/>Since humans must to some extent carry a burden of racial feelings and collective archetypes as well as the complexes of the personal unconscious, will they still be regarded as personalities or at least sound individuals without the “pathological overlapping”. As Jung states the collective unconscious is (no more no less) an inborn racial basis for personality’s structure. And according to Jung it cultivates the personal unconscious and other individual acquisitions. Well, it seems that even what an individual believes to be the result of his empirical experience, is actually determined by the collective unconscious and its chief or
selective influence on the individual’s behavior all through his lifetime.
But is that really the case? It’s hard to dispute the fact, that since all human beings have always had a mother, every infant is born with certain instinctive perceptions of her. But it’s not just characteristic of human species. A child who is regularly given milk from a bottle with a nipple by an orphanage worker may confuse the latter with his mother just like a famous gosling (classical example from animal psychology) taking every toy or a ball for his mother and following it everywhere. Jung asserts that this acquired awareness of one’s mother, so crucial for an individual, could be the realization of his inherent potential, “built” into human brain by his past racial experience. Possibly so. But how does this make us different from animals, the latter having no sign of the collective unconscious, but simply possessing inborn instincts and reflexes just like humans.
If we were to accept Jung’s theory without reservation, our perception of the world is primarily formed by the collective unconscious,
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