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The way we see this whole mess is as resulting from misunderstanding the contents of the personal unconscious and questioning the latter’s very existence and what actually constitutes a personality. Could the essence of the latter be based on various thoughts, feelings, memories, child’s emotions etc.? And could in fact such short term psychological phenomena lay the foundation for a stable system? After all any personality always presents a certain system, something constant, the core, though being somewhat modified due to one’s life situation, but not with a speed of continually changing thoughts, feelings and emotions.
Jung clarifies the above statement in that the collective unconscious is universal due to the fact that all races show similar brain structure resulting from evolution’s generality. Fairly logical as it may seem at first blush, this doesn’t explain why despite the collective archetypes’ effect on an individual on a subconscious level and that of social stereotypes’ on a conscious one, he demonstrates such a great variety of reactions to collective values. Jung maintains that racial memories or representations are not hereditary as such: more likely we inherit the very possibility of reliving the experience of previous generations and they function like inclinations which make an individual react to the world in a manner as if inherited. Then why some individuals are willing to take advantage of their forefathers’ experience, while others are not? What factor determines if a human should make use of his “heritage” or act in his own original way? Here we are not considering his instincts or reflexes which might be quite appropriately added as part of the collective unconscious being common to all types.
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