Describe the Jungian concepts of the collective unconscious and the archetypes.
Carl Jung was once declared as the successor of Freud; however, their friendship soon disintegrated, and Carl Jung developed his own theory of analytical psychology. Jung was brought up in the northern Switzerland. He described his childhood as lonely, unhappy and isolated. His father was a cleric and had evidently lost his faith; hence, was always moody and annoying.
His father would often become very angry and this impacted Carl and his mother very badly. Because of the unbefitting behavior of his father, his mother suffered from emotional disorders. Just in a while, she would turn from a cheerful housewife to an unintelligible, mumbling demon. Later, Jung learned not to believe his parents and the other people in the world.
Later he became the president of the Psychoanalytic association. At the age of 38 he became emotionally distressed and was unable to carry on the intellectual work. He resolved these disorders by facing his own unconscious thoughts. The unconscious mind’s two levels were described by Jung. Underneath the conscious awareness of our mind, lies the personal consciousness.
It consists of impulses, memories, wishes and faint perceptions along with other incidents that have occurred in an individual’s life that has been forgotten or has been suppressed. This tier of insensibility does not deal with great depth. Episodes form the personal unconsciousness can simply be recollected to the conscious awareness. The incidents present within the level of personal unconsciousness are clustered into the complexes.
These complexes are the system of memories and emotions with the regular themes. Beneath the tier of personal unconscious lies the collective unconscious, with which the person is unfamiliar. It consists of the collective experiences of the past generations, which include our animal ancestors as well. Such evolutionary and universal experiences provide a scaffold for providing shape to our personality.