The Collective Unconscious in the Room (Part 1)

Notes From Training: How I Started to Hear the Collective Unconscious in the Room

In this first page dedicated to the collective unconscious, I begin from the intuition that it stretches across generations and cultures, and perhaps even into the furthest reaches of the psyche. The collective unconscious has by no means been fully mapped; it is far denser and more mysterious than we currently understand. What we do know is that it is inhabited by archetypes and recurring patterns, and that those who work with this material can often recognise when an archetype is at work, using us as its actors and our relationships and institutions as its theatre.

In this section, which will form a substantial part of my studies, I will explore some of the key structures of the collective unconscious and examine how archetypes are shaped and reshaped over time, passed from generation to generation. This page is only a first doorway into a much larger terrain.

When I began psychotherapy training, I thought I’d mostly be learning technique: how to reflect, how to pace, how to hold silence, how to work with anxiety without rushing in to rescue it. I did learn all of that. But something else happened over time. I started noticing that different clients different ages, cultures, life stories would arrive carrying problems that looked personal on the surface, yet felt strangely ancient in shape.

Not ancient as in “mystical,” but ancient as in: humans have been living this pattern for a very long time.

This is the place where Jung’s language of the collective unconscious started making sense to me not as a supernatural claim, but as a way to describe how certain psychological structures reappear across lives, and therefore across stories. Jung’s point (as I now hold it) is that beneath our personal biography there are deep organising templates archetypal patterns that help the psyche make meaning out of recurring human pressures: attachment and separation, rivalry and belonging, power and shame, desire and loss. [1], [2], [3].

The first time I really “saw” an archetype

Early in training, I remember hearing the same emotional architecture again and again, even when the plot was different.

One client came in with a stable job and a quiet life, yet lived with a constant inner voice that said, “You are failing, and you’re about to be exposed.” Another client was outwardly chaotic relationships on fire, impulsive choices but underneath was the same dread: “I’ll be found out and left.” Different life circumstances. Same deep fear.

I didn’t call it an archetype at the time. I just felt the repetition. Later, when I returned to Jung, it clicked: archetypes are not costumes, they are forms the psychological “shape” that shows up again and again, generating familiar images, emotions, and relational moves. [1], [3]

How archetypes form over centuries

I don’t imagine archetypes being “invented” by one culture or one storyteller. I think they condense because human experience repeats, and because communities keep telling the stories that help them survive what repeats.

Over centuries, it can look like this:

• Life pressures repeat: birth, dependence, jealousy, betrayal, ageing, death, status struggle, exile, reconciliation. [4], [5]
• Narratives organise those pressures: we turn raw events into tellable sequences who did what, why it mattered, what it cost. [6]
• Ritual reinforces what works: communities repeat the narrative in ritual and norm, because repetition stabilises meaning. [7], [8], [9]
• Symbols compress the story: complex experience collapses into portable images doorways, journeys, monsters, crowns, floods, deserts, forbidden rooms. [4], [5]
• The archetype remains as the template: later generations change the costume, but the psychological structure stays recognisable. [1], [4]

Studying comparative myth and narrative structure made me respect that these patterns aren’t just “ideas.” They’re robust because they solve recurring problems psychologically and socially. [4], [10], [11]

What this looked like in the consulting room

As training progressed, I began noticing a small set of repeating “mythic shapes” appearing in clinical language, even when neither I nor the client used mythic words.

The Orphan / Exile pattern

Clients who felt unchosen, peripheral, replaceable. They’d describe a childhood that taught them: belonging is conditional. Later, in adult life, that template reappeared as people-pleasing, vigilance, and relationships that couldn’t rest. The surface content varied; the deep structure was consistent: attachment insecurity organising the entire personality. This is where attachment theory gave me a second lens that sits well beside Jung: archetypal “exile” often maps to real relational histories. [12], [13].

The Shadow pattern

Over time, I began hearing “shadow” not as a spooky thing, but as a clinical reality: disowned aggression, disowned need, disowned sexuality, disowned envy. People didn’t come in saying “my shadow is active.” They came in saying, “I don’t know why I do this,” or, “I’m not that kind of person.” Yet the body knew. The psyche kept returning to what had been banished.

