The notion of the Collective Unconscious is part of the array of psychological ideas that Jung rolled out as part of his effort to popularize psychology by removing the honesty from it, and at the same time to explain away his own recurrent problems with nascent schizophrenia. The idea itself is pretty simple: that beneath one's own personal unconscious mind as elaborated by Freud there lies another, deeper, unconscious in which are stored all of the archetypes and symbols of humanity.

The collective unconscious is really Jung's way to avoid the frank intensity brought to the table by Nietzsche and Freud. You don't have to honestly grapple with yourself anymore, because as long as you can find a literary predecessor for your particular problem, then it's not YOU who is having the problem, it's an archetype from the Collective Unconscious acting Through You. This was very convenient for Jung, who no longer had to think of himself as a conniving, lying, back-stabbing bastard with regard to Freud, since he could now just think of the whole situation as a "reworking of the Caesar-Brutus archetype" that was beyond his control. And that's why Jung stays popular - for people who don't want to admit that the bad things they sometimes do come from something in them or their own personal past, Jung and the collective unconscious are god-sends.

It is one of the great ironies of psychology that the contributions of the man who so very much wanted to be The Great Revolutionary ended up regressing that discipline to an almost Catholic level of willful self-deception. The Enlightenment, Nietzsche, and Freud had all worked to make us come to terms with ourselves, both our good and bad aspects, without resort to angels and devils. And Jung brought us right back into that again.

To be fair, there are probably evolutionarily advantageous genetic predispositions which lurk in the DNA of most humans that cause most of us to respond emotionally to certain triggers that we haven't necessarily personally experienced. We tend, as a species, to love our families and not eat brightly colored frogs - there might have been genetic stripes of humanity that didn't, but they died when a wolf ate their babies or their babies ate brightly colored frogs. But that's it. To go from there to where Jung goes with the notion is scientifically irresponsible, and Jung more or less knew that. That's why, reading him, one gets struck by how willing he is to fill pages with Mere Erudition in place of actual insight or analysis. He is terrified of alternative explanations to his ideas to the point of not mentioning them at all. Better to quote a tangential anecdote about fourteenth century alchemical practice than to scientifically and rigorously evaluate all possible explanations for a phenomenon. Walter Kaufmann put it best when he said that Jung dove whole-heartedly into esoterica as a way of avoiding the massive psychological problems on his own doorstep.

That said, it is a cool FICTIONAL idea, so we're using it.

- Count Dolby von Luckner