In today’s article, we will explore Carl Jung’s theory of the unconscious as he presented it in the book Man and His Symbols, which we are currently studying because we have returned to its fundamental concepts. There is great value in revisiting these ideas, even if we already know a great deal about Jungian psychology, because they are the foundation of Jungian theory and can also become the foundation of our own inner work. For that reason, a review is always worthwhile.
Let us remember that the theory of the unconscious is the central foundation of psychoanalysis. Its development marked the beginning of a revolution in modern psychology. That is why Carl Jung’s work is essential for understanding it, and that is precisely what we will do in this article.
Let us begin with the following quotation:
Anyone who denies the existence of the unconscious assumes that our present knowledge of the psyche is complete. And this belief is clearly just as false as the assumption that we know all there is to know about the natural universe. Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is as limitless. We cannot define either the psyche or nature. We can merely state what we believe them to be and describe, as best we can, how they function. Apart, therefore, from the accumulative evidence supplied by medical research, there are strong logical grounds for rejecting statements like “There is no unconscious.” Those who say such things merely express an age-old “misoneism” — a fear of the new and the unknown.
By the middle of the last century, when Jung wrote these words, there was still widespread ignorance about the unconscious, along with considerable denial of its existence. Today, the unconscious is a much more widely accepted theory, but at the time the work of Jung and Freud was heavily criticized, even within academic circles.
It was not merely the arrival of a revolutionary theory that was difficult to believe. It also challenged humanity’s image of itself as rational, conscious, and fully in control of its actions. Freud’s famous statement that psychoanalysis represented the third great “wound to human narcissism” captures this idea well. For Jung, however, it was simply misoneism, an aversion to, rejection of, or deep fear of novelty and change.
Nevertheless, it is worth emphasizing that although the theory of the unconscious is now widely accepted, we still live as though the unconscious did not exist. This is partly because our way of life and our culture seem designed to make room only for the dominance of consciousness, without truly recognizing how little conscious control we actually have over ourselves. Our lifestyle is far from being adapted to that which remains in the darkness of the psyche and quietly influences us.
On the other hand, the comparison between our ignorance of the mind and the vastness of the universe is remarkably accurate. Like the cosmos, the mind remains profoundly mysterious and largely unknown, even after centuries of scientific progress and discovery. There are still unanswered questions such as why anything exists instead of nothing, what came before the Big Bang, whether the universe is infinite, whether there are other universes, and whether there are other forms of intelligent life.
Likewise, the psyche remains largely unexplored despite the advances of psychology and neuroscience. We are still far from fully understanding what the mind is, how consciousness arises, and why a collection of biological processes can give rise to a subjective experience of the world. Yet what is even more complex and paradoxical is that the mind is the very instrument we use to understand the mind itself, while that same instrument remains, to a great extent, unknown to itself.
The outer universe can be studied through telescopes, particles, and physical measurements, but the inner universe presents a unique difficulty because the observer and the observed are part of the very same phenomenon. In other words, the mind is trying to understand itself, much like attempting to see our own eyes without the aid of a mirror.
Yet these very limitations of consciousness, this inability to grasp the full extent of our own nature, are themselves one of the strongest arguments for the existence of the unconscious. The fact that we cannot fully comprehend our own psyche reveals that there are dimensions of ourselves that remain beyond our immediate awareness.
What Is Our Unconscious, Really?
In alchemy, the prima materia and the stage of nigredo symbolically referred to the exploration of an unknown dimension within the human psyche.
Carl Jung goes on to say something that helps us better grasp what the unconscious is:
If we listen to a continuous note that is just at the threshold of hearing, the sound seems to stop at regular intervals and then begin again. These fluctuations are due to periodic decreases and increases in our attention, not to any change in the note itself. But when something slips out of our consciousness it does not cease to exist, any more than a car that disappears around a corner dissolves into thin air. It is simply out of sight. And just as we may see the car again later, so we come across thoughts that we had temporarily lost.
I like this passage from Jung because it makes it possible to understand the unconscious from a much simpler perspective, one that moves away from the idea that the unconscious is merely “something hidden.”
The absence of something from our conscious awareness certainly does not mean that it has ceased to exist. It simply means that consciousness has a limited capacity to keep certain contents in the foreground of attention. We cannot pay absolute attention to everything at the same time, so some stimuli naturally move into the background.
