I had a great conversation on New Years day with two psychologists who had seen the recent film “A Dangerous Method”, about the fraught relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. I was fascinated to learn about the fundamental differences in philosophy between Freud and Jung. It seemed that these differences stemmed largely from contrasting views of the collective unconscious.
After listening for a while, I suggested the following analogy: To Freud, the collective unconscious is like a giant power line. When the connection is compromised between a person’s conscious mind and the collective unconscious, then the conscious mind can’t draw enough power to function properly. Therapy essentially repairs this connection to the power grid.
To Jung, the collective unconscious is not like a power line, but rather like the Internet. Down there in the collective unconscious, we’re all sending each other internet packets. Your conscious mind is your local computer, and therapy improves your bandwidth to the Internet.
Yes, the psychologists replied, that’s pretty much it.