Archetypes of the Unconscious

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, and the founder of Analytic Psychology.  His most notable ideas include the concept of psychological Archetypes, and the Collective Unconscious.  These ideas serve as a foundational basis for my own understanding of Horror.

I believe that most of our fears reside in the Unconscious.

In the Jungian psychological model, the waking conscious mind is termed the Ego.  Below the Ego, below the Threshold of Consciousness, is the Unconscious mind.  The Unconscious mind is comprised of two parts: the Personal Unconscious, or Shadow Self, and the Collective Unconscious, which can be described as the wisdom consciousness of the body itself.  All contents of the Personal Unconscious are derived from personal experience.  The Personal Unconscious is that about yourself of which your Ego is completely unaware, of which it has no knowledge whatsoever.  This Shadow Self, in Jung’s terminology, corresponds almost precisely to the Freudian Unconscious.  The Freudian Unconscious is comprised of repressed experiences, repressed shocks that the infant, and later, the growing child has experienced.  The psyche puts these things so far out of sight that our waking consciousness is completely unaware of them. The shocks that have upset and transformed the life experience of one individual will not be precisely the same as those of another.

However, Jung suggests that the Personal Unconscious is not the deepest layer.  There is another layer to our Unconscious, which Jung calls the Collective Unconscious.  This aspect of the Unconscious does not derive from personal experience.  Rather, it contains impersonal components in the form of inherited categories that are manifested and recognized by all people in all cultures.  Jung refers to these categories of the Collective Unconscious as Archetypes of the Unconscious.  An Archetype is a generic collective image that we all share.  According to Jung, the Collective Unconscious is comprised of these Archetypes of The Unconscious.  These are, in some way, perennial features in the Unconscious mind of the human animal – an inheritable memory comprised of collective human experiences reaching back into prehistory.  Experiences that come in through the nervous system are assimilated and interpreted in terms of these basic psychological Archetypes.  It is the role of the Ego to try and make sense of the relationship between the conditions of the external environment and the invisible interpretive nature of the Unconscious. The Collective Unconscious is a function of the biology of the body.  It is the bedrock upon which the Personal Unconscious rests.

So we have two things here – a basic human biology, and also a system of individual experiences.  Both are located in the Unconscious realm, as far as our Ego knowledge is concerned.  Carl Jung thought it of paramount importance to make contact with the Unconscious by examining the content of dreams, fantasies, and artistic expression. According to Jung, the Ego gains knowledge of the Unconscious by way of Projections. Jung defined a Projection as an objectified representation of the contents of the Unconscious. A Projection enables a subject to apprehend and potentially recognize aspects of the psyche that are still unconscious. You really don’t know what’s going on down there until you experience it by way of a Projection.

Horror, as an art form, draws it’s power from the Unconscious.

Horror is a Projection of the fears that lay hidden in the Unconscious.

I make photographs that illustrate childhood fears.  If the Shadow Self is the rejected frightening aspect of our personal experience, then when a viewer is frightened by one of my images, it is because the image has allowed the viewer to experience a Projection from their Shadow Self, their own Personal Unconscious.  They are remembering something that they used to be frightened of, but had forgotten about.  They are re-experiencing a fear that has been repressed since childhood.

However, I believe that the fear they are re-experiencing originates from the biological Collective Unconscious.  Our fears as children are primal in nature.  Fear of the dark, fear of lurking danger, fear of being eaten.  I regard my photographs as culturally inflected variations on primal fears that arise from our biological Collective Unconscious.  I just use the mechanism of the Shadow Self to bring it all back to you.  No need to thank me.  It’s my pleasure.

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Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

• The Personal Unconscious
• Prayer and The Archetype
• SHADOW: The Deficient or Negative Ego (Jungian thoughts)
• Beyond Mom: Who needs sleep, anyway?