Freudian Subconscious vs Jungian Unconscious

Discussion

1. Andrew Sweeny:

(Sweeny is citing another online discussion)

"[The archetypes are] structural forms that underlie [prenatal] concsiousness as the crystal lattice underlies the crystalization process." (C. G. Jung, Collected Letters, Vol. 2, page 418)

Jung's concept of the collective unconscious (or what I'll abbreviate as the "CU") is widely misunderstood to be the same as Freud's notion of the so-called "subconscious." The difference, however, between the prefixes "un-" and "sub-", in this context, is substantial -- as the following descriptions show:

The Freudian SUBconscious. By this, Freud (not Jung) meant the "garbage can" into which the conscious mind stuffs down all of the primitive sexual impulses arising from what he called the "Id." These "repressed" impulses, according to Freud, continually threaten to re-enter consciousness where they are unacceptable.

The Jungian UNconscious. Jung, on the other hand, did not conceive of the unconscious as a personal "garbage can" for repressed sexuality, but as a vast, primordial resevoir of collective, psychospiritual instincts which he called the "archetypes." He further claimed that it is these archetypes -- these inherited psycospiritual instincts -- that shape our personal, interpersonal and transpersonal motives and behavior.

Thus, while Freud viewed the sub-bconscious as that place into which unacceptable, sexual impulses are PUSHED DOWN, Jung saw the un-conscious as a vast, collective resevoir from which all inherited, human instincts -- including the religious and creative -- COME UP. Jung's genius here was to propose that not only sexual impulses were instinctual and inherited, but also religious, creative, and spiritual instincts as well. Thus, according to Jung, not only the will-to-propagate (for example) is instinctual and inherited, but also the Will-to-God. The *forms* in which such psychospiritual instincts are inherited, Jung called the "archetypes."

Over and over again, Jung stresses that the archetypes -- such as God, Satan, Christ, Spirit, etc. -- are not culturally determined, as commonly believed, but passed on through the "psychoid" (or genes) from generation to generation as what he called "collective mythologems." This is neither surprising nor farfetched given what we currently know about the vast amount of supra-biological information actually carried and transmitted by the human genes.

In a letter to Bernard Milt, dated 13 April 1946, Jung defines these archetypes as, "structural forms that underlie [prenatal] concsiousness as the crystal lattice underlies the crystalization process." (Collected Letters, Vol. 2, page 418) In other words, they exist as formless potentialities in the cosmic, "prenatal consciousness" of psycic mitosis. These formless potentialities, the archetypes, only take form, or "crystalize," during the stages of postnatal consciousness in which the Ego differentiates from the Self through a process of psychic acculturation, as shown below. Thus, the form and not the substance of the archetype is "culturally determined."

Moreover, Jung states that there is a hierarchy of archetypes, ranging from the "lowest" and purely psychological in nature, to the "highest" and Spiritual. These compare to the color spectrum which ranges from the lowest vibration of red, through higher vibrations of orange and blue, to the highest vibration of white. Examples of higher archetypes would be "God" and "Spirit," while lower archetypes would be "boss" and "employee," with those in the midrange being such as "friend" and "trickster." It is extremely important to note, however, that ALL archetypes are merely special cases of the Self, in which regard, they are much like the pseudopodia of a single-celled amoebia.

Finally, in most of his work, Jung deals with what he calls the "transformation of God," or "continuing incarnation" -- that is, the way in which the transpersonal Self is modified and altered by its encounter with human consciousness, or the "Ego," to which it has given birth. Regarding this, and to quote Jung's "St. Paul," the late Edward Edinger:

"As it gradually dawns on people, one by one, that the transformation of God is not just an interesting idea but is a living reality, it may begin to function as a new myth. Whoever recognizes this myth as his own personal reality will put his life in the service of this process. Such an individual offers himself as a vessel for the incarnation of deity and thereby promotes the on-going transformation of God by giving him human manifestation." (Edward F. Edinger, The Creation of Consciousness, page 113.)"

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2. Cadell Last:

"Freud never uses the term subconscious.

I should know since I am analyzing almost every paper he has ever written.

In one of the latest papers he actually explicit criticizes use of the term subconscious (direct quote from a paper titled “THE UNCONSCIOUS” (1915)):

“We shall also be right in rejecting the term subconsciousness as incorrect and misleading. […]. In psychoanalysis there is no choice for us but to assert that mental processes are in themselves unconscious, and to liken the perception of them by means of consciousness to the perception of the external world by means of the sense-organs. […] The psychoanalytic assumption of unconscious mental activity appears to us, on the one hand, as a further expansion of the primitive animism which caused us to see copies of our own consciousness all around us, and, on the other hand, as an extension of the corrections undertaken by Kant of our views on external perception. Just as Kant warned us not to overlook the fact that our perceptions are subjectively conditioned and must not be regarded as identical with what is perceived though unknowable, so psychoanalysis warns us not to equate perceptions by means of consciousness with the unconscious mental processes which are their object."

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