Concepts of the Self, the Collective Unconscious, the Shadow, and Social Cohesion

Intro

Having recently finished Carl Jung’s autobiography, ‘Memories, Dreams, Reflections’, my brain remains somewhat rattled as I juggle his ideas throughout my day. Among these include: the unconscious, the collective unconscious, the shadow, individuation, and the extent to which he peered inside his own psyche. With these thoughts in mind, I’ve caught a glimpse of various peoples’ shadows, including my own, and how it can affect our behavior. In this article I discuss my line of thinking on these concepts. In future articles, I’d like to suggest a framework one can use when engaged in difficult conversations to remain intellectually honest and confront one’s shadow.

Senses, Consciousness, and the Unconscious

We exist in a body that reacts to the universe around us. Our senses perceive what is outside and within our body, and our nervous system processes this information and reacts. Some of our reactions are more hard-coded — such as our reflex to remove a hand from heat — while other reactions can be weighed and evaluated. Our brain contains a history of all of our past experiences, which it uses to formulate new ideas. These ideas are evaluated to determine their efforts and outcomes before ultimately making a decision. The processes that we are aware of make up our consciousness. Other circuits in the nervous system are also forged by our individual experiences and affect our behavior, yet we are not conscious of them. This is our unconscious.

Narratives, the Self, and the Ego

Our consciousness, being a correlated series of thoughts, is by definition a narrative. Our narrative’s main character, ‘I’, represents our “self”. The narrative is influenced by the inputs to our senses and can be viewed through two different lenses. The first lens, called the “id”, represents our basic bodily needs, desires, and impulses. The id is often thought of as primitive, instinctual, and animalistic. The other lens represents our social nature and is called the “superego”. The superego considers how our actions are perceived by other human beings and includes our values, morals, and social norms. The ego manages the anxieties and the drives that the id and the superego create by rationalizing an overarching narrative, which becomes our projection to the outside world.

The Collective Unconscious, Customs, and Culture

The fact that we analyze the efforts and outcomes of other humans’ behaviors and incorporate this into our ego’s narrative gives rise to the collective unconscious. As each generation of humans observe the previous, their behavior is affected, which is then observed by the next generation, and the cycle continues. With each cycle the collective unconscious is transformed, in ways both beneficial and harmful to the human species. Our behavior today is a result of how our ancestors have behaved for the past hundreds of thousands of years. This continuous cloud of aggregated observed human behavior is the collective unconscious.

In addition to our ephemeral behavior, man-made objects such as tools and art contribute to the collective unconscious. Spoken language enables us to pass down specific concepts, and stories offer an even more potent way of passing knowledge directly to the ego. The critical invention of writing allows one’s words to not only directly impact the listeners at the moment of utterance, but to influence an everlasting future of readers.

Depending on our upbringing, we have been exposed to varying clouds of the collective unconscious. The overlaps and gaps within each of our individual experiences are what create an understood “status quo” of acceptable human behavior. These customs, as well as a group’s artefacts (art, tools, writing, etc.), make up a culture. Someone who is ‘cultured’ or ‘well-traveled’, has been exposed to a larger set of the collective unconscious, and presumably if they’ve successfully integrated it into their ego, are better armed to understand and deal with a wider variety of situations.

The collective unconscious has both a health and a strength attribute. When it is healthy, it affects people’s behavior in ways that are beneficial to society. Its strength is determined by the degree of overlap within that society. When people have different understandings of the collective unconscious, stress, arguments, and even war can result.

Relationships, Vulnerability, Defense Mechanisms, the Shadow, and Individuation

The superego is driven by our memory and the judgement of our experiences with human behavior and the collective unconscious. Through this judgement, relationships and social hierarchies form. As we develop a relationship with someone, we have the opportunity to more finely calibrate the meanings of their actions. To better understand their actions is to better understand the observed behavior that influenced their actions, which leads to better understanding of the collective unconscious, which ultimately results in better understanding of ourselves.

Vulnerability means revealing more about yourself, which may provide insight into your ego that others can process and pass judgement on. This provides the opportunity for others, with unique personal experiences and understandings of the collective unconscious, to critique our narrative and flaws. This process can strengthen our narrative, better aligning it with our “self” and the expectations of our peers.

However, vulnerability may reveal information that could negatively affect our relationships or social statuses. Furthermore, due to the limitations of our brain’s neuroplasticity, our egos cannot change too quickly. Because of this, we have defense mechanisms that protect our egos. These defense mechanisms can alter the ego’s narrative in ways unbeknownst to the ego and go against the superego’s ideals or the id’s needs and desires. This repressed aspect of the personality is known as the shadow. For one to confront their shadow and develop an ego that is more representative of the entire self is a process Jung referred to as individuation.

The Progression of Man

One can see the power that the collective unconscious has over a society. After all, it is what separates us from cavemen. We’ve discussed how the collective unconscious, social cohesion, knowledge, coexistence, and individuation­ are all intertwined. How then, can we apply these insights to improve our collective unconscious, and thus our society? Consider that the process of individuation is what incorporates one’s personal experiences and the collective conscious into their ego. The better this is integrated, the better the individual is prepared to confront life, learn, and give back to the collective unconscious. Therefore, I would argue that confronting one’s shadow is the best thing one can do for humanity. In the following article, I will discuss what it looks like when these defense mechanisms manifest, and suggest a framework one can employ to confront their shadow.