and images which are part of the collective unconscious. To Jung the same archetype could be equally applied to whole nations and eras.
After conducting research on Greek mythology and analyzing the dreams of mentally ill Africans, Jung came to a theory that major mythological motifs are common for all races at all times. He thought of the collective (or “racial”) unconscious as hereditary, interpersonal and resulting from human evolution. The contents of the former are called archetypes. By Jung’s own definition an archetype is “a symbolic formula functioning whenever the concept of the conscious is either yet non-existent or altogether impossible”, it’s a certain “instinctive vector, a pointed trend, the one, which forces birds to build their nests and ants to erect anthills” [1; 65]. We consider the above definition to be quite accurate, although, as opposed to ants and birds, the author of analytical psychology for some reason denies humans their own “individual destination, with no connection to mankind’s general purpose as a species. While agreeing with the existence of Jung’s archetypical matrix as “infinitely ancient in psychic origin”, we still feel that it contains images of an individual archetypical human pattern, rather than those of the collective unconscious, common to everyone.
Jung believed that people are born with most hereditary traits, inherited from their ancestors, these traits being a main factor in controlling people’s behaviour and partially in determining their character, psychic structure and possible reactions. We, on the other hand, think that the collective unconscious, though not without its obvious effect, does not control one’s behaviour and does not determine one’s reactions and
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