Drawing from the fundamental works of Freud on the unconscious, Jung describes an experience with a particular patient that leads him to branch off and theorize the existence of the collective unconscious. For Jung, the collective unconscious is a space of unconscious thought and symbolic expression derived from intergenerational instincts and drives. More specifically, in psychoanalyzing the dreams of this particular patient, Jung begins to grapple with the idea that humans may have a longing for God rooted in the collective unconscious. Having evaluated my own unconscious in an attempt to verify Jung’s thesis, I find that although the concepts of the personal and collective unconscious are believable in the abstract, the idea that we as humans have an innate longing for God seems unevidenced and reliant upon an approach to psychoanalysis that is incredibly abstract and subjective in nature. Thus, although Jungian psychoanalysis is able to accurately describe the two distinct parts of the unconscious, it lacks the ability to defend the existence of any particular instinct as embedded in the human
Drawing from the fundamental works of Freud on the unconscious, Jung describes an experience with a particular patient that leads him to branch off and theorize the existence of the collective unconscious. For Jung, the collective unconscious is a space of unconscious thought and symbolic expression derived from intergenerational instincts and drives. More specifically, in psychoanalyzing the dreams of this particular patient, Jung begins to grapple with the idea that humans may have a longing for God rooted in the collective unconscious. Having evaluated my own unconscious in an attempt to verify Jung’s thesis, I find that although the concepts of the personal and collective unconscious are believable in the abstract, the idea that we as humans have an innate longing for God seems unevidenced and reliant upon an approach to psychoanalysis that is incredibly abstract and subjective in nature. Thus, although Jungian psychoanalysis is able to accurately describe the two distinct parts of the unconscious, it lacks the ability to defend the existence of any particular instinct as embedded in the human