Carl Jung on the Group Experience and Personal Transformation

If any considerable group of persons are united and identified with one another by a particular frame of mind, the resultant transformation experience bears only a very remote resemblance to the experience of individual transformation.

A group experience takes place on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual.

This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the group is below the level of the individual psyche.

If it is a very large group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal . . . .

. . . The group experience goes no deeper than the level of one’s own mind in that state. It does work a change in you, but the change does not last. ~Carl Jung