In Jungian psychology, collective unconscious is the totality of inherited potentials or the full complement of archetypal patterns that are universally human. In addition to ego-consciousness lies all the forgotten material of an individual’s lifetime (called personal unconscious) as well as the vast reservoir of latent possibilities that belong to the human species (collective unconscious).
Many popular discussions of the collective unconscious give the mistaken impression that it is a sort of storehouse of images or even a memory bank for everything that has ever happened in the course of the world. Jung insists that it is not images or memories that are inherited but rather the capacity to recognize, imagine, and enact typically human patterns of thought and action. The collective unconscious is best understood as the sum of all the behavior patterns we inherit with our DNA: the capacity to learn and speak a language, for instance; the propensity to fall in love, form lasting...
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Haule, J.R. (2015). Collective Unconscious. In: Leeming, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_119-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-27771-9_119-6
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