Collective Unconscious
Carl Jung’s proposed shared layer of the unconscious, containing inherited patterns he called archetypes.
Context
In Jung’s analytical psychology, the personal unconscious draws on an individual’s life experiences. He proposed that the collective unconscious is shared across people and that its archetypes can take different forms in dreams, myths, and symbols.
Examples
- A Jungian reading might see a mother figure in two different folktales as two expressions of the same archetype.