Jung's term for the shared layer of the psyche beneath the personal unconscious. While the personal unconscious contains individual memories, complexes, and repressed material, the collective unconscious contains the inherited structures of the psyche common to all human beings across all cultures: the archetypes. Jung distinguished the collective unconscious from the personal unconscious by noting that its contents were never individually acquired; they are the structural preconditions of the human psyche itself. In the 4th Tarot, every Major Arcana card is an encounter with a figure or force from the collective unconscious.
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Jungian Psychology
Collective Unconscious
Related concepts
universal patterns
archetypes
The Moon
shared psyche
ancestral memory
mythological themes
common humanity
objective psyche
More in Jungian Psychology
- Abraxas
- Acceptance of Evil
- Active Imagination
- Anima
- Animus
- Archetype
- Archetypes
- Compensation
- Complex
- Confrontation with the Unconscious
- Coniunctio
- Creatura
- Daimon
- Divine Child
- Ego
- Enantiodromia
- Eros
- Fantasy
- Forethinking
- God-Image
- Hero
- Individuation
- Inflation
- Integration
- Libido
- Logos
- Magic
- Mandala
- Mater Coelestis
- Nekyia
- Persona
- Phallos
- Philemon
- Pleroma
- Projection
- Quaternity
- Rebirth
- Sacrifice of the Hero
- Salome
- Self
- Shadow
- Spirit of the Depths
- Supreme Meaning
- Synchronicity
- The Irrational
- Transcendent Function
- Tree of Life
- Wise Old Man