Carl Jung and the Collective Unconscious - An explanation for telepathy?

Carl Jung and the Collective Unconscious

Carl Jung was a student and follower of Freud. He was born in a small town in Switzerland in 1875 and all his life was fascinated by folk tales, myths and religious stories. Although he had a close friendship with Freud early in their relationship, his independent and questioning mind soon caused a break.

Jung did not accept Freud’s contention that the primary motivation behind behavior was sexual urges. Instead of Freud’s instinctual drives of sex and aggression, Jung believed that people are motivated by a more general psychological energy that pushes them to achieve psychological growth, self-realization., psychic wholeness and harmony. Also, unlike Freud, he believed that personality continues to develop throughout the lifespan.

What is the Collective Unconscious

The collective unconscious is different. It’s like eye color. If someone were to ask you, “How did you get your eye color,” you would have to say that there was no choice involved – conscious or unconscious. You inherited it. Material in the collective unconscious is like this: inherited. It never came from our current environment. It is the part of the mind that is determined by heredity. So we inherit, as part of our humanity, a collective unconscious; the mind is pre-figured by evolution just as is the body. The individual is linked to the past of the whole species and the long stretch of evolution of the organism. Jung thus placed the psyche within the evolutionary process.



What’s in the collective unconscious? Psychological archetypes. This idea of psychological archetypes is among Jung’s most important contributions to Western thought. An ancient idea somewhat like Plato’s idea of Forms or “patterns” in the divine mind that determine the form material objects will take, the archetype is in all of us. The word “archetype” comes from the Greek “arche” meaning “first, and “type” meaning “imprint or pattern.” Psychological archetypes are thus first prints, or patterns that form the basic blueprint for major dynamic counterparts of the human personality. For Jung, archetypes pre-exist in the collective unconscious of humanity. They repeat themselves eternally in the psyches of human beings and they determine how we both perceive and behave. These patterns are inborn within us. They are part of our inheritance as human beings. They reside as energy within the collective unconscious and are part the psychological life of all peoples everywhere at all times. They are inside us and they are outside us. We can meet them by going inward to our dreams or fantasies. We can meet them by going outward to our myths, legends, literature and religions. The archetype can be a pattern, such as a kind of story. Or it can be a figure, such as a kind of character.


to me jungs theory is a potential explanation for the telepathy phenomenon & many other paranormal events eg knowing relatives have died, twins connection etc.

comments?