To All my students
from a teacher entering the stage of Biological Decrepitude...
i wish i could have done more;
i believe i taught somebody something.
There are many aspects of the expressions attributed to C. Jung that I experience as meaningful and meet the criterion of a high degree of facticity. However, there is a major conceptual point that I consider to be an issue. The conception of the human primate as a being with consciousness of its being is important but it lacks any relevance if that consciousness of being cannot be expressed to an other being, for how else can it even be an issue of analysis.
Unconscious: a topographical term for the unknown process of the psyche. The unconscious is unconscious only to the ego--we don't know if it is actually that way.
1. Personal (subjective) unconscious: the layer containing subliminal impressions and repressed contents. Filled only with personal life-experiences. Includes the shadow and the inferior function.
2. Collective (impersonal, transpersonal, objective) unconscious: an immensely old psyche at the basis of ours, filled with nonpersonal, species-wide, inherited, and permanently unconscious complexes called archetypes and with instincts. Nature doesn't build from scratch each time (see Koestler). Energy in solid forms from old, like coal mines, but that pours out into active images. The psyche's equivalent of those (living!) remnants of previous evolutionary stages we carry in our bodies (going all the way back to the earliest organic forms) and so a potential system of adapted functioning. It's the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development in archaic man. (Just as human bodies have two eyes, our brains have features in common.) At bottom this psychoid layer fuses with physical processes and (includes) the sympathetic nervous system, which experiences from within as opposed to the cerebrospinal system, which senses outer things and maintains the ego. In fact, Jung thought the sympathetic system a deeper, wider, and more embracing psyche than the cerebrum's cortical fields and less exposed to the endocrine system. The highest differentiation of the collective unconscious is the ego, a relatively new combination of ancient elements.
Analysis
Collective Unconscious
From the existential perspective this expression is a contradiction. The collective, or any (sub collective set), of human primates cannot be in a state of unconscious absolutism (unless one is willing to ascribe Jung's Collective Unconscious as analogous to Schopenhauer's notion of Will) because this implies communication between the interior (exclusive) nature of the personal with another interior (exclusive) agent without a medium... (not considering the para psychological). Jean Paul Sartre formulates existence as follows:
Every instance of Human Primate existence is the relation of the in-itself, the for-itself and the Other. The Human Primate is a being which cannot escape the exclusive nature of the for it-self
nor can the human being escape the inclusion imposed by family, community... i.e., Human Primate Sub Collectives.
The Exclusion Inclusion duality underlies not only human primate existence but biological existence.
