^^^^^^^^^^
Sounds like hooey to me, but that’s Jung for you.
Jung, like Freud, has a lot that makes you go “Wow, that’s pretty insightful” followed by a lot that makes you go, “What the HELL?”
One of keys of understanding Jung that makes Jungian psychology palatable to the modern scientific mindset is that Jung takes human experiences which are ordinarily not considered the realm of psychology and translates them into psychological constructs, so that they can be dealt with within the psychological framework.
E.g., take God. Most humans recount that they have some sort of spiritual encounter with God or a higher power. Now, how is a psychologist supposed to deal with that? To talk about God is to talk about an entity that can not be scientifically measured. And so Jung says, “Let’s not talk about God as if we presume he actually exists, but, instead, let’s talk about your internal reaction to the psychological construct you use in your mind to represent God.” This psychological construct is called an archetype. And in the case of God, this archetype is called the imago Dei (i.e., image of God).
And so, a psychologist can now deal with a person’s imago Dei archetype scientifically. Is the archetype showing up in dreams? Is the imago Dei causing the person to live in fear of judgment, or is it a source of courage and affirmation? In this way, the Jungian psychologist can deal with a person’s metaphysical issues without presuming the cosmic truth or falsity of that metaphysical reality (or non-reality).
In the same way, the collecive unconscious is a Jungian way to deal with what today’s scientists recognize as our primitive reptilian wiring. E.g., fear of snakes and insects, revulsion to decay, attachment to mom (and all things maternal), sexual appetites, competition and establishment of social hierarchies. These are all complex social instincts wired into our deep brain that we have little conscious control over.
However, these impulses are there, and they affect us behaviorally, coginitively (the way we think), and affectively (emotionally). So, how is a psychologist supposed to help someone obsessed over what people think of him? Getting at the collective unconscious’s archetype of the bully might help (the bully is the alpha-male who controls through intimidation). Or maybe a mythological story of the rejected misfit of the tribe who winds up saving the village might help. These are archetypal patterns of the mind that deal with the instictive drive to belong to the pack and determine one’s place within the hierarchy.
And so, the collective conscious is simply our psychological construct for dealing with the metaphysical and biological issues which all humans deal with.
Peace.
i understand the jungian approach, but want to know its validity. i remember reading/hearing/seeing some study on monkeys wherein the monkeys were on different islands(isolatedly), but, somehow, once a group of monkeys on one island figured otu how to get a certain food in a certain manner, all the others did, too.
This is not a valid experiment; all it would show is that monkeys take roughly the same amount of time to figure out how to get food.
Well there’s a coincidence: I mentioned the monkey story only yesterday. It’s a load of crap.
moriah, I appreciate your very logical way of explaining Jungian analysis. I’ve never read Jung. However, a lot of stuff I’ve read about Jung, particularly the writings of Colin Wilson, make out that the collective unconscious is way more full of archetypes than the reptilian brain, a lot of which are modern - i.e. the only way of them getting there is through some ‘morphic resonance’. Which (IMO) would make the concept bunk until we have evidence otherwise.
Is this unfair to Jung, or does he actually claim more for the CU than you are doing here?
Is there any connection between the “collective unconscious” and the “meme” theory?
The way I’ve understoon a “meme”, is that it’s basically a piece of information passed from one to another.
What is “the meme theory” you speak of?
Images in the collective archetype-plex were unavailable for comment.
Dopers continue to demand explanation.
Well, with respect to God, Jung was a believer, but he used the archetype of God to deal with the idea of God and its effects on the psyche to avoid the metaphysical assumption of God’s existence.
When Jung was dealing with the CU, I don’t think he knew he was tapping into the instinctual hardwiring of the brain. He saw that people, over and over again, shared common archetypes that popped up from ‘nowhere.’ All his talk of the UC seems to imply the existence of mystical metaphysical reality of a common pool of archetypes that exist ‘out there’ somewhere in which all humans can and do tap into. He perhaps believed that, but his psychological framework of ‘archetype’ enabled him to deal with these presenting images without actually making that metaphysical claim, and thus preserve the veneer of scientific scrutiny.
It is my interpratation that Jung’s CU is tapping into a reality that biological, sociological, and genetic research has uncovered, namely the complex social instincts that humans have (and share somewhat with other mammals, reptiles, and birds).
I’m not familiar with Wilson’s interpretation of Jung. I hope this answered your question.
Peace.
Regarding OP: When a group of friends and I go out for a night of hard drinking we often experience a bout of collective unconciousness afterward.