-Jung had a dream that led him to his theory of the collective unconscious. He was in a house with many levels. Beginning with the Salon, in the style of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers, descending through the medieval ground floor, the Roman cellar and ending in a prehistoric cave. “The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene became. In the cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myself – a world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness”. (Jung, 19671, p. 160).
-Jung had begun noticing the difference between himself and Freud at this point and had been wrestling with a variety of questions on the matter: “On what premises is Freudian psychology founded? To what category of human thought does it belong? What is the relationship of its almost exclusive personalism to general historical assumptions?” (Jung, 1961, p. 161).
-This dream, seemingly spoke directly to those questions and others. “It obviously pointed to the foundations of cultural history – a history of successive layers of consciousness. My dream thus constituted a kind of structural diagram of the human psyche; it postulated something of an altogether impersonal nature underlying that psyche. It “clicked” as the English have it – and the dream became for me a guiding image which in the days to come was to be corroborated to an extent I could not at first suspect. It was my first inkling of a collective a priori beneath the personal psyche. This I first took to be the traces of earlier modes of functioning. Later, with increasing experience and on the basis of more reliable knowledge, I recognized them as forms of instinct, that is, as archetypes” (Jung, 1961, p. 161).
-This dream also inspired Jung to pick up his old interest in archeology. He began by reading about Babylonian excavations and dove headlong into books on myth, then onto Gnostism. One book in particular struck him: Friedrich Creuzer’s “Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Volker”. “It was as if I were beginning to treat and analyze all the centaurs, nymphs, gods, and goddesses in Creuzer’s book as though they were my patients. While thus occupied I could not help but discover the close relationship between ancient mythology and the psychology of primitives..” (Jumg, 1961, p. 162).
-While he was furiously studying mythologies he came upon a paper by a friend, Theodore Flournoy in the “Archives de Psychologie”. In it he describes one Miss Miller, an American. “I was immediately struck with the mythological character of the fantasies. They operated like a catalyst upon the stored-up and still disorderly ideas within me” (Jung, 1961, p.163).
-“The realization came to him that the imagery that his patients were finding welling up from their own psyches was precisely that with which the world of comparative mythologists and their history of religion studies were already familiar. The imagery of his patients’ fantasizing showed precise parallels to mythological themes. Jung then noticed that the parallels held true not only with psychotics but with neurotics and with relatively well-balanced people as well.
-This discovery impressed him tremendously and motivated him to immerse himself in the study of mythology” (Campbell, 2004, p. 86).
-“Mythological images are the images by which the consciousness is put in touch with the unconscious. That’s what they are. When you don’t have your mythological images, or when your consciousness rejects them for some reason or other, you are out of touch with your own deepest part. I think that’s the purpose of a mythology that we can live by. We have to find the one that we are in fact living by and know what it is so that we can direct our craft with competence” (Campbell, 2004, p.86).
-“Beneath the threshold of consciousness everything was seething with life” (Jung, 1961, p.178).
– “The concept of the archetype…is derived from the repeated observation that, for instance, the myths and fairytales of world literature contain definite motifs which crop up everywhere. We meet these same motifs in the fantasies, dreams, deliria, and delusions of individuals living today….They impress, influence and fascinate us. They have their origin in the archetype, which in itself is an irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can therefore manifest spontaneously anywhere, at any time” (Jung, 1971, p.392).
-“My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents” (Jung, 1971, p.60).
-“There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life. Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution, not in the form of images filled with content, but at first only as forms without content, representing merely the possibility of a certain type of perception or action. When a situation occurs which corresponds to a given archetype, that archetype becomes activated and a compulsiveness appears, which, like an instinctual drive, gains its way against all reason and will or else produces a conflict of pathological dimensions, that is to say, a neurosis” (Jung, 1971, p.66).
-“…the images arising from the a priori inherited foundations of the unconscious. These archetypes… the accumulated experiences of organic life in general, a million times repeated, and condensed into types. In these archetypes, therefore, all experiences are represented which have happened on this planet since primeval times. The more frequent and the more intense they were, the more clearly focused they became in the archetype. The archetype would thus be, to borrow from Kant, the noumenon of the image which intuition perceives and, in perceiving, creates” (Jung, 1971, p.260).
-“That this is so is immediately understandable when we consider that the unconscious, as the totality of all archetypes, is the deposit of all human experience right back to its remotest beginnings. Not, indeed, a dead deposit, a sort of abandoned rubbish-heap, but a living system of reactions and aptitudes that determine the individual’s life in invisible ways – all the more effective because invisible. It is not just a gigantic historical prejudice, so to speak, an a priori historical condition; it is also the source of the instincts, for the archetypes are simply the forms which the instincts assume” (Jung, 1971, p.44).
