Collective Unconscious

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

Litencyc Editors (Independent Scholar - Europe)
Download PDF Add to Bookshelf Report an Error
  • The Literary Encyclopedia. WORLD HISTORY AND IDEAS: A CROSS-CULTURAL VOLUME.

Resources

The collective unconscious is a concept developed by Carl Jung in 1936 and constitutes a difference between Jungian and Freudian psychoanalysis, the latter denying its existence. Jungians hold that beneath the individual unconscious, which stores repressed personal memories and desires, lies a collective unconscious which contains collective memories from the history of mankind and recurrent life-experiences such as birth, death, the mother, the father. These recurrent collective experiences are referred to in primordial archetypal images — the earth mother, the wise father, the devouring female, the angry God — and narratives, especially of birth, death and the transformation from one phase to another, which patter religions, mythology, dreams and imaginative works.

108 words

Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "Collective Unconscious". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 May 2006 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=200, accessed 29 March 2024.]

200 Collective Unconscious 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

Save this article

If you need to create a new bookshelf to save this article in, please make sure that you are logged in, then go to your 'Account' here

Leave Feedback

The Literary Encyclopedia is a living community of scholars. We welcome comments which will help us improve.