Jung's Theory of the Collective Unconscious

In the discussion in the chapter "Carl Jung: The Personal and the Collective Unconscious," Baynes details the steps that Jung went through in assembling his theories on dreams and the unconscious. Although Jung and Freud had collaborated from 1907-1912, by the end of that five years Jung had developed an opposing theory of the nature of the unconscious (Baynes, 1958, p. 341). This paper will discuss three of Carl Jung's key ideas in regards to the nature of the unconscious which are touched upon in this article with a view as to which one is the most persuasive in character.

The first idea Jung postulates is that of the existence of the unconscious mind. Unlike the conscious mind, which may be proven to exist through common sense and experience, the unconscious mind contains hidden content that only surfaces occasionally in dreams, when people are unconscious (Baynes, 1958, p. 341). Although Jung agrees with Freud and others that the unconscious speaks to people through symbolic language, rather than directly, Jung disagrees as to where the content comes from. Freud and others had asserted that unconscious symbols in dreams came from unprocessed conflicts and desires that had been suppressed and that needed to be exposed and dealt with. Dreams were a way for the patient to come to terms with those repressions and were a gauge for psychiatrists to use in studying where patients were in the healing process (Baynes, 1958). Jung termed this part of the unconscious the pe

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