Collective memory

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Collective memory refers to the shared pool of memories, knowledge and information of a social group that is significantly associated with the group's identity. The English phrase "collective memory" and the equivalent French phrase "la mémoire collective" appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century. The philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs analyzed and advanced the concept of the collective memory in the book La mémoire collective (1950). Collective memory can be constructed, shared, and passed on by large and small social groups. Examples of these groups can include nations, generations, communities among others. Collective memory has been a topic of interest and research across a number of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, history, philosophy and anthropology.

Conceptualization of collective memory

Attributes of collective memory

Collective memory has been conceptualized in several ways and proposed to have certain attributes. For instance, collective memory can refer to a shared body of knowledge (e.g., memory of a nation's past leaders or presidents); the image, narrative, values and ideas of a social group; or the continuous process by which collective memories of events change.

History versus collective memory

The difference between history and collective memory is best understood when comparing the aims and characteristics of each. A goal of history broadly is to provide a comprehensive, accurate, and unbiased portrayal of past events. This often includes the representation and comparison of multiple perspectives and the integration of these perspectives and details to provide a complete and accurate account. In contrast, collective memory focuses on a single perspective, for instance, the perspective of one social group, nation, or community. Consequently, collective memory represents past events as associated with the values, narratives and biases specific to that group.

Studies have found that people from different nations can have major differences in their recollections of the past. In one study where American and Russian students were instructed to recall significant events from World War II and these lists of events were compared, the majority of events recalled by the American and Russian students were not shared. Differences in the events recalled and emotional views towards the Civil War, World War II and the Iraq War have also been found in a study comparing collective memory between generations of Americans.

Perspectives on collective memory

The concept of collective memory, initially developed by Halbwachs, has been explored and expanded from various angles – a few of these are introduced below. 

James E. Young has introduced the notion of 'collected memory' (opposed to collective memory), marking memory's inherently fragmented, collected and individual character, while Jan Assmann develops the notion of 'communicative memory', a variety of collective memory based on everyday communication. This form of memory is similar to the exchanges in an oral culture or the memories collected (and made collective) through oral history. As another subform of collective memories Assmann mentions forms detached from the everyday, it can be particular materialized and fixed points as, e.g. texts and monuments.

The theory of collective memory was also discussed by former Hiroshima resident and atomic bomb survivor, Kiyoshi Tanimoto, in his tour of the United States as an attempt to rally support and funding for the reconstruction of his Memorial Methodist Church in Hiroshima. He theorized that the use of the atomic bomb had forever been added to the world's collective memory and would serve in the future as a warning against such devices.

The idea was also discussed more recently in The Celestine Prophecy and subsequent novels written by James Redfield as a continuing process leading to the eventual transcendence of this plane of existence. The idea that a futuristic development of the collective unconscious and collective memories of society allowing for a medium with which one can transcend ones existence is an idea expressed in certain variations of new age religions.

The historian Guy Beiner, an authority on memory and history on Ireland, has criticized the unreflective use of the adjective "collective" in many studies of memory:

The problem is with crude concepts of collectivity, which assume a homogeneity that is rarely, if ever, present, and maintain that, since memory is constructed, it is entirely subject to the manipulations of those invested in its maintenance, denying that there can be limits to the malleability of memory or to the extent to which artificial constructions of memory can be inculcated. In practice, the construction of a completely collective memory is at best an aspiration of politicians, which is never entirely fulfilled and is always subject to contestations.

In its place, Beiner has promoted the term "social memory" and has also demonstrated its limitations by developing a related concept of "social forgetting".

Collective memory and psychological research

Though traditionally a topic studied in the humanities, collective memory has become an area of interest in psychology. Common approaches taken in psychology to study collective memory have included investigating the cognitive mechanisms involved in the formation and transmission of collective memory; and comparing the social representations of history between social groups.

Social representations of history

Research on collective memory have taken the approach to compare how different social groups form their own representations of history and how such collective memories can impact ideals, values, behaviors and vice versa. Developing social identity and evaluating the past in order to prevent past patterns of conflict and errors are proposed functions of why groups form social representations of history. This research has focused on surveying different groups or comparing differences in recollections of historical events, such as the examples given earlier when comparing history and collective memory.

Differences in collective memories between social groups, such as nations or states, have been attributed to collective narcissism and egocentric/ethnocentric bias. In one related study where participants from 35 countries were questioned about their country's contribution to world history and provided a percentage estimation from 0% to 100%, evidence for collective narcissism was found as many countries gave responses exaggerating their country's contribution. In another study where American's from the 50 states were asked similar questions regarding their state's contribution to the history of the United States, patterns of overestimation and collective narcissism were also found.

Cognitive mechanisms underlying collaborative recall

Certain cognitive mechanisms involved during group recall and the interactions between these mechanisms have been suggested to contribute to the formation of collective memory. Below are some mechanisms involved during when groups of individuals recall collaboratively.

Collaborative inhibition and retrieval disruption

When groups collaborate to recall information, they experience collaborative inhibition, a decrease in performance compared to the pooled memory recall of an equal number of individuals. Weldon and Bellinger (1997) and Basden, Basden, Bryner, and Thomas (1997) provided evidence that retrieval interference underlies collaborative inhibition, as hearing other members' thoughts and discussion about the topic at hand interferes with one's own organization of thoughts and impairs memory. The main theoretical account for collaborative inhibition is retrieval disruption. During the encoding of information, individuals form their own idiosyncratic organization of the information. This organization is later used when trying to recall the information. In a group setting as members exchange information, the information recalled by group members disrupts the idiosyncratic organization one had developed. As each member's organization is disrupted, this results in the less information recalled by the group compared to the pooled recall of participants who had individually recalled (an equal number of participants as in the group).

