12.2 The Not-So-Collective Unconscious

As discussed in the NOBA Chapter “Personality Assessment,” early attempts at assessing personality were largely driven by psychodynamically oriented theories. These theories, most prominently championed by Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, propose that behavior is often influenced by factors outside of our awareness; thus, we must seek methods, such as dream analysis, that enable us to understand those aspects of people that they do not even understand about themselves. In one line of reasoning, Freud used the term “archaic remnants” to refer to ideas and behaviors that are not easily explainable by anything in one’s own life and that he concluded must be inherited from humanity’s past. Jung expanded this idea into what he called the “collective unconscious,” which is a set of inherited mental concepts shared among all humans.

On its surface, the idea of the collective unconscious seems like a unifying one. In line with the universalist perspective (see the NOBA unit on personality traits), Jung argues that cultures share archetypal symbols or characters—for instance, a “ruler” figure, who strives to take charge and lead others to greatness. But is it true that all cultures have inherited these archetypes?

Recent scholars have argued that Jung’s archetypes are not so collective, but rather reflective of racist and/or Eurocentric perspectives (Dalal, 1988) that assume that European experiences are fundamental and representative of others’ experiences. Jung largely generated his notion of the collective unconscious from his own firsthand experiences and then looked for evidence of these archetypes across cultures. Like a hammer in search of a nail, Jung may have interpreted cross-cultural behaviors in ways that were consistent with his Eurocentric perspective but that did not reflect a deep understanding of what he was actually observing. For example, in his writing, Jung regularly equated Africans with a primitive state of human closer to the unregulated unconscious. This was consistent with his expectations, but certainly not how Africans would describe themselves. Furthermore, Jung neglected to learn about culturally-specific stories and experiences that may have driven the behaviors he observed. In other words, what Freud and Jung viewed as “unexplainable” behaviors may very well have been features of cultures that were passed down through traditions, artifacts, and systems.

Video 11.5. “Cultures, Subcultures, and Countercultures: Crash Course Sociology #11 “ by CrashCourse.