The collective unconscious: is it shared or copied?
Posted: Sat Feb 27, 2021 12:46 pm
I'm reading Decoding Jung's Metaphysics. Very interesting so far.
Regarding the collective unconscious, it is not clear to me whether Jung regarded it as a single mental domain that we all share, or an individual mental faculty that is merely a close or near identical copy of that possessed by other human beings. I am also not sure if it is regarded as a mutable mental feature, and whether it is mutable over the course of a lifetime or across the timescale of evolution.
In Christopher M. Bache's book, "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven", he describes psychedelic trips involving (laborious and painful) healing of the "collective unconscious of humanity", which he clearly regarded as work that benefited everyone (therefore involving modifying a shared mental faculty). I find the concept of this kind of mutable, shared, collective unconscious hard to reconcile with my understanding of Bernardo's philosophy. Some types of brain activity are the partial image ego, but where is there a candidate for partial image of the shared, collective human subconscious? What boundary would prevent it being shared by all beings, not just humans? The partial image of the boundary that prevents our personal ego being shared by all beings is our skin. I can't imagine what would correspond to the boundary of a shared, collective human subconscious.
Discussion of archetypes and the collective unconscious in Decoding Jung's Metaphysics chapter 3 suggests that Jung did not view the collective unconscious as an actually shared, mutable mental faculty. Eg "As our common inheritance, they [archetypes] largely define our humanity" (p34), in which case there is no issue, though this isn't the understanding of Jung's collective unconscious that I had gleaned from previous (limited) exposure to his work.
Regarding the collective unconscious, it is not clear to me whether Jung regarded it as a single mental domain that we all share, or an individual mental faculty that is merely a close or near identical copy of that possessed by other human beings. I am also not sure if it is regarded as a mutable mental feature, and whether it is mutable over the course of a lifetime or across the timescale of evolution.
In Christopher M. Bache's book, "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven", he describes psychedelic trips involving (laborious and painful) healing of the "collective unconscious of humanity", which he clearly regarded as work that benefited everyone (therefore involving modifying a shared mental faculty). I find the concept of this kind of mutable, shared, collective unconscious hard to reconcile with my understanding of Bernardo's philosophy. Some types of brain activity are the partial image ego, but where is there a candidate for partial image of the shared, collective human subconscious? What boundary would prevent it being shared by all beings, not just humans? The partial image of the boundary that prevents our personal ego being shared by all beings is our skin. I can't imagine what would correspond to the boundary of a shared, collective human subconscious.
Discussion of archetypes and the collective unconscious in Decoding Jung's Metaphysics chapter 3 suggests that Jung did not view the collective unconscious as an actually shared, mutable mental faculty. Eg "As our common inheritance, they [archetypes] largely define our humanity" (p34), in which case there is no issue, though this isn't the understanding of Jung's collective unconscious that I had gleaned from previous (limited) exposure to his work.