ARCHAIC MEMORIES AS SEEN BY FREUD AND JUNG

Every so often someone claims that Jung discovered the "collective unconscious." I'm afraid that claim does not stand up to close scrutiny. As early as in "The Interpretation of Dreams" of 1900, (1) Freud observed that dreams may contain ancient motifs that do not refer to events in a patient's personal past, but rather appear to be about situations that must have occurred in mankind's distant, primeval past. (2) He did not, however, coin the phrase "the collective unconscious," and he would only broach such archaic material once he had dealt with a patient's personal past, including memories that had been repressed. Nor did he regard such material as being of a mystical nature.

In that respect, i.e. about mysticism, Jung had rather a different approach. Almost right from the start this son of a Protestant pastor would encourage his patients to tell him about the unusual visions they had seen in their dreams. He called these visions the archetypes, and he said that they derived from mankind's ancient past - hence his well-known saying that we all have a million-year-old man in out head. He called this the collective unconscious, and my impression, after many years of reading Jung, is that he considered the collective material to virtually hang in the air like pollen in spring. I use that rather unusual description because, much more so that Freud, he believed that there was a synchronistic ot telepathic tendency for whole groups of people to simultaneously be affected by the material of the collective unconscious.

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1. In "Freud: The Mind of the Moralist" Professor Philip Rieff called Freud's opus "the masterwork of the 20th Century."  The collected works of both Freud and Jung are vast and take many years to read and grasp.  During my student years they were only superficially discussed, and to my mind UNISA made a colossal mistake by suggesting that Skinner (think Behaviorism) would become more important than Freud. I might add, perhaps, that my familiarity with Freud and Jung;s works goes back to the 1970s. My own personal analysis lasted just over two years.

2. Particularly so in "Totem and Taboo."

 


 

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