The collective unconscious: what Jung claimed, and what his evidence supports

The collective unconscious is Carl Jung's name for the deepest layer of the unconscious. He claimed that its contents are inborn and shared by all humans. He called its patterns archetypes.

• The collective unconscious holds archetypes, not memories from your own life.
• The personal unconscious holds forgotten, repressed and subliminal material from your own life.
• Jung described archetypes as inborn ways to perceive, like instincts are inborn ways to act.
• His best-known case has a flaw: the man may have learned the old image without knowing it.
• A Swiss test with 402 students found better recall for matching symbol-word pairs, but it cannot separate nature from culture.
• Even Jungian researchers now say that the genetic claim has no firm basis.

What the collective unconscious is

Jung compared archetypes with instincts. An instinct is an inborn way to act. An archetype, for Jung, is an inborn way to perceive and grasp an object. In his book Psychological Types from 1921 he defines the archetype as the inborn way to grasp an object, as opposed to instinct as the inborn way to act.

The collective unconscious is the layer where these archetypes lie. The APA Dictionary of Psychology calls it the deepest and least accessible part of the unconscious.

The words came one after another. In his 1912 book Transformations and Symbols of the Libido Jung spoke of primordial images, a term he took from the historian Jacob Burckhardt. Jung first used the word archetype in 1919, in his paper Instinct and the Unconscious in the British Journal of Psychology. In Psychological Types he also equated the collective unconscious with what the zoologist Richard Semon called Mneme. That equation matters for the inheritance question below.

Personal and collective unconscious: the difference

Jung split the unconscious into two layers. The personal unconscious holds what you forgot, what you repressed, what you perceived without noticing, and complexes. The collective unconscious, for Jung, is the deep base of all consciousness and holds inherited possibilities of psychic function.

The APA Dictionary adds that part of the personal unconscious can return to consciousness, like Freud's preconscious. Other parts stay truly unconscious. Freud had two models of his own: the early one from The Interpretation of Dreams and the structural model. Our article on Freud's id, ego and superego explains both.

One difference gets lost in many summaries. You can test the personal unconscious in principle, because you can ask after the origin of a memory. With the collective unconscious that is hard. Jung had to show that an image did not come from the person's own life. The whole theory hangs on that point, as the sections on his key case show.

Archetypes: what Jung meant

An archetype, for Jung, is not a ready image. It is a pattern that orders images. The archetype itself has no pictorial content. It works like a formal factor, and culture and the person supply the images. Jung stresses this formal point in Psychological Types.

The best-known archetypes, as the APA Dictionary lists them:

• Shadow: the darker side of the psyche, all that the conscious self cannot accept. It can be a trait, a wish or a feeling, even a positive one.
• Persona: the public face a person shows to the world. The word comes from the mask of actors in ancient Rome.
• Anima and animus: archetypes of general female and male traits, or the unconscious female side in a man and the unconscious male side in a woman.
• Further APA examples are a highest being and the hero.

Where the 12 archetypes come from

Many pages list 12 archetypes after Jung: warrior, sage, jester, ruler and so on. That list of twelve does not come from Jung. It comes from the US author Carol S. Pearson. On her website she writes that she first built a model with six archetypes in The Hero Within. In Awakening the Heroes Within she grew it to twelve. Her Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator rests on that model. Pearson refers to Jung, but also to James Hillman, Joseph Campbell and Erik Erikson. If you take an archetype test, you test Pearson's model, not Jung's theory.

What was supposed to be inherited: images or only forms

The inheritance question is the core of the theory, and Jung did not always answer it the same way. In 1921 his answer sounds like a theory of inherited memory. In Psychological Types he writes about archetypes, in own translation from the German:

In the definitions chapter Jung calls the primordial image a memory precipitate, an engram after Semon. An engram, for Semon, is a memory trace. Semon held a special idea: memory and heredity should work by the same mechanism. Memory researchers Daniel Schacter, James Eich and Endel Tulving called that identity of Semon his decisive scientific error. It led him to the doctrine of inheritance of acquired traits. If you follow Jung's 1921 wording, you follow a heredity doctrine that was already sharply criticised in Semon's lifetime.

Later Jung wrote more carefully. In his paper on the psychological aspects of the mother archetype, now in volume 9/1 of the Collected Works, he calls archetypes empty and purely formal, an a priori given possibility of imagination. After this version the images themselves are not inherited. A 2013 study quotes these passages from the English edition. The German Dorsch lexicon follows this late version: the forms of archetypal ideas, not their content, can be inherited.

The APA Dictionary follows the early Jung instead. There the collective unconscious holds the inherited accumulation of primordial human experience in the form of ideas and images. The two lexicons thus describe two versions of the same theory. For an exam say which Jung you mean. The Jung of 1921 spoke of inherited experiences, the later Jung only of inherited forms.

Jung's best-known case: the patient with the sun phallus

Jung looked for cases where a person makes an image from an old myth that the person could not know. The best-known case is a patient of the Zurich clinic Burgholzli. Jung describes him in 1912 in Transformations and Symbols of the Libido on page 94, in own translation from the German:

Paranoid dementia is an old name for a psychosis. Jung found the parallel in a magic papyrus from the early fourth century, now in Paris. The philologist and historian of religion Albrecht Dieterich had published the text as Mithrasliturgie and translated it into German. Jung quotes Dieterich's translation: from the sun the so-called tube, the origin of the working wind, becomes visible, like a hanging tube.

