Editing Collective unconscious (section)

== Distinction from related concepts ==
Jung contrasted the collective unconscious with the [[personal unconscious]], the unique aspects of an individual study which Jung says constitute the focus of [[Sigmund Freud]] and [[Alfred Adler]].<ref>Jung, ''Collected Works'' vol. 9.I (1959), "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious" (1936), ¶91 (p. 43). "Medical psychology, growing as it did out of professional practice, insists on the ''personal'' nature of the psyche. By this I mean the views of Freud and Adler. It is a ''psychology of the person'', and its aetiological or causal factors are regarded almost wholly as personal in nature."</ref> Psychotherapy patients, it seemed to Jung, often described fantasies and dreams which repeated elements from ancient mythology. These elements appeared even in patients who were probably not exposed to the original story. For example, mythology offers many examples of the "dual mother" narrative, according to which a child has a biological mother and a divine mother. Therefore, argues Jung, Freudian psychoanalysis would neglect important sources for unconscious ideas, in the case of a patient with neurosis around a dual-mother image.<ref>Jung, ''Collected Works'' vol. 9.I (1959), "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious" (1936), ¶96–97 (pp. 46–47) "Let us now transpose Leonardo's case to the field of the neuroses, and assume that a patient with a mother complex is suffering from the delusion that the cause of his neurosis lies in his having really had two mothers. The personal interpretation would have to admit that he is right—and yet it would be quite wrong. For in reality the cause of his neurosis would like in the reactivation of the dual-mother archetype, quite regardless of whether he had one mother or two mothers, because, as we have seen, this archetype functions individually and historically without any reference to the relatively rare occurrence of dual motherhood."</ref>

This divergence over the nature of the unconscious has been cited as a key aspect of Jung's famous split from [[Sigmund Freud]] and his school of [[psychoanalysis]].<ref name="Williams1963" /> Some commentators have rejected Jung's characterization of Freud, observing that in texts such as ''[[Totem and Taboo]]'' (1913) Freud directly addresses the interface between the unconscious and society at large.<ref name="Percival1993" /> Jung himself said that Freud had discovered a collective archetype, the [[Oedipus complex]], but that it "was the first archetype Freud discovered, the first and only one".<ref>Adrian Carr, "Jung, archetypes and mirroring in organizational change management", ''Journal of Organizational Change Management'' 15.5, 2002.</ref>

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| quote = Probably none of my empirical concepts has been met with so much misunderstanding as the idea of the collective unconscious.
| source = Jung, October 19, 1936<ref name=ConceptOfThe /><ref>Jung, ''Collected Works'' vol. 9.I (1959), "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious" (1936), ¶87 (p. 42).</ref>
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Jung also distinguished the collective unconscious and [[collective consciousness]], between which lay "an almost unbridgeable gulf over which the subject finds himself suspended". According to Jung, collective consciousness (meaning something along the lines of [[consensus reality]]) offered only generalizations, simplistic ideas, and the fashionable ideologies of the age. This tension between collective unconscious and collective consciousness corresponds roughly to the "everlasting cosmic tug of war between good and evil" and has worsened in the time of the [[Mass society|mass man]].<ref>Jung, ''Collected Works'' vol. 8 (1960), "On the Nature of the Psyche" (1947/1954), ¶423–426 (pp. 217–221).</ref><ref>Progoff, ''Jung's Psychology and its Social Meaning'' (1953), pp. 53–54.</ref>

[[Organized religion]], exemplified by the [[Catholic Church]], lies more with the collective consciousness; but, through its all-encompassing [[dogma]] it channels and molds the images which inevitably pass from the collective unconscious into the minds of people.<ref>Shelburne, ''Mythos and Logos'' (1988) pp. 44, 50. "Although originating through individual experiences of the collective unconscious religion is, strictly speaking, a phenomenon of collective consciousness."</ref><ref>Jung, ''Collected Works'' vol. 9.I (1959), "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious" (1936), ¶21 (p. 12). "Dogma takes the place of the collective unconscious by formulating its contents on a grand scale. The Catholic way of life is completely unaware of psychological problems in this sense. Almost the entire life of the collective unconscious has been channeled into the dogmatic archetypal ideas and flows along like a well-controlled stream in the symbolism of creed and ritual."</ref> (Conversely, religious critics including [[Martin Buber]] accused Jung of wrongly placing psychology above transcendental factors in explaining human experience.)<ref>Shelburne, ''Mythos and Logos'' (1988) pp. 76.</ref>