Despite the problem of collaborative inhibition, working in groups may benefit an individual's memory in the long run, as group discussion exposes one to many different ideas over time. Working alone initially prior to collaboration seems to be the optimal way to increase memory. 

Early speculations about collaborative inhibition have included explanations, such as diminished personal accountability, social loafing and the diffusion of responsibility, however retrieval disruption remains the leading explanation. Studies have found that collective inhibition to sources other than social loafing, as offering a monetary incentive have been evidenced to fail to produce an increase in memory for groups. Further evidence from this study suggest something other than social loafing is at work, as reducing evaluation apprehension – the focus on one's performance amongst other people – assisted in individuals' memories but did not produce a gain in memory for groups. Personal accountability – drawing attention to one's own performance and contribution in a group – also did not reduce collaborative inhibition. Therefore, group members' motivation to overcome the interference of group recall cannot be achieved by several motivational factors.

Cross-cueing

Information exchange among group members often helps individuals to remember things that they would not have remembered had they been working alone. In other words, the information provided by Person A may 'cue' memories in Person B. This phenomenon results in enhanced recall.

Error pruning

Compared to recalling individually, group members can provide opportunities for error prune during recall to detect errors that would otherwise be uncorrected by an individual.

Social contagion errors

Group settings can also provide opportunities to exposure of erroneous information that may be mistaken to be correct or previously studied.

Re-exposure effects

Listening to group members recall the previously encoded information can enhance memory as it provides a second exposure opportunity to the information.

Forgetting

Studies have shown that information forgotten and excluded during group recall can promote the forgetting of related information compared to information unrelated to that which was excluded during group recall. Selective forgetting has been suggested to be a critical mechanism involved in the formation of collective memories and what details are ultimately included and excluded by group members. This mechanism has been studied using the socially shared retrieval induced forgetting paradigm, a variation of the retrieval induced forgetting method with individuals.

Synchronization of memories (from dyads to networks).

Bottom-up approaches to the formation of collective memories investigate how cognitive-level phenomena allow for people to synchronize their memories following conversational remembering. Due to the malleability of human memory, talking with one another about the past results in memory changes that increase the similarity between the interactional partners' memories.  When these dyadic interactions occur in a social network, one can understand how large communities converge on a similar memory of the past. Research on larger interactions show that collective memory in larger social networks can emerge due to cognitive mechanisms involved in small group interactions.

Collective memory, culture and the public sphere

Memorialization of collective memory

The collective memory of a nation is represented in part by the memorials it chooses to erect. Public memory is enshrined in memorials from the Holocaust memorial in Berlin to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Whatever a nation chooses to memorialize in physical monument, or perhaps more significantly, what not to memorialize, is an indicator of the collective memory.

Collective memory is also sustained through a continuous production of representational forms. In the media age – and maybe particularly during the last decade of increasing digitization – this generates a flow of, and production of, second hand memories (see James E. Young below). Particular narratives and images are reproduced and reframed, yet also questioned and contested through new images and so forth. Collective memory today differs much from the collective memories of an oral culture, where no printing technique or transportation contributed to the production of imagined communities in which people come to share a sense of heritage and commonality with many human beings we have never met – as in the manner a citizen may feel a sort of 'kinship' with people of the same nation, region or city.

Mass media and collective memory

Film and television

The arrival of film created many images, film scenes, news scenes, photographs, quotes, and songs, which became very familiar to regular moviegoers and remained in their collective memory. Images of particular movie stars became part of collective memory. During cinema visits, people could watch newsreels of news stories from around the world. For the first time in history a mass audience was able to view certain stories, events, and scenes, all at the same time. They could all view how for instance the Hindenburg disaster was caught on camera and see and remember these scenes all at once. 

When television became a global mass entertainment medium in the 1950s and 1960s the collective memory of former cinema visitors increased when various films could be repeated endlessly and worldwide on television broadcasts. For example, old films like The Wizard of Oz, King Kong and cartoons such as Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry have been shown internationally and remained on television, through syndication. Hereby particular film scenes have become well-known, even to people who had not seen these films on their original cinematic release. The same applies for television shows like I Love Lucy which have been repeated so often over the decades that certain episodes and scenes have become ingrained in the public's collective memory.

When newsreels in the cinema gradually made place for television news broadcasting, it became a habit for mass audiences to watch the daily news on television. Worldwide this led to a new kind of collective memory where various news events could be shown much quicker than with the cinema newsreels. Therefore, certain filmed news stories could be shown on the same day they happened and even live during the broadcast itself. Millions of people have viewed the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the landing of Apollo 11 in 1969, the wedding of Prince Charles and Princess Diana in 1981, the death of Princess Diana, and the September 11 attacks on their televisions. In fact, certain questions like "What were you doing when.... happened?", usually referring to a large, heavily-mediatized event, have become a very important question in the history of the development of the collective memory. 

Many people can remember what they were doing when certain internationally big media events occurred and these type of questions are usually used as a sort of milestone in individual people's life. For example, "What were you doing when you heard that John Lennon was shot?". Due to television repeats, these moments could be relived even long after the actual event happened. The introduction of video stores and video recorders in the 1980s, the internet in the 1990s and the DVD player and YouTube in the 2000s even increased the opportunity to view and check out famous and infamous movie and TV scenes.

Thanks to all these innovations certain scenes have become part of audiences' collective memory. This makes it easy for journalists, comedians, advertisers, politicians, etc. to make references to these scenes, knowing that a large audience will recognise and understand them without further explanation. For example, when president Ronald Reagan concluded a speech on March 13, 1985 against the increase of taxes he said "Make my day". Most people in the audience and TV viewers understood the reference to the Clint Eastwood film Sudden Impact and many laughed and cheered in response. The dance moves from Michael Jackson's music video for "Thriller" have been repeatedly shown on TV so much that they are instantly recognizable and therefore imitated frequently for comedic effect in films, TV shows, commercials, etc.

