The Collective Unconscious

Reviewing Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious Mind, Part 3: Tackling Jordan Peterson’s Reading List

Gemini creating a vision of Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious in the style of Michaelangel. I think that little floating head is Carl Jung.

Carl Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious is not something I can summarize in a short essay, so I decided to create bite-sized chunks of what I’m getting from it.

It can be hard to accurately detect tone in text, but a conversation I had about Jung with someone who has a background in psychology gave me the impression that they saw him as kind of a new-age, supernatural theory mystic. She used the term “collective unconscious” more so as a derisive as if the concept is silly and a bit out there. And this is partly why I think people dismiss these ideas. But I think it’s a misunderstanding of what these ideas, which sometimes sound supernatural, really mean.

I have a family member who is a retired plastic surgeon. She, before and after retirement, has spent a lot of time traveling the world to help children with cleft palates through her local Rotary Club. It’s a lot of work and a lot of people put a lot of money into it, and it is wonderfully beneficial to those kids.

Now an American trained physician, surgeon or not, wouldn’t have to take any different anatomy and physiology classes once they decided to travel the world and help people on…