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The Psychology of the Collective Unconscious

11 1
17.01.2026

Written by Mark Shelvock and Angela Waterfield.

"Our separation from each other is an optical illusion of consciousness." - Albert Einstein

The human psyche is not confined to the individual body, and much of your inner life was already waiting for you before you were even born.

Because across cultures, human beings reliably experience the same core emotional systems, particularly around grief, fear, anger, joy, love, shame, and awe, amongst others. Beyond universal emotions, human societies have independently generated remarkably similar symbolic imagery and shared stories, a pattern carefully documented by Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist.

Parent-child bonds, floods, underworlds, sacrifice, death, heroes, angels, wizards, and shadows appear frequently throughout fairy tales, myths, religions, and modern storytelling. These archetypal expressions occur across time, history, geography, and space, reflecting inherited structures for meaning-making that operate beneath conscious awareness.

During times of widespread stress, research demonstrates that dream content among large groups begins to converge around similar psychological concerns. Studies conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic found that common dream themes centered on human threat, death, fear, and loss. Threat-related motifs, such as being chased or attacked, also appear among the most frequently reported dream themes across cultures, revealing how the collective unconscious processes distress through shared symbolic experiences.

These patterns are not random, nor are they merely cultural accidents. They point toward something deeper… a shared psychological inheritance that quietly shapes experience across generations and civilizations.........

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