The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications

by Renos K. Papadopoulos

when he was a young student, Jung became very interested in psychic phenomena to the extent that his PhD thesis was in this area. Using his cousin Helen Prieswerk as a subject, he investigated her apparent abilities as a medium – a trend that was highly prevalent at the time in Europe. In doing so, he became less convinced of her psychic ‘powers’ and more convinced that the phenomena and knowledge she displayed in trance – which her conscious mind was unaware of – were stemming from her unconscious psyche. Moreover, this was not material known personally to the subject and so implied some sort of cultural collective unconscious. Jung reasoned that unconscious material that emerged from a subject, frequently as dream imagery (not just the trance speeches, as with Prieswerk), could not be accounted for through the subject’s personal learning or experience; thus, he assumed that this may stem from a collective, general and universal part of the unconscious mind, a collective unconscious derived through aeons of repetition of human cultural imagery and experience that, despite differences in detail, remains typically human with recognisable common qualities and meanings.