Whenever a comedy show or film features a scene where someone is killed or threatened in a shower, most people understand it as a parody of Psycho. Various cartoons from Bugs Bunny to Shrek have spoofed famous fairy tales, knowing that everybody is familiar with the original stories and will immediately laugh at every deviation. The roar of movie monster Godzilla and Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan yell have become instantly recognizable and easy to put into a context, even without the images.

Numerous TV shows and films such as The Simpsons, Family Guy, Scary Movie, the Shrek films, and the films of Mel Brooks, have referenced, parodied, imitated and recreated these famous scenes, often to the point of overkill. Certain observers, like Kenneth Tynan in a quote from his diaries from October 19, 1975 have noted that due to the heavy rotation and repeats of all these famous film scenes, often even without their original context, they have become part of the cultural consciousness. He wrote:

Nobody took into account the tremendous impact that would be made by the fact that films are permanent and easily accessible from childhood onward. As the sheer number of films piles up, their influence will increase, until we have a civilization entirely molded by cinematic values and behavior patterns.

The influence of television scenes on collective memory has been noticeable with children who are able to quote lines and songs from commercials, films and television shows they have watched regularly. Some young children who have watched a large amount of television have been known to react in an unnatural way to certain situations, comparable with overacting, because they recreate scenes they remember seeing in similar situations on television. There have been cases reported of people who've compared their own life too much with the romanticized, idealized life depicted in films and television series. They try to recreate the happy families and perfect love relationships they remember seeing on television or in movies.

Not all scenes that were once collective memory are remembered as well today. Certain shows, commercials and films that were popular in one decade are shown less frequently on television in the next. Thus, certain scenes do not rest in the collective memory of the next generation. Many references in old Bugs Bunny cartoons to Hollywood stars and radio shows who were famous in the 1940s, are almost obscure to modern viewers. On the other hand, certain scenes have remained in the collective memory, due to being constantly repeated in other media and are well known even for those unfamiliar with the original. For example, even people who never saw the film King Kong know that there is a scene in which the large ape climbs the Empire State Building with a woman in his hand. This could be a negative side effect of the multi-referential nature films and television shows.

Younger audiences, unfamiliar with the original subject being referenced in a contemporary film or TV series, do not recognize the reference and assume that, for instance a Twilight Zone plot reference in The Simpsons has been thought up by the creators of The Simpsons instead of the other way around. In some cases, references or parodies of older movies in contemporary films and TV shows are almost comparable to plagiarism since they just mimic or imitate a famous scene frame-by-frame instead of adding a funny new element.

In a more general and global perspective, the work of Jeffrey Andrew Barash emphasizes the ways in which the mass media select, articulate and transmit reported events and thus endow them with public significance. Mass media representation of communicated events configures them in accord with spatio-temporal patterns and a logic that are not simple replicas of the order of everyday experience, since disseminated information is charged with an autonomous symbolic sense through which public awareness is channeled and sedimented in collective memory. This autonomous symbolic sense draws its potency from an uncanny ability to simulate direct experience while dissimulating the gap which separates it from the immediate life world in which it originates. The potency of the mass media format appears in a particularly clear light in examples such as the televised Romanian revolution, media representation of the Balkan wars, and the mediatized O. J. Simpson trial in the United States.

Music

This notion of collective memory overflows into the music and film world. Certain references and songs have permeated through culture and invoke certain reactions in a wide social group. This makes it easy to make references to these scenes and songs, knowing that a large audience will recognize and understand them without further explanation.

Soundtracks have been instrumental to cinema and television as a subtler form of expression and identity. Music, and more specifically soundtracks, can be utilized as an outlet for hope, possibility and resistance for everyday people. In Time Passages, George Lipsitz acknowledged that "dominant ideology triumphed on television in the 1950s, just as it did in political and social life" (Lipsitz, 67). However, recently movies and television shows such as Insecure, Super Fly, and Waiting to Exhale have been able to incorporate music to spread “other” culture and foster a community feel. The music not only grounds itself in time but also helps personify the complex characters. The combination of new and classic songs helps promote these ideals. Sharing music and exchanging songs and in turn facilitating a collective memory also connects a person to their larger community. In "Record and Hold," Jose Van Dijck looked at how this “Shared listening, exchanging songs, and talking about music create a sense of belonging, and connect a person’s sense of self to a larger community and generation” (Van Dijck, 357). The same song can elicit different memories and emotions from different people – but they remain a sign of their time and location. Collective memory highlights the power of television and popular culture to influence politics and offer a glimpse into other people's social realities. The music incorporated in popular television and film culture can also play a role in young people's development of their identities. Van Dijck wrote, "Recorded music also has a formative function: young people in particular construct their identities while figuring out their musical taste" (Van Dijck 359). Television and movies can have just as big of an impact on cultural identities as any history book.

Collective unconscious

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Illustration of the structure of Hell according to Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. By Sandro Botticelli (between 1480 and 1490). According to Carl Gustav Jung, hell represents, among every culture, the disturbing aspect of the collective unconscious.

 

Collective unconscious, a term coined by Carl Jung, refers to structures of the unconscious mind which are shared among beings of the same species. According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is populated by instincts and by archetypes: universal symbols such as The Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, the Tree of Life, and many more.

Jung considered the collective unconscious to underpin and surround the unconscious mind, distinguishing it from the personal unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis. He argued that the collective unconscious had profound influence on the lives of individuals, who lived out its symbols and clothed them in meaning through their experiences. The psychotherapeutic practice of analytical psychology revolves around examining the patient's relationship to the collective unconscious. 

Psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Lionel Corbett argues that the contemporary terms "autonomous psyche" or "objective psyche" are more commonly used today in the practice of depth psychology rather than the traditional term of the "collective unconscious."

Critics of the collective unconscious concept have called it unscientific and fatalistic, or otherwise very difficult to test scientifically (due to the mythical aspect of the collective unconscious). Proponents suggest that it is borne out by findings of psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology.

Basic explanation

The term "collective unconscious" first appeared in Jung's 1916 essay, "The Structure of the Unconscious". This essay distinguishes between the "personal", Freudian unconscious, filled with sexual fantasies and repressed images, and the "collective" unconscious encompassing the soul of humanity at large.

In "The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology" (November 1929), Jung wrote:

And the essential thing, psychologically, is that in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These "primordial images" or "archetypes," as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which has been called the collective unconscious.

The existence of the collective unconscious means that individual consciousness is anything but a tabula rasa and is not immune to predetermining influences. On the contrary, it is in the highest degree influenced by inherited presuppositions, quite apart from the unavoidable influences exerted upon it by the environment. The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence it exerts an influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest degree, since it is continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths.

On October 19, 1936, Jung delivered a lecture "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious" to the Abernethian Society at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. He said:

My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.

Jung linked the collective unconscious to 'what Freud called "archaic remnants" – mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual's own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind'. He credited Freud for developing his "primal horde" theory in Totem and Taboo and continued further with the idea of an archaic ancestor maintaining its influence in the minds of present-day humans. Every human being, he wrote, "however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche."

As modern humans go through their process of individuation, moving out of the collective unconscious into mature selves, they establish a persona—which can be understood simply as that small portion of the collective psyche which they embody, perform, and identify with.

The collective unconscious exerts overwhelming influence on the minds of individuals. These effects of course vary widely, since they involve virtually every emotion and situation. At times, the collective unconscious can terrify, but it can also heal.

Distinction from related concepts

Jung contrasted the collective unconscious with the personal unconscious, the unique aspects of an individual study which Jung says constitute the focus of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Psychotherapy patients, it seemed to Jung, often described fantasies and dreams which repeated elements from ancient mythology. These elements appeared even in patients who were probably not exposed to the original story. For example, mythology offers many examples of the "dual mother" narrative, according to which a child has a biological mother and a divine mother. Therefore, argues Jung, Freudian psychoanalysis would neglect important sources for unconscious ideas, in the case of a patient with neurosis around a dual-mother image.

This divergence over the nature of the unconscious has been cited as a key aspect of Jung's famous split from Sigmund Freud and his school of psychoanalysis. Some commentators have rejected Jung's characterization of Freud, observing that in texts such as Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud directly addresses the interface between the unconscious and society at large. Jung himself said that Freud had discovered a collective archetype, the Oedipus complex, but that it "was the first archetype Freud discovered, the first and only one".

Probably none of my empirical concepts has met with so much misunderstanding as the idea of the collective unconscious.

Jung, October 19, 1936

Jung also distinguished the collective unconscious and collective consciousness, between which lay "an almost unbridgeable gulf over which the subject finds himself suspended". According to Jung, collective consciousness (meaning something along the lines of consensus reality) offered only generalizations, simplistic ideas, and the fashionable ideologies of the age. This tension between collective unconscious and collective consciousness corresponds roughly to the "everlasting cosmic tug of war between good and evil" and has worsened in the time of the mass man.

Organized religion, exemplified by the Catholic Church, lies more with the collective consciousness; but, through its all-encompassing dogma it channels and molds the images which inevitably pass from the collective unconscious into the minds of people. (Conversely, religious critics including Martin Buber accused Jung of wrongly placing psychology above transcendental factors in explaining human experience.)

Instincts

Jung's exposition of the collective unconscious builds on the classic issue in psychology and biology regarding nature versus nurture. If we accept that nature, or heredity, has some influence on the individual psyche, we must examine the question of how this influence takes hold in the real world.

On exactly one night in its entire lifetime, the yucca moth discovers pollen in the opened flowers of the yucca plant, forms some into a pellet, and then transports this pellet, with one of its eggs, to the pistil of another yucca plant. This activity cannot be "learned"; it makes more sense to describe the yucca moth as experiencing intuition about how to act. Archetypes and instincts coexist in the collective unconscious as interdependent opposites, Jung would later clarify. Whereas for most animals intuitive understandings completely intertwine with instinct, in humans the archetypes have become a separate register of mental phenomena.

Humans experience five main types of instinct, wrote Jung: hunger, sexuality, activity, reflection, and creativity. These instincts, listed in order of increasing abstraction, elicit and constrain human behavior, but also leave room for freedom in their implementation and especially in their interplay. Even a simple hungry feeling can lead to many different responses, including metaphorical sublimation. These instincts could be compared to the "drives" discussed in psychoanalysis and other domains of psychology. Several readers of Jung have observed that in his treatment of the collective unconscious, Jung suggests an unusual mixture of primordial, "lower" forces, and spiritual, "higher" forces.

Archetypes

In an early definition of the term, Jung writes: "Archetypes are typical modes of apprehension, and wherever we meet with uniform and regularly recurring modes of apprehension we are dealing with an archetype, no matter whether its mythological character is recognized or not." He traces the term back to Philo, Irenaeus, and the Corpus Hermeticum, which associate archetypes with divinity and the creation of the world, and notes the close relationship of Platonic ideas.

