Is the Collective Unconscious Proven?

It is difficult to prove the existence of the collective unconscious and its archetypes because we cannot measure and weigh it, but one can deduce that the hypothesis is correct. The theory that animals have innate behavior patterns is widely accepted in biology and ethology. The idea that humans also have them is a more controversial issue because culture and consciousness play a greater role, but see for example Donald E. Brown's "List of Human Universals." The more we learn about human nature, the stronger the argument becomes that innate traits such as genes determine our behavior, abilities, choices, and broadly our lives. One could say that archetypes are the psychological side of instincts.

Already when Jung worked as a young psychiatrist at the Burghölzli mental hospital, he observed that people had dreams, visions and notions that could not be explained by individual history; instead images and themes constantly emerged from the unconscious as something entirely foreign to the individual's consciousness and personal unconsciousness. This content, he noted, formed typical, universally human themes and patterns recognized from myths and other more or less religious notions from around the world.

Characteristic of the psychology of the collective unconscious are precisely its mythological motifs. Jung argued that one can consequently study the collective unconscious either through its projections (myths, folktales, alchemy, astrology, etc.) or through individual analysis. This is briefly why his books are filled with imagery from obscure sources along with individual experiences.

Since we are talking about the unconscious, the subject becomes more elusive than, for example, innate physical behavior patterns. But just as ethology has shown that animals have innate behavior patterns, and anthropology that humans have universal cultural patterns, analytical psychology has shown that humans have an innate psychological foundational structure. For various reasons, however, the latter has not yet been widely academically accepted.

How can we see that this holds true in modern society? Today we lack a mythology, a connection to the mythological symbols of the collective unconscious. Since we still have this unconscious layer within us, we project it onto other areas than religion. A good example Jung writes about is UFOs – these ”technological angels” who descend from the sky at any moment to save us. One can observe that ufology has a clear, often pronounced spiritual dimension, even though an UFO essentially is "nuts and bolts."

Today we seek, as humans have always done, meaning, a context in something greater than ourselves (as the collective unconscious is) and explanations through stories. But since we no longer have a natural outlet for these symbols, we cling to sects (in the broad sense), occultism, conspiracy theories, ideologies, and so forth, which unfortunately tend not to be productive. Or on the other hand, we may feel emptiness, meaninglessness, and incomprehensible anxiety because we lack contact with our psychological foundation.

This text, of course, does not prove the existence of the collective unconscious. One reason why Jung's works are often complex and sometimes seem to go in circles (or rather spirals) is precisely that we cannot investigate and describe the archetypes as such, but can only describe them by studying their effects – just as we cannot prove the root cause of why spiders spin webs even though no one has taught them to do it, we can only state that it is so and infer that it is an innate trait.

This "weakness" in the argument is not unique to the collective unconscious and its archetypes but applies to psychology in general, as it is an entirely subjective phenomenon. Everyone with life experience and understanding of the concept knows that projections occur, but no one can prove a projection; I can tell a dream I had, but I cannot prove that I actually had it, and so on.

For example, I had a dream when I was four or five years old with a mythological content that was frightening and incomprehensible. Only decades later did I finally understand what the archetypal imagery conveyed, with insights into what we can call "The Archetype of the Cabeiri." It is impossible to understand the whole thing without the hypothesis of the collective unconscious and knowledge of the archetype theory. But while I can tell about it in a convincing way, I cannot even prove that the dream was real. So a certain uncertainty lies in the nature of the subject.