Collective unconscious - a term thatintroduced into psychology student and follower, and later opponent of Z. Freud Karl Gustav Jung in the early twentieth century. According to the psychologist, human consciousness, which is an indispensable condition for its full-fledged, activity-based existence, is only a small upper layer. Beneath it is another, more extensive one, which contains forgotten or suppressed personal memories, feelings and patterns of behavior, designated by Jung as a personal or individual unconscious. Under this second layer there is a vast and immensely more ancient layer, consisting of patterns of behavior and images that have been formed and repeatedly repeated in the process of the cultural and historical development of all mankind. This layer Jung designated as the manifestation of an objective and collective soul and later called the "collective unconscious", because it consists of behavioral forms and images accessible to all living on earth, but not acquired by man during life, and it is impossible to embrace consciousness.
The reason for this hypothesis wasobservation of one patient of a psychiatric clinic. Exploring her painful fantasies and images of dreams, Jung discovered many parallels between them and the myths of different cultures and peoples that the patient never read or knew. This could only be explained by the existence of a collective subconscious of the soul, feeding mythological images of man's fantasy and dream.
The unconscious in the human psyche has been studiedin ancient times. In the early twentieth century, psychoanalysts Z. Freud, and then K.-G.Young, took up this problem more deeply. They showed that the problem of the unconscious is very significant, that the information that is realized by the person is only a small part of the vast whole.
The unconscious in the human psyche isa set of mental phenomena, patterns of behavior, states that can not be comprehended and controlled. These can be attitudes, instincts, unconscious inclinations, intuitive thinking, creative insight, hypnotic states or dreams, etc.
The theories of Freud and Jung, formed by them in the study of the unconscious and its role in human behavior, are still the starting points in the study of this complex mental phenomenon.
H.Freud singled out the three main sources of manifestation of the unconscious - dreams, neuroses and erroneous actions, for the study of which he applied the method of free associations and analysis, which made it possible to reveal the experiences hidden in the subconscious. What did Freud mean by each of the forms he singled out?
He believed that during sleep control of consciousnessthe person is reduced and images from the sphere of the unconscious are blocked, blocked in a waking state. Neurosis is the result of the destructive influence of foci concentrated in the subconscious, displaced by the consciousness of traumatic situations that destroy the human psyche. The equally disastrous consequences are caused by the unpleasant situations displaced by the consciousness, accompanying the everyday life of the person and manifesting themselves in erroneous actions - clerks, reservations, forgetting events and names, etc.
As already noted K.-G.Jung identified three levels of the human psyche: consciousness, personal and collective unconscious. The latter, in his opinion, is formed from the collective memory of all past generations of people. In the psyche of an individual person, the collective unconscious manifests itself in the form of archetypes - common to all images and ideas emotionally experienced by each individual.
Despite numerous studies of natureunconscious, holistic, unifying theories about its mechanisms and structure is still not there, which is undoubtedly associated with the complexity of studying this psychological and psychic phenomenon.
