Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology

by C. G. Jung

In practical treatment[253] it is therefore of the utmost importance to keep the aim of individual development constantly before us. If for instance the collective psyche be conceived as a personal possession or as a personal burden, an unbearable weight or strain is put upon the personality. Hence we must make a clear distinction between the personal and the collective psyche. In practice this distinction is not easy because the personal grows out of the collective psyche, and is most closely joined with it. It is therefore difficult to say which materials are to be termed collective and which personal. There is no doubt, for instance, that the archaic symbols so often found in phantasies and dreams are collective factors. All primary propensities and forms of thought and feeling are collective; so is everything about which men are universally agreed, or which is universally understood, said or done. Upon close consideration it is astonishing to note how much of our so-called individual psychology is really collective; so much that the individual element quite disappears. Individuation, however, is an indispensable psychological requirement. The crushing predominance of what is collective should make us realise what peculiar care and attention must be given to the delicate plant "individuality," if it is to develop.

Human beings have a capacity which is of the utmost use for purposes of collectivism and most prejudicial to individuation, and that is the capacity to imitate. Collective psychology cannot dispense with imitation, without which the organization of the State and Society would be impossible. Imitation includes the idea of suggestibility, suggestive effect, and mental infection.

But we see daily how the mechanism of imitation is used, or rather abused, for the purposes of personal differentiation; some prominent personality, or peculiar trait or activity is simply imitated, which at least brings about an external differentiation from the environment. As a rule this delusive attempt to attain individual differentiation by means of imitation comes to a standstill as mere affectation, the individual remaining on the same plane as before, only a few degrees more sterile than formerly, and under an unconscious compulsory bondage to his environment.

In order to find out what is really individual in us, we should have to give the matter deep thought, and we should certainly become aware how exceedingly difficult such a discovery is.

III.—The Individual as an Excerpt of the Collective Psyche.

We now come to a problem the overlooking of which would cause the greatest confusion.

As I said before, the immediate result of the analysis of the unconscious is that additional personal portions of the unconscious are incorporated into the conscious. I called those parts of the unconscious which are repressed but capable of being made conscious, the personal unconscious. I showed moreover that through the annexation of the deeper layers of the unconscious, which I called the impersonal unconscious, an extension of the personality is brought about which leads to the state of God-Almightiness ("Gottähnlichkeit"). This state is reached by a continuation of the analytical work, by means of which we have already re-introduced what is repressed to consciousness. By continuing analysis further we incorporate some distinctly impersonal universal basic qualities of humanity with the personal consciousness, which brings about the aforesaid enlargement, and this to some extent may be described as an unpleasant consequence of analysis.

From this standpoint, the conscious personality seems to be a more or less arbitrary excerpt of the collective psyche. It appears to consist of a number of universal basic human qualities of which it is à priori unconscious, and further of a series of impulses and forms which might just as well have been conscious, but were more or less arbitrarily repressed, in order to attain that excerpt of the collective psyche, which we call personality. The term persona is really an excellent one, for persona was originally the mask which an actor wore, that served to indicate the character in which he appeared. For if we really venture to undertake to decide what psychic material must be accounted personal and what impersonal, we shall soon reach a state of great perplexity; for, in truth, we must make the same assertion regarding the contents of the personality as we have already made with respect to the impersonal unconscious, that is to say that it is collective, whereas we can only concede individuality to the bounds of the persona, that is to the particular choice of personal elements, and that only to a very limited extent. It is only by virtue of the fact that the persona is a more or less accidental or arbitrary excerpt of the collective psyche that we can lapse into the error of deeming it to be in toto individual, whereas as its name denotes, it is only a mask of the collective psyche; a mask which simulates individuality, making others and oneself believe that one is individual, whilst one is only acting a part through which the collective psyche speaks.

If we analyse the persona we remove the mask and discover that what appeared to be individual is at bottom collective. We thus trace "the Little God of the World" back to his origin, that is, to a personification of the collective psyche. Finally, to our astonishment, we realise that the persona was only the mask of the collective psyche. Whether we follow Freud and reduce the primary impulse to sexuality, or Adler and reduce it to the elementary desire for power, or reduce it to the general principle of the collective psyche which contains the principles of both Freud and Adler, we arrive at the same result; namely, the dissolution of the personal into the collective. Therefore in every analysis that is continued sufficiently far, the moment arrives when the aforesaid God-Almightiness must be realised. This condition is often ushered in by peculiar symptoms; for instance, by dreams of flying through space like a comet, of being either the earth, the sun, or a star, or of being either extraordinarily big or small, of having died, etc. Physical sensations also occur, such as sensations of being too large for one's skin, or too fat; or hypnagogic feelings of endless sinking or rising occur, of enlargement of the body or of dizziness. This state is characterised psychologically by an extraordinary loss of orientation about one's personality, about what one really is, or else the individual has a positive but mistaken idea of that which he has just become. Intolerance, dogmatism, self-conceit, self-depreciation, contempt and belittling of "not analysed" fellow-beings, and also of their opinions and activities, all very frequently occur. An increased disposition to physical disorders may also occasionally be observed, but this occurs only if pleasure be taken therein, thus prolonging this stage unduly.