Jung

The Structure of the Psyche

…I would like to emphasize that we must distinguish three psychic levels: (1) consciousness, (2) the personal unconscious, and (3) the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious consists firstly of all those contents that became unconscious either because they lost their intensity and were forgotten or because consciousness was withdrawn from them (repression), and secondly of contents, some of them sense-impressions, which never had sufficient intensity to reach consciousness but have somehow entered the psyche. The collective unconscious, however, as the ancestral heritage of possibilities of representation, is not individual but common to all men, and perhaps even to all animals, and is the true basis of the individual psyche.

[The psyche’s] peculiar organization must be intimately connected with environmental conditions. We should expect consciousness to react and adapt itself to the present, because it is that part of the psyche which is concerned chiefly with the events of the moment. But from the collective unconscious, as a timeless and universal psyche, we should expect reactions to universal and constant conditions, whether psychological, physiological, or physical.

…the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious.

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Just as the living body with its special characteristics is a system of functions for adapting to environmental conditions, so the psyche must exhibit organs or functional systems that correspond to regular physical events.

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Mighty ancestor spirits or gods dwell in the man of importance; deadly fetish-power resides in anyone strange or extraordinary. Sickness and death are never due to natural causes, but are invariably caused by spirits, witches, or wizards. Even the weapon that has killed a man is mana, endowed with extraordinary power.

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…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.

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These things seem very remote to our modern, “enlightened” eyes. When I speak of this hinterland of the mind, the unconscious, and compare its reality with that of the real world, I often meet with an incredulous smile. But then I must ask how many people there are in our civilized world who still believe in mana and spirits and such like theories – in other words, how many millions of Christian Scientists and spiritualists are there? I will not add to this list of questions. They are merely intended to illustrate the fact that the problem of invisible psychic determinants is as alive today as it ever was.

The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual.

…it is the function of consciousness not only to reorganize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us.

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