The Collective Unconscious, Instinct and Archetype, and Archetypal Images for the Theory of Synchronicity
Jung’s project on synchronicity as a meaningful coincidence dates from 1925 to 1939 during which he opened a series of seminars at the Psychological Club in Zurich.
It is from this period that his theory of synchronicity becomes a major part of his analytical psychology, even though he only first publishes his essay On Synchronicity in 1951 and then revises it in 1952 with the name Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle.
With the notion of synchronicity, Jung attempts to show the archetypal process of the human psyche, which is driven from the a-priori form or primordial image deeply rooted in human unconsciousness.
Jung argues that the depth of the psyche is closely associated with an outer event through the synchronistic moment.
He maintains the following in his essay on Synchronicity:
If, therefore, we entertain the hypothesis that one and the same (transcendental) meaning might manifest itself simultaneously in the human psyche and in the arrangement of an external and independent event, we at once come into conflict with the convention of all scientific and epistemological views… Synchronicity postulates a meaning which is a priori in relation to human consciousness and apparently exists outside man.
Jung focuses on the non-causal dimension of the human experience irreducible to the cause-effect system of mind and nature.
Jung argues that the correspondence of the inner psyche to the outer event is performed by the archetypal representation derived from the collective unconscious, which is beyond the individual self.
Therefore, the synchronistic phenomenon cannot be properly described by the causal relation between mind and nature according to traditionally-Western logical reasoning.
Jung’s notion of synchronicity is based on the concepts of collective unconsciousness, which is composed of instinct and archetype and the archetypal image; these elements are correlative with one another for the whole scheme of his psychology.
According to Jung, collective unconsciousness refers to the deepest layer of the human psyche.
It is given by birth and greatly influences one’s psyche in various ways without being recognized by one’s consciousness.
Jung distinguishes this collective area of the unconscious from the personal dimension of the unconscious.
The former, the “collective unconscious,” is shaped a priori and reveals universal phenomena throughout all humankind beyond time and space.
The latter, based on particular experiences of individuals, refers to a dim state of the personal psyche (or memories), which have disappeared from ego-consciousness by being repressed and forgotten.
Jung calls this “the personal unconscious.”
Although “collective” and “personal” are easily distinguished in their definitions, those two words convey a complex of meanings in describing the unconscious aspects of human experience.
The notion of “the unconscious” indicates an obscure phenomenon not grasped in any conscious knowledge, so that it is very difficult to be described in a linguistic manner.
In other words, whether the unconscious is the personal or the collective is not clearly distinct in our psychic experience.
From this meaning structure of the unconscious, Jung presents the concept of collective unconscious in an attempt to distinguish himself from Sigmund Freud and to establish his own psychological system.
Jung writes the following about Freud’s description of the unconscious:
In Freud’s view, as most people know, the contents of the unconscious are reducible to infantile tendencies which are repressed because of their incompatible character. Repression is a process that begins in early childhood under the moral influence of the environment and continues throughout life. By means of analysis the repressions are removed and the repressed wishes made conscious.
Thus does Jung see Freud’s notion of the unconscious including the process of repression by the ego-consciousness.
In a conflict between one’s situational limitation and infantile wishes, the repressed psychic contents remain unconscious, a situation which can also bring forth various types of symptoms and neuroses in the process of one’s wish-fulfillment.
By regarding this Freudian notion of the unconscious as only part of what makes up the unconscious, Jung seeks to extend its meaning:
According to this [Freud’s] theory, the unconscious contains only those parts of the personality which could just as well be conscious, and have been suppressed only through the process of education. Although from one point of view the infantile tendencies of the unconscious are the most conspicuous, it would nonetheless be a mistake to define or evaluate the unconscious entirely in these terms. The unconscious has still another side to it: it includes not only repressed contents, but all psychic material that lies below the threshold of consciousness.
Jung turns around the relation between the conscious and the unconscious through his criticism of Freud.