These archetypes dwell in a world beyond the chronology of a human lifespan, developing on an evolutionary timescale. Regarding the animus and anima, the male principle within the woman and the female principle within the man, Jung writes:

They evidently live and function in the deeper layers of the unconscious, especially in that phylogenetic substratum which I have called the collective unconscious. This localization explains a good deal of their strangeness: they bring into our ephemeral consciousness an unknown psychic life belonging to a remote past. It is the mind of our unknown ancestors, their way of thinking and feeling, their way of experiencing life and the world, gods and men. The existence of these archaic strata is presumably the source of man's belief in reincarnations and in memories of "previous experiences". Just as the human body is a museum, so to speak, of its phylogenetic history, so too is the psyche.

Jung also described archetypes as imprints of momentous or frequently recurring situations in the lengthy human past.

A complete list of archetypes cannot be made, nor can differences between archetypes be absolutely delineated. For example, the Eagle, a common archetype that may have a multiplicity of interpretations. It could mean the soul leaving the mortal body and connecting with the heavenly spheres. Or it may mean that someone is sexually impotent, in that they have had their spiritual ego body engaged. In spite of this difficulty Jungian analyst June Singer suggests a partial list of well-studied archetypes, listed in pairs of opposites:

Ego	Shadow
Great Mother	Tyrannical Father
Old Wise Man	Trickster
Anima	Animus
Meaning	Absurdity
Centrality	Diffusion
Order	Chaos
Opposition	Conjunction
Time	Eternity
Sacred	Profane
Light	Darkness
Transformation	Fixity

Jung made reference to contents of this category of the unconscious psyche as being similar to Levy-Bruhl's use of collective representations or "représentations collectives," Mythological "motifs," Hubert and Mauss's "categories of the imagination," and Adolf Bastian's "primordial thoughts." He also called archetypes "dominants" because of their profound influence on mental life.

Evidence

In his clinical psychiatry practice, Jung identified mythological elements which seemed to recur in the minds of his patients—above and beyond the usual complexes which could be explained in terms of their personal lives. The most obvious patterns applied to the patient's parents: "Nobody knows better than the psychotherapist that the mythologizing of the parents is often pursued far into adulthood and is given up only with the greatest resistance."

Jung cited recurring themes as evidence of the existence of psychic elements shared among all humans. For example: "The snake-motif was certainly not an individual acquisition of the dreamer, for snake-dreams are very common even among city-dwellers who have probably never seen a real snake." Still better evidence, he felt, came when patients described complex images and narratives with obscure mythological parallels. Jung's leading example of this phenomenon was a paranoid-schizophrenic patient who could see the sun's dangling phallus, whose motion caused wind to blow on earth. Jung found a direct analogue of this idea in the "Mithras Liturgy", from the Greek Magical Papyri of Ancient Egypt—only just translated into German—which also discussed a phallic tube, hanging from the sun, and causing wind to blow on earth. He concluded that the patient's vision and the ancient Liturgy arose from the same source in the collective unconscious.

Going beyond the individual mind, Jung believed that "the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious". Therefore, psychologists could learn about the collective unconscious by studying religions and spiritual practices of all cultures, as well as belief systems like astrology.

Criticism of Jung's evidence

Popperian critic Ray Scott Percival disputes some of Jung's examples and argues that his strongest claims are not falsifiable. Percival takes especial issue with Jung's claim that major scientific discoveries emanate from the collective unconscious and not from unpredictable or innovative work done by scientists. Percival charges Jung with excessive determinism and writes: "He could not countenance the possibility that people sometimes create ideas that cannot be predicted, even in principle." Regarding the claim that all humans exhibit certain patterns of mind, Percival argues that these common patterns could be explained by common environments (i.e. by shared nurture, not nature). Because all people have families, encounter plants and animals, and experience night and day, it should come as no surprise that they develop basic mental structures around these phenomena.

This latter example has been the subject of contentious debate, and Jung critic Richard Noll has argued against its authenticity.

Ethology and biology

Animals all have some innate psychological concepts which guide their mental development. The concept of imprinting in ethology is one well-studied example, dealing most famously with the Mother constructs of newborn animals. The many predetermined scripts for animal behavior are called innate releasing mechanisms.

Proponents of the collective unconscious theory in neuroscience suggest that mental commonalities in humans originate especially from the subcortical area of the brain: specifically, the thalamus and limbic system. These centrally located structures link the brain to the rest of the nervous system and said to control vital processes including emotions and long-term memory .

Archetype research

A more common experimental approach investigates the unique effects of archetypal images. An influential study of this type, by Rosen, Smith, Huston, & Gonzalez in 1991, found that people could better remember symbols paired with words representing their archetypal meaning. Using data from the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism and a jury of evaluators, Rosen et al. developed an "Archetypal Symbol Inventory" listing symbols and one-word connotations. Many of these connotations were obscure to laypeople. For example, a picture of a diamond represented "self"; a square represented "Earth". They found that even when subjects did not consciously associate the word with the symbol, they were better able to remember the pairing of the symbol with its chosen word. Brown & Hannigan replicated this result in 2013, and expanded the study slightly to include tests in English and in Spanish of people who spoke both languages.

Maloney (1999) asked people questions about their feelings to variations on images featuring the same archetype: some positive, some negative, and some non-anthropomorphic. He found that although the images did not elicit significantly different responses to questions about whether they were "interesting" or "pleasant", but did provoke highly significant differences in response to the statement: "If I were to keep this image with me forever, I would be". Maloney suggested that this question led the respondents to process the archetypal images on a deeper level, which strongly reflected their positive or negative valence.

