The collective unconscious is a term that was introduced into psychology by a student and follower, and later opponent of Z. Freud, Karl Gustav Jung in the early twentieth century. According to the psychologist, human consciousness, which is an indispensable condition for its full, active existence, is only a small upper layer. Underneath is another, more extensive one, which contains forgotten or suppressed personal memories, feelings and patterns of behavior designated by Jung as a personal or individual unconscious. Under this second layer there is a vast and immeasurably more ancient layer, consisting of patterns of behavior and images that were formed and repeated many times in the process of cultural and historical development of all mankind. Jung designated this layer as a manifestation of an objective and collective soul, and later called it “collective unconscious”, because it consists of behavioral forms and images that are accessible to all living on earth, but not acquired by a person during his life, and it is impossible to embrace with consciousness.
The reason for this hypothesis was the observation of one patient in a psychiatric clinic. Exploring her painful fantasies and images of dreams, Jung discovered many parallels between them and the myths of various cultures and peoples that the patient never read and did not know. This could be explained only by the existence of a collective foundation of the soul, nourishing mythological images of man’s fantasies and dreams.
The unconscious in the human psyche was studied in ancient times. At the beginning of the 20th century, psychoanalysts Z. Freud, and then K.-G. Jung, dealt with this problem more deeply. They showed that the problem of the unconscious is very significant, that human-aware information is only a small part of the vast whole.
The unconscious in the human psyche is a combination of mental phenomena, patterns of behavior, conditions that are not amenable to understanding and control. These may be attitudes, instincts, unconscious drives, intuitive thinking, creative insight, hypnotic states or dreams, etc.
The theories of Freud and Jung, formed by them in the study of the unconscious and its role in human behavior, still remain the starting points in the study of this complex mental phenomenon.
Z. Freud singled out the three main sources of manifestation of the unconscious - dreams, neurosis and erroneous actions, for the study of which he used the method of free associations and analysis, which made it possible to identify the experiences hidden in the subconscious. What did Freud mean by each of the forms he singled out?
He believed that during sleep the control of human consciousness decreases and images that are blocked in the waking state break out of the unconscious sphere. Neurosis is the result of the destructive influence of foci concentrated in the subconscious, pushed out by the consciousness of traumatic situations that destroy the human psyche. Unpleasant situations displaced by consciousness, accompanying a person’s daily life and manifested in erroneous actions - typos, reservations, forgetting events and names, etc. lead to equally devastating consequences.
As already noted K.-G. Jung identified three levels of the human psyche: consciousness, personal and collective unconscious. The latter, in his opinion, is formed from the collective memory of all past generations of people. In the psyche of an individual personality, the collective unconscious manifests itself in the form of archetypes - common to all images and ideas, emotionally experienced by each individually.
Despite numerous studies of the nature of the unconscious, holistic, unifying theory of its mechanisms and structure, there is still no, which, undoubtedly, is connected with the complexity of studying this psychological and mental phenomenon.