“The form of the world into which he is born is already inborn in him as a virtual image. Likewise parents, wife, children, birth, and death are inborn in him as virtual images.” – C. G. Jung (CW 7, par. 717)
The collective unconscious, with its myriad conceptual archetypal powers and patterns, is a theoretical concept, useful for explaining elements of the human experience. While we cannot put the collective unconscious under a microscope, we can consider the elements of this conceptual reality by considering our own daily experience.
Without an archetypal unconscious, for example, we would not make sense of any sensory stimuli—know an object as being in the world, recognize its shape, or distance. We would not even recognize the concept of distance at all. The invisible and unknowable collective unconscious is a kind of precondition for consciousness—it frames it, shapes it, and enables it. Kant referred to the preconditioning frameworks as a priori categories. These preformed understandings for life experience provide a useful framework for recognizing experience “out there.”
If Jung is right, relationships “out there,” would also be elements of our a priori understanding. We are born ready to be receptive to the nature of “family” and “home.” We are receptive to the experience of a mother. How the actual experience goes, whether a mother is loving or cruel, present or absent, engenders what Jung called a “mother complex.”
But some of our frameworks transcend the tangibly real. With some archetypes, we are framed by inward “intangibles” like values and meanings. We recognize justice, fairness, goodness, truth, beauty, and we are born to recognize them as part of our reality. We are preconditioned to know these as real, just as we have an a priori capacity to understand squiggly lines on paper as words, and words that can be combined into meaningful aggregations. We must build our understanding of all of those intangibles through learning and life experience, but the container, the framework arranged by the archetypes, would be a precondition for that learning.
We could say that the function of the collective unconscious could be considered “bifurcated.” It plays at least two essential roles for living: it enables us to experience life out there in the world, and it enables us to grasp intangible meanings and values in there—the inner life where images, ideas, ideals, meanings, and visions, influence and motivate human experience.
Jung’s simple compass of psychological types is useful for navigating these these two fundamental orientations of consciousness. Three of the extraverted types engage in what is “out there.” They are preconditioned to address what exists out there now, or has been out there in the past. They form the basis, for example, of scientific materialism—a mode of consciousness that recognizes life as that which is tangibly discernible.
Three of Jung’s types are attentive to what is “in there.” They consider images, visions, ideas, and ideals. That which is outwardly tangible may exist and may be part of their conscious processes, but the tangible is always subordinate to the intangible. These three are most concerned with what is imaginatively possible—with the new, the original, and often with the numinous and mystical. For them, the outer life is real, but what they are attentive to inwardly is more real than real.
Then two other composite types bridge both the outward and inward orientations. They deal with what is tangible, but with a high degree of imagination. They, too, give birth to the new and original, but they are limited by the objects of their attention.
No one is born with exclusive attention either inwardly or outwardly. Such a person, Jung said, would be a “candidate for a lunatic asylum.” All eight types are required for a fully unified personality.