Ultimately, although Jung referred to the collective unconscious as an empirical concept, based on evidence, its elusive nature does create a barrier to traditional experimental research. June Singer writes:

But the collective unconscious lies beyond the conceptual limitations of individual human consciousness, and thus cannot possibly be encompassed by them. We cannot, therefore, make controlled experiments to prove the existence of the collective unconscious, for the psyche of man, holistically conceived, cannot be brought under laboratory conditions without doing violence to its nature. [...] In this respect, psychology may be compared to astronomy, the phenomena of which also cannot be enclosed within a controlled setting. The heavenly bodies must be observed where they exist in the natural universe, under their own conditions, rather than under conditions we might propose to set for them.

Exploration

Moře (Sea), Eduard Tomek [cs], 1971

 

Proof of the existence of a collective unconscious, and insight into its nature, could be gleaned primarily from dreams and from active imagination, a waking exploration of fantasy.

Jung considered that 'the shadow' and the anima and animus differ from the other archetypes in the fact that their content is more directly related to the individual's personal situation'. These archetypes, a special focus of Jung's work, become autonomous personalities within an individual psyche. Jung encouraged direct conscious dialogue of the patient's with these personalities within. While the shadow usually personifies the personal unconscious, the anima or the Wise Old Man can act as representatives of the collective unconscious.

Jung suggested that parapsychology, alchemy, and occult religious ideas could contribute understanding of the collective unconscious. Based on his interpretation of synchronicity and extra-sensory perception, Jung argued that psychic activity transcended the brain. In alchemy, Jung found that plain water, or seawater, corresponded to his concept of the collective unconscious.

In humans, the psyche mediates between the primal force of the collective unconscious and the experience of consciousness or dream. Therefore, symbols may require interpretation before they can be understood as archetypes. Jung writes:

We have only to disregard the dependence of dream language on environment and substitute "eagle" for "aeroplane," "dragon" for "automobile" or "train," "snake-bite" for "injection," and so forth, in order to arrive at the more universal and more fundamental language of mythology. This give us access to the primordial images that underlie all thinking and have a considerable influence even on our scientific ideas.

A single archetype can manifest in many different ways. Regarding the Mother archetype, Jung suggests that not only can it apply to mothers, grandmothers, stepmothers, mothers-in-law, and mothers in mythology, but to various concepts, places, objects, and animals:

Other symbols of the mother in a figurative sense appear in things representing the goal of our longing for redemption, such as Paradise, the Kingdom of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem. Many things arousing devotion or feelings of awe, as for instance the Church, university, city or country, heaven, earth, the woods, the sea or any still waters, matter even, the underworld and the moon, can be mother-symbols. The archetype is often associated with things and places standing for fertility and fruitfulness: the cornucopia, a ploughed field, a garden. It can be attached to a rock, a cave, a tree, a spring, a deep well, or to various vessels such as the baptismal font, or to vessel-shaped flowers like the rose or the lotus. Because of the protection it implies, the magic circle or mandala can be a form of mother archetype. Hollow objects such as ovens or cooking vessels are associated with the mother archetype, and, of course, the uterus, yoni, and anything of a like shape. Added to this list there are many animals, such as the cow, hare, and helpful animals in general.

Care must be taken, however, to determine the meaning of a symbol through further investigation; one cannot simply decode a dream by assuming these meanings are constant. Archetypal explanations work best when an already-known mythological narrative can clearly help to explain the confusing experience of an individual.

Application to psychotherapy

Psychotherapy based on analytical psychology would seek to analyze the relationship between a person's individual consciousness and the deeper common structures which underlie them. Personal experiences both activate archetypes in the mind and give them meaning and substance for individual. At the same time, archetypes covertly organize human experience and memory, their powerful effects becoming apparent only indirectly and in retrospect. Understanding the power of the collective unconscious can help an individual to navigate through life. 

In the interpretation of analytical psychologist Mary Williams, a patient who understands the impact of the archetype can help to dissociate the underlying symbol from the real person who embodies the symbol for the patient. In this way, the patient no longer uncritically transfers their feelings about the archetype onto people in everyday life, and as a result can develop healthier and more personal relationships.

Practitioners of analytic psychotherapy, Jung cautioned, could become so fascinated with manifestations of the collective unconscious that they facilitated their appearance at the expense of their patient's well-being. Schizophrenics, it is said, fully identify with the collective unconscious, lacking a functioning ego to help them deal with actual difficulties of life.

Application to politics and society

Elements from the collective unconscious can manifest among groups of people, who by definition all share a connection to these elements. Groups of people can become especially receptive to specific symbols due to the historical situation they find themselves in. The common importance of the collective unconscious makes people ripe for political manipulation, especially in the era of mass politics. Jung compared mass movements to mass psychoses, comparable to demonic possession in which people uncritically channel unconscious symbolism through the social dynamic of the mob and the leader.

Although civilization leads people to disavow their links with the mythological world of uncivilized societies, Jung argued that aspects of the primitive unconscious would nevertheless reassert themselves in the form of superstitions, everyday practices, and unquestioned traditions such as the Christmas tree.

Based on empirical inquiry, Jung felt that all humans, regardless of racial and geographic differences, share the same collective pool of instincts and images, though these manifest differently due to the moulding influence of culture. However, above and in addition to the primordial collective unconscious, people within a certain culture may share additional bodies of primal collective ideas.

Jung called the UFO phenomenon a "living myth", a legend in the process of consolidation. Belief in a messianic encounter with UFOs demonstrated the point, Jung argued, that even if a rationalistic modern ideology repressed the images of the collective unconscious, its fundamental aspects would inevitably resurface. The circular shape of the flying saucer confirms its symbolic connection to repressed but psychically necessary ideas of divinity.