According to Jung, something similar happens with certain psychic contents. A thought, an emotion, a memory, or an inner image can disappear from consciousness without being destroyed, remaining beyond the threshold of our attention. All of this demonstrates that the psyche contains far more than what happens to be present in consciousness at any given moment.
Thus, the unconscious refers to everything that escapes our attention and focus, disappearing from the field of consciousness while continuing to exist. Yet the unconscious can also be verified in the opposite direction, through the emergence of new contents.
That is why Carl Jung says:
Just as conscious contents can vanish into the unconscious, new contents, which have never yet been conscious, can also arise from it. We may have, for instance, a feeling that something is about to enter consciousness, that “something is in the air,” or that we “smell a rat.” The discovery that the unconscious is not merely the storehouse of the past, but is also full of germs of future psychic situations and ideas, led me to my new approach to psychology. There was much controversy over this point. But it is a fact that, besides memories from the remote conscious past, completely new thoughts and creative ideas can also arise spontaneously from the unconscious. Such thoughts and ideas have never before been conscious. They grow from the dark depths of the mind like a lotus, and form a most important part of the subliminal psyche.
Jung argues that the unconscious is not merely a place where forgotten contents or experiences that slip beyond our awareness are stored. It is also a creative source of new psychic contents. In other words, the unconscious is not merely an archive of the past, but an active force that constantly participates in shaping our mental life.
This would explain why our psyche, like our body, undergoes a series of transformations throughout life. It is not only our personal experience that shapes the mind, but also an inner natural process with its own functions and inherent creative capacity.
This idea also helps us better understand creativity.
You have probably read that many creative people describe their best ideas as arriving unexpectedly.
A melody suddenly appears in a musician’s mind as inspiration.
A solution emerges after a problem has been set aside.
A writer discovers an image or a sentence that seems to have arisen spontaneously.
Even many of history’s greatest scientific discoveries came to their discoverers in the form of sudden revelations.
For Jung, not only do all these things arise from the deeper layers of the unconscious, but we also carry within us something like a library containing the accumulated wisdom of humanity, known as the collective unconscious.
Carl Jung says the following, which is important for understanding how the Swiss analyst came to formulate the idea of the collective unconscious:
…we find that many dreams present images and associations that are analogous to primitive ideas, myths, and rites. These dream images were called by Freud “archaic remnants” a phrase that suggests they are surviving psychic elements in the human mind from ages long ago
The psychoanalyst is referring to what he later called the collective unconscious.
The symbols that appear in dreams, along with associations analogous to primitive ideas, myths, and rituals, would be expressions of a layer of the mind that lies far beyond our conscious awareness.
Throughout his long career as an analyst and psychiatrist, Carl Jung observed that some of his patients’ dreams, fantasies, and even visions pointed back to ancient symbols. Moreover, through his extensive study of mythology, religion, and alchemy, he found that these symbols appeared over and over again, even among cultures and religions that had no connection with one another. This led him to the realization that such symbols did not come solely from the outside world, but also emerged from the deepest layers of the human mind.
Freud called these images “archaic remnants,” intending to suggest that they were psychological residues inherited from humanity’s distant past, a kind of survival of primitive ways of thinking.
Although Jung found this idea interesting, he disliked the term because calling them “remnants” suggested that they were merely leftovers from the past, like psychological fossils stored in the mind without serving any purpose, when in fact they played an active and vital role, as we will see in a future article on archetypes.
For this reason, Jung later says the following, with which we conclude this article:
There are no “dead” or meaningless remnants. They still function, and they are particularly valuable (as Dr. Henderson shows in the next chapter of this book) precisely because of their “historical” nature. They form a bridge between the ways in which we consciously express our thoughts and a more primitive, more colourful and pictorial mode of expression.
This confirms exactly what we have been saying.
These “archaic remnants” are still alive and continue to shape our psyche.
If they appear again and again in dreams, myths, religions, and great works of art, it is because they continue to serve an essential psychological function and are not merely “leftovers,” as Freud’s terminology might suggest.
Finally, if the meaning and function of symbols were still unclear, Jung explains here that they unite two worlds that normally remain separate.
On the one hand is rational consciousness, where we think through concepts, definitions, and logical reasoning.
On the other is what he calls “a more primitive, more colourful and pictorial mode of expression,” which is nothing less than our deepest nature, the patterns of human behavior engraved into our very genes.
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