Carl Gustav Jung's idea of the collective unconscious is first and foremost based on the ideas presented by Freud.
Freud suggested a triadic model of the subject which is composed of the ego, id
and super-ego. This structure is based on the distinction between the
conscious, unconscious and preconscious, known as Freud's topographical model
of the mind. Freud held that we take memories, fantasies and mental content
that we cannot cope with and divert them into the unconscious, a process he
termed as repression. Freud noted to levels of the unconscious, the universal
one –"phylogenies", and an individual one –"ontogenesis".
The universal unconscious contains inherited repressions which are termed by
Freud as "primary repression" which has according to him 3 main
fantasies: castigation, temptation and primal scene.
The
personal process of repression is termed by Freud as "secondary
repression" which exiles unpleasant thoughts to the unconscious, there
they do not vanish but rather become separated from the conscious level.
Repressed content reappears in a distorted and sublimated form in dreams,
jokes, slips of tongue and of course psychological pathology and neurosis.
Unlike
Freud, Carl Jung held that the unconscious has positive sides as well. Freud thought
that psychotherapy should discover repressed content in order to process it and
reconcile with it. Jung thought that the unconscious also has locked-away
"resources" that their discovery might aid in achieving mental
balance.
Dreams
were a central subject for dispute between Freud and Jung, a dispute which
eventually led them to break up their friendship. Freud did have some interest
in what he called Phylogenies and universal fantasies in order to interpret the
human psyche, but he was more focused on personal private content since his
theory revolved around the subject's relation with the other (object). Jung, on
the other hand, was more interested in the subject's relations with himself,
and this made him pose the idea of the Collective Unconscious at the center of
his psychoanalytic theory. Therefore,
for Jung and unlike Freud, dreams do not necessarily point to our relations
with the other but can also contain various aspects of our own psyche.
Repression, in other words, does not deny something about our relation with the
world, as Freud argued, but rather something about our relation with ourselves
that once freed can lead to mental harmony.
See also:
Jung's Books and Essays
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