The universal applicability of archetypes has not escaped the attention of marketing specialists, who observe that branding can resonate with consumers through appeal to archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Minimal and maximal interpretations

In a minimalist interpretation of what would then appear as "Jung's much misunderstood idea of the collective unconscious", his idea was "simply that certain structures and predispositions of the unconscious are common to all of us...[on] an inherited, species-specific, genetic basis". Thus "one could as easily speak of the 'collective arm' – meaning the basic pattern of bones and muscles which all human arms share in common."

Others point out however that "there does seem to be a basic ambiguity in Jung's various descriptions of the Collective Unconscious. Sometimes he seems to regard the predisposition to experience certain images as understandable in terms of some genetic model" – as with the collective arm. However, Jung was "also at pains to stress the numinous quality of these experiences, and there can be no doubt that he was attracted to the idea that the archetypes afford evidence of some communion with some divine or world mind', and perhaps 'his popularity as a thinker derives precisely from this" – the maximal interpretation. 

Marie-Louise von Franz accepted that "it is naturally very tempting to identify the hypothesis of the collective unconscious historically and regressively with the ancient idea of an all-extensive world-soul." New Age writer Sherry Healy goes further, claiming that Jung himself "dared to suggest that the human mind could link to ideas and motivations called the collective unconscious...a body of unconscious energy that lives forever." This is the idea of monopsychism.

Archetypal psychology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Archetypal psychology was initiated as a distinct movement in the early 1970s by James Hillman, a psychologist who trained in analytical psychology and became the first Director of the Jung Institute in Zurich. Hillman reports that archetypal psychology emerged partly from the Jungian tradition whilst drawing also from other traditions and authorities such as Henry Corbin, Vico and Plotinus.

 

Archetypal psychology relativizes and deliteralizes the notion of ego and focuses on what it calls the psyche, or soul, and the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, "the fundamental fantasies that animate all life" (Moore, in Hillman, 1991). Archetypal psychology likens itself to a polytheistic mythology in that it attempts to recognize the myriad fantasies and myths – gods, goddesses, demigods, mortals and animals – that shape and are shaped by our psychological lives. In this framework the ego is but one psychological fantasy within an assemblage of fantasies. Archetypal psychology is, along with the classical and developmental schools, one of the three schools of post-Jungian psychology outlined by Andrew Samuels (see Samuels, 1995).

Influences

The main influence on the development of archetypal psychology is Carl Jung's analytical psychology. It is strongly influenced by Classical Greek, Renaissance, and Romantic ideas and thought. Influential artists, poets, philosophers and psychologists include: Nietzsche, Henry Corbin, Keats, Shelley, Petrarch, and Paracelsus. Though all different in their theories and psychologies, they appear to be unified by their common concern for the psyche – the soul.

C. G. Jung

Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychologist who was the first father of archetypal psychology. Jungian archetypes are thought patterns that find worldwide parallels in individuals or entire cultures. Archai appear in dreams, religions, the arts, and social customs in all people and they manifest impulsively in mental disorders. According to Jung archetypal ideas and patterns reside within the collective unconscious, which is a blueprint inherent in every individual, as opposed to the personal unconscious, which contains a single individual's repressed ideas, desires and memories as described by Freud. What differentiates Jungian psychology from archetypal psychology is that Jung believed archetypes are cultural, anthropological, and transcend the empirical world of time and place, and are not phenomenal. On the contrary, Archetypal psychology views archetypes to always be phenomenal.

Henry Corbin

Henry Corbin, a French scholar and philosopher, is the second father of archetypal psychology. Corbin created the idea of the existence of the mundus imaginalis which is a distinct field of imaginable realities and offers an ontological mode of location of archetypes of the psyche. The mundus imaginalis provided an evaluative and cosmic grounding for archetypes. The second contribution Corbin made to the field was the idea that archetypes are accessible to imagination and first present themselves as images, so the procedure of archetypal psychology must be rhetorical and poetic, without logical reasoning, and the goal in therapy should be to restore the patient's imaginable realities. Therefore, the goal of therapy is the middle ground of psychic realities, a development of a sense of soul. Also, according to Corbin, the method of therapy is the cultivation of imagination.

Edward Casey

Edward S. Casey is attributed with distinguishing archetypal psychology from other theories by explaining an image as a way of seeing rather than something seen. According to Casey an image is only perceived by imagining because an image is not what one sees but the way one sees. He also states that imagination is an activity of soul and not just a human faculty. An image appears to be more profound, more powerful, and more beautiful than the comprehension of it. This explains the drive behind the arts which provide disciplines that can actualize the complexity of the image.

James Hillman

Hillman (1975) sketches a brief lineage of archetypal psychology.

By calling upon Jung to begin with, I am partly acknowledging the fundamental debt that archetypal psychology owes him. He is the immediate ancestor in a long line that stretches back through Freud, Dilthey, Coleridge, Schelling, Vico, Ficino, Plotinus, and Plato to Heraclitus – and with even more branches yet to be traced (p. xvii).

Polytheistic psychology

Thomas Moore says of James Hillman's teaching that he "portrays the psyche as inherently multiple". In Hillman's archetypal/polytheistic view, the psyche or soul has many directions and sources of meaning – and this can feel like an ongoing state of conflict – a struggle with one's daimones. According to Hillman, "polytheistic psychology can give sacred differentiation to our psychic turmoil.…" Hillman states that

The power of myth, its reality, resides precisely in its power to seize and influence psychic life. The Greeks knew this so well, and so they had no depth psychology and psychopathology such as we have. They had myths. And we have no myths – instead, depth psychology and psychopathology. Therefore... psychology shows myths in modern dress and myths show our depth psychology in ancient dress."

Hillman qualifies his many references to gods as differing from a literalistic approach saying that for him they are aides memoires, i.e. sounding boards employed "for echoing life today or as bass chords giving resonance to the little melodies of life." Hillman further insists that he does not view the pantheon of gods as a 'master matrix' against which we should measure today and thereby decry modern loss of richness.

