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I think with movies I am really connecting to the Joseph Campbell idea of the collective unconscious.
Sep 24, 2025
The writing is the springboard for your intuitive stuff and then you see, maybe a colour of what you want to achieve. Then you bring in the technique you've learnt. But when you're on film, you're not always in control of that. That's what makes me believe in a kind of collective unconscious, a sort of experience you draw on.
I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive.
I'm just trying to make a smudge on the collective unconscious.
it is a shoe designer's job to be a year ahead of our collective unconscious.
Science and Technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response. Expelled from individual consciousness by the rush of change, history finds its revenge by stamping the collective unconscious with habits, values, expectations, dreams. The dialectic between past and future will continue to form our lives.
In my own life, I think legends of supernatural, mythic things are really just a manifestation of the collective unconscious. So I don't really get freaked out. I mean certainly, you read about things people did to each other in the pursuit of some mystical or occult goal, and it's horrifying. But that's just human nature.
Summertime, I think, is a collective unconscious. We all remember the notes that made up the song of the ice cream man; we all know what it feels like to brand our thighs on a playground slide that's heated up like a knife in a fire; we all have lain on our backs with our eyes closed and our hearts beating across the surface of our lids, hoping that this day will stretch just a little longer than the last one, when in fact it's all going in the other direction.
I'm just trying to rid the world of all these fevered egos that are tainting our collective unconscious.
Jung even asserted that he would have no objection to regarding the psyche as a quality of matter and matter as a concrete aspect of the psyche, provided that the psyche was understood to be the collective unconscious.
Male domination is so rooted in our collective unconscious that we no longer even see it.
The purpose of ritual is to wake up the old mind in us, to put it to work. The old ones inside us, the collective unconscious, the many lives, the divine eternal parts, the senses and parts of the brain that have been ignored.
The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.
You have many years ahead of you to create the dreams that we can't even imagine dreaming. You have done more for the collective unconscious of this planet than you will ever know.
The God-image in man was not destroyed by the Fall but was only damaged and corrupted (“deformed”), and can be restored through God's grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the descensus ad inferos, the descent of Christ's soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. The psychological equivalent of this is the integration of the collective unconscious which forms an essential part of the individuation process.
There is no birth of consciousness without pain.
I cannot define for you what God is. I can only say that my work has proved empirically that the pattern of God exists in every man and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest of all his energies for transformation and transfiguration of his natural being. Not only the meaning of his life but his renewal and his institutions depend on his conscious relationship with this pattern of his collective unconscious.
To die is to go into the Collective Unconscious, to lose oneself in order to be transformed into form, pure form.
The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.
The world of gods and spirits is truly 'nothing but' the collective unconscious inside me.
The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.
The problem of synchronicity has puzzled me for a long time, ever since the middle twenties, when I was investigating the phenomena of the collective unconscious and kept on coming across connections which I simply could not explain as chance groupings or "runs." What I found were "coincidences" which were connected so meaningfully that their "chance" concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure.
I'm always gratified when I check something I've made up and discover that I've gotten it right. How can we imagine something that turns out to be true? How can we know things we couldn't possibly know? It makes me wonder about the existence of a collective unconscious.
Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.
America was founded by puritans and like it or not the anti-pleasure dogma of those buckled-shoed killjoys still pervades our collective unconscious like an I-max shot of Dennis Franz's naked hairy cop ass. Hence, anything enjoyable is automatically forbidden and bad and in our panic to avoid it at all cost we become obsessed with it... like dressing up in a pink teddy and a pair of ugboots and repeatedly screaming the word 'VERBOTEN!' into a conk shell balanced on the back on a miniature pony... Oh, I see.. That would just be me.
The collective unconscious appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious. We can see this most clearly if we look at the heavenly constellations, whose originally chaotic forms are organized through the projection of images. This explains the influence of the stars as asserted by astrologers. These influences are nothing but unconscious instrospective perceptions of the collective unconscious.
In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious
Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense— he is "collective man"— one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind.
...The Western 'God-image' is a representation of the collective unconscious, an archetype of the psyche that undergoes a continual process of transformation...The God image evolves through its relationship to humanity. Whoever knows God has an effect on 'him'. For the individual, knowing God, is the process of recognizing and assimilating the pressured and paradoxical contents of the self, which come to consciousness- seek incarnation- within the ego.
For me Esoteric Hitlerism is being possessed by the archetypes of the collective unconscious which the Greeks used to call gods.
Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture.
Antarctica has this mythic weight. It resides in the collective unconscious of so many people, and it makes this huge impact, just like outer space. It's like going to the moon.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
Ancient eschatological texts are actually maps of the inner territories of the psyche that seem to transcend race and culture and originate in the collective unconscious.
The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands.
I like to use the term alchemy, which is the soul of the world, or those of Jung's collective unconscious. You connect with a space where everything is.
The great problems of life — sexuality, of course, among others — are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marveled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence.
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together.
The Internet has usurped the collective unconscious and access to cosmic consciousness has become difficult and almost primitive.
For me, synchronicity is a way of confirming the rightness of action. It is only in its absence that I realize I'm out of kilter with, for want of a better term, the collective unconscious.
America certainly has made extraordinary progress. The collective unconscious of the nation has certainly shifted as a result of the civil rights movement and the developments in the '70s and '80s. We have witnessed a great expansion of the black middle class.
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