Jung’s language helped me hold this without moralising it. “Shadow” became a compassionate concept: not evil, but unintegrated life seeking a place in consciousness. [1], [2]

The Lover pattern

Some clients suffered not because they “made bad choices,” but because desire carried a demand: save me, choose me, make me real. When love becomes salvation, the nervous system doesn’t negotiate; it clings, collapses, or tests. This is where I found it helpful to think of archetypal energy as something that can “possess” the ego again, not mystically, but psychologically: when intensity overrides reflective capacity. [3], [14]

The King / Authority pattern

I also saw how many struggles with bosses, institutions, and authority figures were not only present-day conflicts but re-enactments of the psyche’s relationship with “the Father,” “the Law,” “the Crown.” Sometimes the authority was tyrannical; sometimes it was absent; sometimes the client was secretly trying to become authority to avoid feeling small. Mythic language made it easier to speak about power without collapsing into blame. [5], [9], [11]

My own training as a modern ritual

A thing I didn’t expect: training itself started to feel like a rite of passage not because it’s dramatic, but because it changes your inner organisation.

Van Gennep’s and Turner’s work on rites of passage helped me name the arc: separation (you enter training), liminality (you are no longer who you were, not yet who you’ll be), and reintegration (you can carry responsibility differently). [8], [9]

Supervision, in this sense, is part of the ritual container: it is where raw clinical material is processed so it doesn’t leak into enactment. It’s where the archetypal charge gets metabolised into thought, ethics, and choice.

How stories shape what clients can feel

Another shift happened: I began noticing that clients don’t only carry feelings they carry stories that permit or forbid feelings.

Some people had a story that allowed anger but forbade grief. Others allowed competence but forbade need. Others allowed caretaking but forbade receiving. These story-rules are often inherited through family culture and wider culture what Durkheim might call collective forces shaping individual experience. [7]

Assmann’s work on cultural memory helped me hold how “personal” pain can be transmitted through language, tradition, and family narrative without requiring any mystical explanation. Culture remembers, and people live inside what culture remembers. [6]

A careful claim about the collective unconscious

So where do I land now?

I hold the “collective unconscious” as a useful name for this reality: across time, humans keep meeting similar existential problems, and the psyche keeps producing similar solutions in image and narrative. Those solutions become shared cultural material, and the shared material in turn shapes the psyche. It’s a loop.

You don’t have to believe in a literal psychic warehouse of ancient content to see the phenomenon. You can observe it clinically: certain patterns recur with such consistency that they behave like deep templates. [1], [4], [11], [12]

What it changed in my work with clients

Archetypal thinking made me less moralistic and more curious.

When a client repeats a destructive relational pattern, I’m less likely now to treat it as “bad decision-making” and more likely to ask:

• What template is trying to complete itself here? [1]
• What was disallowed, and is now returning through symptom or compulsion? [2]
• What does the nervous system expect will happen if they stop performing the old story? [12], [13]
• What would integration look like, not as perfection, but as increased choice? [14]

This is where the whole thing becomes practical: archetypes aren’t there to make life poetic. They’re there to make life intelligible, so that a person can step out of compulsive repetition and into agency.

💡A final note on confidentiality

When I reflect on “clients I’ve seen,” I’m always speaking in composites blurred details, mixed stories because the point isn’t the biography. The point is the pattern. And in that sense, archetypal work is respectful: it protects the person while clarifying the structure.

References (Books)

1. Jung, C. G. (1981). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
2. Jung, C. G. (1966). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 7). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 
3. Jung, C. G. (1964). Man and His Symbols. London: Aldus Books. 
4. Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Books.
5. Eliade, M. (1963). Myth and Reality. New York: Harper & Row.
6. Assmann, J. (2011). Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
7. Durkheim, É. (1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. New York: Free Press. (Original work published 1912). 
8. van Gennep, A. (1960). The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1909). 
9. Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. 
10. Propp, V. (1968). Morphology of the Folktale (2nd ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
11. Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books. 
12. Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1: Attachment. New York: Basic Books. 
13. Ainsworth, M. D. S., Blehar, M. C., Waters, E., & Wall, S. (1978). Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 
14. Hillman, J. (1996). The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling. New York: Random House.