Archetypes

Letter from Jung to Pastor Frischknecht on the nature of the Collective Unconscious, 1946

Dear Pastor Frischknecht,

Your careful study on the terrifying vision of the Blessed Brother Klaus, for which I thank you very much, made interesting and enjoyable reading. I agree entirely with what you say up to the point (p. 36) where you raise the question of the transcendent reason for the vision. Your alternative is either “metaphysical God” or Brother Klaus's “own unconscious.”

This is the caput draconis! Unwittingly and unawares you impute to me a theory which I have been fighting against for decades, namely Freud's theory. As you know, Freud derives the religious “illusion” from the individual's “own” unconscious, that is, from the personal unconscious. There are empirical reasons that contradict this assumption. I have summed them up in the hypothesis of the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is characterized by the fact that its contents are formed personally and are at the same time individual acquisitions which vary from man to man, so that everyone has his “own” unconscious.

The collective unconscious, on the contrary, is made up of contents which are formed personally only to a minor degree and in essentials not at all, are not individual acquisitions, are essentially the same everywhere, and do not vary from man to man. This unconscious is like the air, which is the same everywhere, is breathed by everybody, and yet belongs to no one. Its contents (called archetypes) are the prior conditions or patterns of psychic formation in general. They have an esse in potentia et in actu but not in re, for as res they are no longer what they were but have become psychic contents. They are in themselves non-perceptible, irrepresentable (since they precede all representation), everywhere and “eternally” the same. Hence there is only one collective unconscious, which is everywhere identical with itself, from which everything psychic takes shape before it is personalized, modified, assimilated, etc. by external influences.

In order to clarify this somewhat difficult concept I would like to take a parallel from mineralogy, the so-called crystal lattice. This lattice represents the axial system of the crystal. In the mother liquor it is invisible, as though not present, and yet it is present since first the ions aggregate round the (ideal) axial points of intersection, and then the molecules. There is only the one crystal lattice for millions of crystals of the same chemical composition. No individual crystal can speak of its lattice, since the lattice is the identical precondition for all of them (none of which concretizes it perfectly!). It is everywhere the same and “eternal”.

The theological parallel is the idea of likeness to God. There is only one imago Dei, which belongs to the existential ground of all men. I cannot speak of “my” imago Dei but only of “the” imago Dei. It is the principle by which man is shaped, one and the same, immutable, eternal.

Jung Letters, volume 1

Painting, The Collective Unconscious, by John Charles Ruskowski