A collective unconscious reconsidered: Jung's archetypal imagination in the light of contemporary psychology and social science.

A rapprochement between Jung and contemporary human sciences may depend less on a biologistic collective unconscious than on re-inscribing archetypal imagination as the phenomenological and empirical core of Jungian psychology. The most promising approaches combine cognitive psychology of metaphor and synaesthesia, individual differences in imaginative absorption, and openness to numinous experience as symbolic intelligence. This perspective aligns with Lévi-Strauss on metaphoric roots of mythology and Durkheim on collective consciousness, validating cross-cultural commonality of physical metaphor. Jung's Red Book is closer to a socio-cultural collective consciousness based on metaphoric imagination than to a phylogenetic unconscious. Mutual re-inscribing can validate Jung's observations and is consistent with his early synthesis efforts.

Study at a glance

Abstract

A needed rapprochement between Jung and the contemporary human sciences may rest less on the much debated relevance of a biologistic collective unconscious than on a re-inscribing of an archetypal imagination, as the phenomenological and empirical core of Jungian psychology. The most promising approaches in this regard in terms of theory and research in psychology come from combining the cognitive psychology of metaphor and synaesthesia, individual differences in imaginative absorption and openness to numinous experience and spirituality as a form of symbolic intelligence. On the socio-cultural side, this cognitive psychology of archetypal imagination is also congruent with Lévi-Strauss on the metaphoric roots of mythological thinking, and Durkheim on a sociology of collective consciousness. This conjoined perspective, while validating the cross cultural commonality of physical metaphor intuited by Jung and Hillman on alchemy, also shows Jung's Red Book, considered as the expressive source for his more formal psychology, to be far closer in spirit to a socio-cultural collective consciousness, based on metaphoric imagination, than to a phylogenetic or evolutionary unconscious. A mutual re-inscribing of Jung into congruent areas of contemporary psychology, anthropology, sociology, and vice versa, can help to further validate Jung's key observations and is fully consistent with Jung's own early efforts at synthesis within the human sciences.