The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
The core theoretical statement on archetype, anima and the collective layer of the psyche.
This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the term 'collective' because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal.
Published in 1959 as the first part of Volume 9 of the Collected Works, this book gathers Jung's central papers on the archetypes and the layer of the psyche he held to be inherited rather than acquired. It argues that beneath the personal unconscious lies a common substrate whose contents, the archetypes, are inborn forms that shape how images, figures and situations recur across dreams, myth and religion. For the clinician, the value is practical. The book supplies a vocabulary for the material a patient brings: the mother in her nurturing and devouring aspects, the child and the maiden, rebirth, the trickster and the spirit. Jung treats such figures as structuring patterns rather than personal invention, so a recurring dream image can be read as an expression of a wider form. The closing studies on mandala symbolism show him tracking these patterns in patients' own drawings.
About the author
Carl Gustav Jung
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. He worked closely with Sigmund Freud in the early years of the psychoanalytic movement before breaking with him in 1913 over the nature of the libido and the unconscious. Jung's work posits a collective unconscious populated by archetypes, and frames individuation as the lifelong integration of the psyche. He also distinguished psychological types along the introversion and extraversion axis. He practised and wrote in Zurich until his death in 1961.
Details
- 1959
- 1959
- German
- R. F. C. Hull
- Princeton University Press
- Princeton University Press, 1959
- 552
- 9780691097619