Summary
The collective unconscious is Carl Jung’s name for a layer of the mind that he believed all humans share and inherit, lying beneath each person’s own unconscious. Where the personal unconscious holds what an individual has forgotten or repressed, the collective one holds ‘archetypes’: recurring forms that, for Jung, explained why similar figures and themes turn up in myths and dreams around the world.
Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, first used the term in 1916 and kept returning to it. In a 1936 London lecture he said it “does not develop individually but is inherited”. Critics have called the idea unscientific and hard to test.
Rationale
Part 1 names the ‘collective unconscious’ among Western concepts that look beneath conscious belief. The difference matters: Jung’s is inherited and the same in everyone; deep dispositions are “continually being formed and reinforced” by culture.