Kyle’s Reviews > The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious > Status Update

Closing out this volume with chapters on individuation and the therapeutic importance of the mandala, Jung summarizes whole decades of his work while leaving things open to continue in his second volume Aion. Showing some evolution of his idea for the collective unconscious based upon what his patients presented, he also records the trauma of life in Europe just before WWII and its hateful misuse of alchemy.

Taken the less trodden path into the psyche, in this section Jung looks at fairytales and trickster legends to uncover the archetypes most rational adult ignore or bury away in the unconscious. Spirit seen as superstition much to the detriment of people like Jung who survived two world wars and still sees humanity making the same mistakes. His inquiry into tricksters showcases how asinine we were long before YouTube.

Two amazing articles that stand on their own yet support one another with insight on the pre-conscious state young children and certain adults experience. There are many important lessons to learn about the child archetype and mother-daughter relationship that are often mythologized, taken out of time and entered into a dream space precisely because they are the result of our connection to the collective unconscious.

Lookjng across many cultures and their religious beliefs, Jung lectures on the topic of rebirth and transformation, and my reading of this section comes at a very intriguing period in my life. Of course, all of it connects to the unconscious and even his analysis of the Islamic figure of Khidr has the most Jungian paragraph I have read so far, on “so-called telepathic phenomena” (p. 142) related to his synchronicity.

An elaboration of the anima archetype becomes so much more, a summary or highlight reel of Jung’s career, based largely on his encounters with female patients. The Great Mother is analyzed for her positive and negative aspects, almost exclusively female. A brief couple of paragraphs on male connection to the psychological type and briefer sentences on homosexuality is his push towards healing an atomic-charred world.

I have often wondered, while reading books by or about Jung, where are the first instances of such foundational ideas as archetypes, the collective unconscious and anima. It turns out that each of them are found in the essays and lectures making up the first three chapters of this book - seems obvious now but had to be written somewhere. Jung must take some pleasure in pointing out Freud’s faulty St. Anne assumption.