Two details in Jung's 1912 text read differently in later retellings:

1. 1.Honegger found the delusion, after Jung's own wording, not Jung. The Jungian Christian Roesler writes in 2012 that the patient told Jung about it and Jung had just translated the old text. Jung himself only writes that he got to know the visions of the Mithras liturgy.
2. 2.Jung cites in his notes Dieterich: Eine Mithrasliturgie, 1910. That is the second edition. The first edition came out in 1903 with Teubner in Leipzig, with the same German translation of the tube passage. A review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review also names 1903 as the year.

For Jung the case stayed important. In 1921 he refers in Psychological Types to exactly that page and calls it a remarkable example of an archaic image. Roesler calls it the most important case for Jung's path to the archetype. The historian Sonu Shamdasani stresses instead that the case carried the burden of proof together with other figures. In a letter he also points to a BBC interview from 1959. Asked after the turning point of his thought, Jung first named a trip to Washington. There he had studied the dreams of Black psychiatric patients in a clinic. Already in 1921 Jung claimed that he had found motifs of Greek mythology in the dreams and fantasies of Black psychiatric patients. He used a racist term of his time.

The cryptomnesia problem

A myth image in a dream or in a delusion proves something inherited only if the person never saw, read or heard the motif. Else the person may remember without knowing it. That phenomenon has the name cryptomnesia. Jung knew it well. In his doctoral thesis from 1902 he describes it as a memory image that returns without recognition as memory. He adds, in own translation:

For his theory Jung thus had to show for each case that no cryptomnesia lay behind it. Roesler writes in his 2012 paper that Jung had to claim for all cases that the person had not known the image before. He could prove it naturally not in each case. With the sun-phallus patient the years show the problem. Dieterich's translation stood in print since 1903. What the patient had read or heard before his illness does not follow from Jung's text. With the year alone you cannot exclude cryptomnesia.

Roesler names a second objection from Raya Jones in 2007. If the fantasy were truly archetypal, it should occur much more often than in one patient and in one old text.

Do experiments show it: what the memory test found

Tests of the collective unconscious are rare. The team around Milena Sotirova-Kohli writes this in its 2013 study. The study repeats a 1991 test that a US team around David Rosen had built. The idea: if a symbol has an inborn meaning, you learn the symbol with that meaning more easily than with another.

In Rosen's test the subjects could not consciously name the archetypal meaning of the symbols. They still learned pairs of a symbol and a fitting word better than pairs with a strange word. Sotirova-Kohli and her team tested this with a German version of the words on 402 students from German-speaking Switzerland. The subjects learned pairs of a symbol and a word like ascent or soul. Later they had to give the words back.

The difference was clear in statistical terms, and it stayed when the pairs were taken out that subjects already knew. The authors read it as a hint at a universal nature of archetypes. They also name limits. German and English are closely related languages, and a test in Japanese, Chinese, Turkish or Arabic is missing. Some pairs were known cultural symbols. And a reviewer asked whether some words simply describe what the symbol looks like.

A further limit follows from the design. The subjects were students from one European culture. If they learn a symbol with its traditional meaning more easily, that fits an inborn meaning. It fits just as well a meaning they learned in their culture without remembering it. The test cannot split these two explanations.

Therapy that rests on Jung's theory also has thin data. The Dorsch lexicon writes in its analytical psychology entry that clear proof of effect has been given in remarkably small amount so far.

What criticism says today

Clear criticism comes from Jungian research itself. Christian Roesler is a Jungian and works in Freiburg. In his 2012 paper in the Journal of Analytical Psychology he tests the inheritance claim with the knowledge of genetics. His result: there is still no firm scientific basis for one claim. The claim is that complex symbolic patterns like the hero myth pass in a way that each human can reach them.

Roesler rests on epigenetics. After that field genes do not work like a fixed blueprint. The environment switches them on and off, above all through experiences with the first caregivers. From that Roesler concludes that universal patterns can no longer rest on genetics. He asks whether archetypes pass much more through culture and upbringing, through story traditions and religious forms. He closes:

In 2023 Roesler went further. After the description of his book Deconstructing Archetype Theory, Jung's doctrine is not one theory but four: a biological, an anthropological, a transcendental and a psychological one. The book tests the claims of the theory with knowledge from biology, anthropology, and myth research. His conclusion: these claims lack support and should be dropped. He keeps only one part: Jung's description of a general process of psychic change, as a map for psychotherapy.

Jung and Freud: who believed in inherited contents

People often explain the split like this: Freud knew only the personal unconscious, Jung added the collective one. That holds for the build of the theories. For inheritance it is too simple. Freud wrote in 1939 in Moses and Monotheism, in own translation from the German:

Freud knew that the biology of his time would know nothing of inheritance of acquired traits. He held to it anyway. With that Freud in 1939 went further than the late Jung, who held only forms for inherited. The difference lies elsewhere. Freud thought of memory traces of fixed events, like a primal patricide. Jung thought of a general layer of patterns, laid out the same in all humans.

Telling the terms apart

Around the collective unconscious several terms mix easily. Jung and Freud write of the unconscious. The word subconscious is popular, but it is no technical term, as our article on psychology terms that shift between English and German shows. Jung's school has the name analytical psychology. That is not the same as analytic psychotherapy, one of the licensed procedures in Germany, which comes from the psychoanalytic tradition and which our article on therapy approaches explained lists. And the archetype itself, for Jung, stays unseen. Seen are only the archetypal images of a culture.

Collective unconscious, personal unconscious, archetype, archetypal image, persona, shadow and cryptomnesia come from the same theory, and in an exam you mix them easily. Psychology World is a dictionary app with more than 18,000 psychology terms. You can save terms like these in one list. Then you drill the list as flashcards, as multiple choice or by typing. The multiple-choice mode needs a list with at least four words. How to memorise psychology terms explains which study methods hold the strongest proof.