ABSTRACT
Psychology is the science of the ‘psyche’, which can be translated as science of mind. For Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), one of the foremost theorists in the eld of psychology of religion, mind meant not only the conscious mind, but also the unconscious. Human beings were for Jung creatures of limitless depths, possessors of an unconscious psyche of which we are dimly aware and that we both seek and ee. Jung’s ‘unconscious’ is not Sigmund Freud’s ‘subconscious’, a repository for repressed instincts that the civilized self cannot own, but a ‘living fountain’, ‘the very source of the creative impulse’ (Jung [1947/54] 1969b: para. 339). e personal unconscious comprises:
everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want and do; all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness … (Ibid.: para. 185)
e waters of the personal unconscious ow to a wider and more mysterious sea: that of the collective unconscious. Jung was already speculating about the phenomenon of a collective psyche in his earliest writings, the product of his years as a psychiatrist at the Bürgholzi Clinic.
