Does The Collective Unconscious Exist?

Experts speak of the collective unconscious as something “innate in the human being” a type of universal warehouse that all of us who belong to the same species possess, something similar to a “universal library” … obviously it is difficult to understand and even to accepting, however, is undoubtedly an idea full of charm: we are all linked by something universal that makes us unique, something that resides in a part of our brain, like a small trunk that is there, even if it is not we are conscious.

Let’s take an example: as children we all learned to ride a bicycle, after a while we no longer stopped to think about what to do to keep our balance and how to pedal without falling to the ground. Our brains and muscles have stored that information to make them automatic gestures, stored in a corner of our brain structures where all the learning we will never think about is collected.

The collective unconscious and dreams

It was Carl Jung who forged this term based on his vast experience in psychiatry. For him, in our brain, in our mind, there are concepts called “archetypes”, that is the basic dimensions of humanity: love, fear, integrity, being … Essential dimensions that we all feel and suffer equally, something innate that we assimilate simply when we are born and that, at the same time, we inherit from our parents, who in turn inherited it from theirs.

And now the question is: how do we access them, how do we remember them? It’s like remembering why we know how to ride a bike, or how to stay afloat when we swim. According to Jung, one way to get there is dreams; for this reason, many studies focus on the dream field, a moment in which, according to Jung, people have access to that unconscious that we all share.

Does the collective unconscious really exist?

To accept the existence of the collective unconscious, we should begin to believe that life, the whole universe is living matter. Samuel Batler argued, for example, that all life forms have an unconscious memory, arguing that atoms also have one.

All this would show us that when we are born, we come into the world with a kind of base memory genetically inherited from the origin of the human being, something with which we have evolved generation after generation and which we have unconsciously stored in our memory.

We all have the same drives: love, anger, anger, fear … these are very strong emotions that are established in our body and organism, it is something we all know how to recognize. There are, for example, fears that many share: the fear of the dark certainly derives from a basic survival instinct, not being able to defend ourselves.

According to Jung, generally human beings have very similar dreams, images that emerge only in moments in which one is at the mercy of the dream world where situations, visions and experiences arise that we do not know how to explain, which, however, in turn they are repeated to other people and in different cultures.