Psyche or soul

Hillman says he has been critical of the 20th century's psychologies (e.g. biological psychology, behaviorism, cognitive psychology) that have adopted a natural scientific philosophy and praxis. His main criticisms include that they are reductive, materialistic, and literal; they are psychologies without psyche, without soul. Accordingly, Hillman's oeuvre has been an attempt to restore psyche to its proper place in psychology. Hillman sees the soul at work in imagination, fantasy, myth and metaphor. He also sees soul revealed in psychopathology, in the symptoms of psychological disorders. Psyche-pathos-logos is the "speech of the suffering soul" or the soul's suffering of meaning. A great portion of Hillman's thought attempts to attend to the speech of the soul as it is revealed via images and fantasies. 

Hillman has his own definition of soul. Primarily, he notes that soul is not a "thing", not an entity. Nor is it something that is located "inside" a person. Rather, soul is "a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint towards things… (it is) reflective; it mediates events and makes differences…"(1975). Soul is not to be located in the brain or in the head, for example (where most modern psychologies place it), but human beings are in psyche. The world, in turn, is the anima mundi, or the world ensouled. Hillman often quotes a phrase coined by the Romantic poet John Keats: "call the world the vale of soul-making." 

Additionally, Hillman (1975) says he observes that soul:

refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second the significance of soul makes possible, whether in love or religious concern, derives from its special relationship with death. And third, by soul I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.

The notion of soul as imaginative possibility, in relation to the archai or root metaphors, is what Hillman has termed the "poetic basis of mind".

Dream analysis

Because Hillman's archetypal psychology is concerned with fantasy, myth, and image, it is not surprising that dreams are considered to be significant in relation to soul and soul-making. Hillman does not believe that dreams are simply random residue or flotsam from waking life (as advanced by physiologists), but neither does he believe that dreams are compensatory for the struggles of waking life, or are invested with "secret" meanings of how one should live (à la Jung). Rather, "dreams tell us where we are, not what to do" (1979). Therefore, Hillman is against the 20th century traditional interpretive methods of dream analysis. Hillman's approach is phenomenological rather than analytic (which breaks the dream down into its constituent parts) and interpretive/hermeneutic (which may make a dream image "something other" than what it appears to be in the dream). His dictum with regard to dream content and process is "Stick with the image." 

Hillman (1983) describes his position succinctly:

For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that's walking into your life…and the moment you've defined the snake, you've interpreted it, you've lost the snake, you've stopped it.… The task of analysis is to keep the snake there.…

The snake in the dream does not become something else: it is none of the things Hillman mentioned, and neither is it a penis, as Hillman says Freud might have maintained, nor the serpent from the Garden of Eden, as Hillman thinks Jung might have mentioned. It is not something someone can look up in a dream dictionary; its meaning has not been given in advance. Rather, the black snake is the black snake. Approaching the dream snake phenomenologically simply means describing the snake and attending to how the snake appears as a snake in the dream. It is a huge black snake, that is given. But are there other snakes in the dream? If so, is it bigger than the other snakes? Smaller? Is it a black snake among green snakes? Or is it alone? What is the setting, a desert or a rain forest? Is the snake getting ready to feed? Shedding its skin? Sunning itself on a rock? All of these questions are elicited from the primary image of the snake in the dream, and as such can be rich material revealing the psychological life of the dreamer and the life of the psyche spoken through the dream.

The Soul's Code

Hillman's book, The Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, outlines an "acorn theory of the soul." His theory states that each individual holds the potential for their unique possibilities inside themselves already, much as an acorn holds the pattern for an oak, invisible within itself. It argues against the parental fallacy whereby our parents are seen as crucial in determining who we are by supplying us with genetic material and behavioral patterns. Instead the book suggests for a reconnection with what is invisible within us, our daimon or soul or acorn and the acorn's calling to the wider world of nature. It argues against theories which attempt to map life into phases, suggesting that this is counter-productive and makes people feel like they are failing to live up to what is normal. This in turn produces a truncated, normalized society of soulless mediocrity where evil is not allowed but injustice is everywhere – a society that cannot tolerate eccentricity or the further reaches of life experiences but sees them as illnesses to be medicated out of existence.

Hillman diverges from Jung and his idea of the Self. Hillman sees Jung as too prescriptive and argues against the idea of life-maps by which to try to grow properly.

Instead, Hillman suggests a reappraisal of each individual's childhood and present life to try to find the individual's particular calling, the acorn of the soul. He has written that he is the one to help precipitate a re-souling of the world in the space between rationality and psychology. He replaces the notion of growing up, with the myth of growing down from the womb into a messy, confusing earthy world. Hillman rejects formal logic in favour of reference to case histories of well known people and considers his arguments to be in line with the puer aeternus or eternal youth whose brief burning existence could be seen in the work of romantic poets like Keats and Byron and in recently deceased young rock stars like Jeff Buckley or Kurt Cobain. Hillman also rejects causality as a defining framework and suggests in its place a shifting form of fate whereby events are not inevitable but bound to be expressed in some way dependent on the character of the soul or acorn in question.

Psychopathology and therapy

Psychopathology is viewed as the psyche's independent ability to create morbidity, disorder, illness, abnormality and suffering in any part of its behavior and to imagine and experience life through a deformed perspective.

Archetypal psychology follows the following procedures for therapy:

• Regular meetings
• Face-to-face
• The therapist chooses the location
• A fee is charged

These procedures may be modified depending on the therapist and the client. In therapy both the therapist and client explore the client's habitual behavior, feelings, fantasies, dreams, memories, and ideas. The goal of therapy is the improvement of the client and termination of treatment. Goals are not stated for therapy.