to Jung.
A few years earlier, a patient at the Burgh�lzli Hospital had, Jung recalled, taken him to
one side, pointing out how the Sun had a phallus that was responsible for the movements of
the wind.
Since Dieterich�s account of the solar myth had only just been published, there was, to
Jung�s mind, no ready explanation of the corresponding symbolism.
The patient�s hallucination had sprung from �the impersonal layer in our psyche�,
a collective unconscious that, �independently of tradition, guarantee[d] in every single
individual a similarity and even sameness of experience�.
This was a shaggy-dog story that Jung recycled throughout his life, defending it as late
as 1959, for the benefit of the BBC cameras that assembled in the study of his K�snacht
home.
In truth, Jung had actually never met the patient in question.
To study the �impersonal layer in our psyche� he had, towards the end of 1909, commissioned
three psychiatric assistants to read Friedrich Creuzer�s seminal study of the mythology
of the mystery cults, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volk�r (1810-1812), asking them
to collect material from Burgh�lzli patients that seemed in any way consonant with its
ancient rites.
The solar hallucination that so excited Jung was reported to him only a few months afterwards,
which is to say that it was doctored proof of the collective unconscious.
Alongside the story of the legend of the so-called Solar Phallus Man, there was a second version
of Jung�s �first inkling� of a realm beyond the �egotistical bundle of personal
wishes, fears, hopes, and ambitions� associated with the Freudian unconscious.
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961), Jung described a troubling dream in which he entered
the cellar of a house and discovered scattered bones, broken pottery and two human skulls.
It was this dream from early 1909 that sowed the seeds of his eventual apostasy from the
psychoanalytic movement, nudging Jung towards the study of archaeology and mythology.
The catalogue of myths and archetypes that Jung went on to identify as the core of the
collective unconscious were drawn from other dreams, from �active� reveries and a host
of feverish interpolations of gnostic and alchemical texts � all of which he, somewhat
oddly, described as �empirical� in nature.
The idea of the collective unconscious itself, however, was not Jung�s own: it belonged
to the intellectual ether of late 19th-century Germany, and would have been familiar to many
from the work of Adolf Bastian, a widely travelled anthropologist who had, as early as 1868,
recognised the universality of certain myths and customs, invoking them as evidence of
the �psychic unity of mankind�.
The Jungian notion of myths and archetypes as projections of a collective unconscious
rebounded through 20th-century psychiatry and literature, philosophy and theology.
Underpinning Joseph Campbell�s immensely popular study of comparative mythology, The
Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Jung�s mythopoetics of the unconscious soon became
a staple in the New Age curriculum of mind-expansion, with Aldous Huxley pronouncing the �The
Far West of the collective unconscious, with its flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal
archetypes� as the world-soul that mescaline and LSD had ushered him into.
Others concurred.
Through meditation, hypnosis, flicker machines and shamanic rites, it was, apparently, possible
to become more intimate with one�s anima or animus, to connect with the whirligig of
healing symbols or, following the poet Robert Bly�s Iron John (1990), recover a lost masculine
identity.
The limitations of the collective unconscious were not lost on American folklorists, many
of whom had been quick to call out Jung�s plundering of world mythology, religion and
alchemy for its �racial mysticism� and �arrogant ethnocentrism�.
Yet, inevitably enough, Jungian symbolism would, like psychoanalysis and scientology,
also come to minister to Hollywood�s very own storytellers, offering creative tools
and exercises for stymied actors, blocked writers and studio executives on their search
for the green light and red carpet.
Perhaps not what Jung had in mind when promoting communion with the collective unconscious
to bring the spiritually beleaguered into �indissoluble communion with the world at
large�, but everything one might expect from the Tinseltown remake.
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