Spiders are born knowing how to weave webs. It’s little stretch to believe that humans, too, are born with instinct. And what is “instinct”? Is it cultural knowledge written in genetics? Accepting this definition of instinct is the first step down the long path of belief in humanity’s shared experience—what some call the collective unconscious—and various people are willing to walk this path of belief for varying distances.
Let’s take a mental stroll into the collective unconscious and test the stamina of your belief.
Carl Jung compared the mind to an onion (whereas Freud probably considered it a lotus blossom …). The heart of Jung’s onion-mind is your individual brain, which is made up of your (thick) conscious and (thin) unconscious. The next layer is the mind you share with your family, with whom you’re likely closest in belief, knowledge, and culture. Then the next layer of Jung’s onion-mind is that of your culture, then your society, and finally a thin layer of mind shared with all of humanity.
He called this outermost layer the collective unconscious. Many of us live in only the onion’s center. But that doesn’t diminish the unconscious role of the onion’s skin.
Again, if you’re a massive curmudgeon, you can understand this through genetics: The architecture of your mind is similar to that of your family, and so you’re likely to share ways of thought (and potentially, thoughts themselves).
Jung took this similarity of mind a rather large stride further. According to his theories, coded in his collective unconscious are not only physical instincts like the ability to weave a web, but the experiences basic to the human condition, too. To Jung, swirling around us are Beowulf and Shakespeare, Homer and Star Wars, the Vedas and the Bible—or more specifically, the archetypes that each of these taps into: We understand ourselves as balances of hero and servant, mother and victim, etc. How much scary-ass, half-robot father in a big black helmet do you have within yourself? How much Luke Skywalker?
And imbalance creates disorders: Too much “great mother” makes for a neurotic holiday season; too much “hero” makes it hard to stay retired from professional football.
Want proof? Jung (and Joseph Campbell) points to shared myths. Think of the Greek, Hindu, Native American, and Egyptian pantheons—certainly these cultures put their own spin on their gods, making them more or less aggressive, more or less sexual, and more or less idealized, but the archetypes these gods represent stay basically unchanged. They are part of our universal understanding.
Disorders of the Collective Unconscious
Just as disorders can disrupt the individual mind, might they also be able to disrupt the collective mind? Extending the idea of mental disorder one “onion layer” outward, do certain families foster certain neuroticisms? Is a family OCD or ADHD or overly concerned with beauty and entitlement to the point of narcissism?
Could you extend the idea of disorder from individual, to family, to culture? Could a certain culture of North America be seen as just a wee bit narcissistic as a whole?
Eye Hack: Filling-in Illusion
Stare at the center dot. Let your mind go blank. Soon the outer circle should go blank too. This vanishing takes place to some degree whenever a visual stimulus is absolutely stable, and the filling-in always takes the color of the background.
Let’s take another step down the C. U. path: You can access the collective unconscious. Yep, like Wi-Fi, our minds can tap into the information stream and pluck out URLs. Tapping into this archetypical understanding allows authors like Toni Morrison and Salman Rushdie to write stories that, while we don’t quite know what the hell is going on, speak to “something deeper” within us.
And just as we pull archetypal understanding from the collective unconscious, Jung believes we can add to it: Do you believe that your actions contribute to a global consciousness? Does your holding the door open for the person behind you make the world a slightly better place? Do we add to or take from the great jar of karma?
But in addition to plucking the experience of archetype, this information drawn from the collective unconscious can also be just that: information (can’t it?). Jung believed that each individual or culture uploads its information into the mainframe of the collective unconscious, and by tapping into this unconscious, we can know anything that has ever been known. Or we can learn of events or “feelings” far away in the world.
Some go even further. Take synchronicity. One day a client in Carl Jung’s office was relating a dream of a scarab beetle and suddenly said beetle flew in the window. To Jung, these synchronous events were too perfect to be mere coincidence. Instead, the collective unconscious sent the beetle.
You still there? You want another step? Try this quote from the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” If the collective unconscious knows humanity’s shared past and present, why not its future, too?
OK, think about it: where did you get off the path of belief? Why did you jump? Are you sure you couldn’t walk the path to its end?
