Socrates says in the Republic that people who take the sun-lit world of the senses to be good and real are living pitifully in a den of evil and ignorance. The Allegory of the Cave is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible (noeton) and that the visible world ((h)oraton) is the least knowable, and the most obscure. Jung’s idea appears to share some degree of commonality with the Platonic concept of “forms” as described in the famous “allegory of the cave” cited in Plato’s Republic: It is only now being perceived as, what Jung termed, the “collective unconscious” – the unconscious domain of shared human instincts and archetypal paradigms. our beta brainwave state of conscious awareness. With the development of words and language, over time – in other words, the “verbal consciousness” or, in the language of psychologists like Jung and his mentor, Freud, the “ego” – this instinctual level of shared awareness became buried under and obscured to our “waking” consciousness, i.e. Jung’s ideas appear to suggest that, at some point in our prehistory, human beings operated purely instinctually, like a school of fish, perhaps. Jung proceeds to suggest that the collective unconscious is closely connected with instinctual behavior in human beings, and that “archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves, in other words, that they are patterns of instinctual behavior.” ( ibid., par. ![]() Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, pars. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents. ![]() This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. My thesis, then, is as follows: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even, if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. Whereas the personal unconscious consists for the most part of complexes, the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes. ![]() While the personal unconscious is made up essentially of contents which have at one time been conscious but which have disappeared from consciousness through having been forgotten or repressed, the contents of the collective unconscious have never been in consciousness, and therefore have never been individually acquired, but owe their existence exclusively to heredity.
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