He maintains that the realm of the unconscious does not originate in the deposit repressed from the conscious but rather the conscious sprouts from the unconscious.
Of course, this turning point does not suggest Jung’s overall denial of Freud’s notion of the unconscious.
Jung is greatly influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytical method and develops his major psychological concepts within the context of his discussion about Freud, who elaborated the correlation between ego-consciousness and unconsciousness in a scientific manner.
Jung affirms and advances Freud’s idea that the unconscious emerges in person’s fantasy, lapse of memory, neurosis, and symptoms, the expressions of which also appear in the person’s dreams.
Yet, Jung’s dissatisfaction with Freud’s method occurs at the point where Freud reduces all the sources of the unconscious to the contents of the infantile wish repressed from the conscious and focuses on those contents in terms of the instinctual drive.
It is from this criticism that Jung posits the presence of the unconscious that encompasses the deeper level of the human psyche, which Jung calls the collective unconscious.
The psychic contents of the collective unconscious are based upon non-sensory perceptions.
Jung’s collective unconsciousness includes archaic vestiges inherited from ancestral experiences and thus directly unknown to the percipient’s experience.
Jung differentiates the collective from the personal unconscious as follows:
The collective unconscious is a part of the psyche which can be negatively distinguished from a personal unconscious by the fact that it does not, like the latter, owe its existence to personal experience and consequently is not a personal acquisition. While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity.
Jung’s exploration of the psychical dimension outside the phenomenal world limited in time and space is based on his assumption of the collective unconscious.
According to Jung, the scope of consciousness is narrow in comparison with that of unconsciousness.
Human consciousness functions simply with some contents in a given situation but does not embrace the whole feature of the psyche.
These contents of the collective unconscious are commonly found at a deep level of the psyche throughout all of humankind.
The contents of the collective unconscious, therefore, become the source of the production of mythical and religious motifs with the non-rational dimension of the human experience.
Jung attempts to derive the concrete and immediate features of the psyche from the notion of the collective unconscious.
From his perspective, rationality results from the process of abstract reasoning from psychic data grasped in consciousness.
Jung introduces and employs the concepts of the collective unconscious in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido in 1912 (translated as The Psychology of the Unconscious), which is later revised under the title Symbole der Wandlung in 1952 (Symbols of Transformation).
According to Jung,
Creative fantasy is continually engaged in producing analogies to instinctual processes in order to free the libido from sheer instinctuality by guiding it toward analogical ideas… The libido has, as it were, a natural penchant: it is like water, which must have a gradient if it is to flow. The nature of these analogies is therefore a serious problem because, as we have said, they must be ideas which attract the libido. Their special character is, I believe, to be discerned in the fact that they are archetypes, that is, universal and inherited patterns which, taken together, constitute the structure of the unconscious.
By using the metaphor “water” for the flow of libido, Jung brings the character of perceptual direction to the psychic structure.
Libido is the energy producing the psychic quality that transmits the unconscious contents (such as creative fantasy or imagination) into the conscious.
This process of libido is not developed simply in a repetitive and quantitative pattern but in a specific way as in the direction of water-flow.
Libido does not mean the phenomenon of energy that manifests simply quantitative character.
As Volney Gay makes the difference between energy and libido,
“it [energy] is purely quantitative and relative, not qualitative and particular. Yet libido has special negative qualities (need, displeasure, unlust) and special positive qualities (pleasure and satisfaction).”
Libido refers to the particular character of the psyche with qualitative energy that shows one’s own inclination.
Jung attempts to connect the notion of libido with archetype by indicating that the libido is not driven only by the instinctual dimension.
According to Jung libido per se is deeply rooted in archetype as the a-priori form of the psyche.
Let me know if you’d like this converted into -tagged HTML for your Classic Editor or styled for a specific theme. ~Young Woon Ko, Jung on Synchronicity and Yijing, A Critical Approach, Page 1-5
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