14Chapter 11. Jung and the Collective Unconscious: When Psychiatry Met Myth

In 1913, thirty-eight-year-old Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), Switzerland’s leading psychiatrist, once Sigmund Freud’s favorite disciple and designated “heir,” but by then a man who had just broken with his mentor, began hearing voices.

He beheld fantastical visions. He conversed with figures who appeared before his mind’s eye—a wise old man he named Philemon, a being called Salome, and others. It seemed to him that Europe would soon be awash in a “sea of blood.” This was at the end of 1913—eight months before the outbreak of the First World War.

Jung plunged into what he would later call his “confrontation with the unconscious.” Hallucinations. Paranoid ideas. A warping of reality. In the language of modern psychiatry, this is a textbook psychotic episode. White coat, straitjacket, padded cell. But Jung was never hospitalized. Why? He didn’t lose his ability to function. By day — patients, lectures, books. By night — hell unfurled. He himself knew: what was happening to him was not normal. He didn’t surrender to madness — he walked straight into its black maw. Writing it down, sketching it, recording every blow from within. That is how the Red Book came to be — an illuminated calligraphic manuscript that kept its secret for nearly half a century. It would not be published until 2009, forty-eight years after his death.

This episode, which lasted from 1913 to 1919, became — by his own admission — the raw material for all his subsequent theoretical work. The images that came to him during those years formed the foundation of his concepts of the collective unconscious and the archetypes. Everything that Jungian analysis is famous for was, in essence, born out of this six-year “controlled psychotic era” of Jung’s life.

Here an important caveat is immediately in order. Modern psychiatry does not consider Jung to have been schizophrenic. The clinical picture doesn’t match. The criteria aren’t met. But how, then, to explain that chaos? Jung retained his professional and social functioning. He could “enter” and “exit” his experiences — step into the abyss and come back, shutting the door behind him. With schizophrenia, that is impossible. Most likely, it was a severe neurotic crisis with psychotic features. Body and mind writhed under colossal pressure: the break with Freud, clinical burnout, the threshold of midlife, the brewing of a world war.

But for our purposes, something else matters more. Jung is the only one among the major founders of depth psychology who had personal experience of psychotic states and used that experience as research material. When he later wrote about schizophrenia, he wrote not from the outside, as Freud did, but from within.

Jung’s path into psychiatry began long before the break with Freud. The year 1900. Jung is twenty-five. He crosses the threshold of the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich. The very one where Eugen Bleuler stands at the helm. Nine years Jung will spend within these walls. Nine years among madness. What is he searching for? During this time he writes his dissertation, conducts his famous word-association research, and finally strikes: he publishes his first major work — “The Psychology of Dementia Praecox” (Über die Psychologie der Dementia praecox, 1907).

This book is often dismissed. It is overshadowed by Jung’s later, “mystical” works. But it is precisely here, in the shadow of future myths, that a bomb lies buried. The book was entirely in keeping with the spirit of its time. Jung took the method he had honed in his association experiment and applied it directly to schizophrenic patients. How does it work? He gave the patient a list of stimulus words. One after another. And asked: say the first thing that comes to mind. Then he analyzed the substance of the responses. He measured reaction time. He studied the character of the answers. And — most importantly — he noted the moments where thought stumbled, where the connection snapped and strange, frightening associations surfaced. What lies hidden behind these breakdowns? Jung already knew the answer.

Jung concluded that behind every strange response lay a “complex”—an emotionally charged, often traumatic content that was not integrated into consciousness. In patients with early dementia, these complexes were particularly powerful and, according to Jung’s hypothesis, could directly penetrate consciousness, creating hallucinations and delusions.

This was a brilliant piece of clinical work. It had a direct influence on Bleuler, particularly in his choice of the term “schizophrenia”—“split mind,” referring to a mind in which various complexes exist in isolation, without integration.

In “The Psychology of Dementia Praecox,” Jung made a move that changed the game entirely. One assumption. One hypothesis that would later haunt him. He claimed: the schizophrenic’s complex produces a toxin. A substance. An invisible killer that attacks the healthy brain, paralyzing its normal functioning—and flings open the doors of consciousness. The unconscious bursts forth like dark water through a cracked dam. It was a boldness bordering on madness. But the resolution turned out differently. The toxin? It didn’t exist. No such substances were ever found. A shot in the dark. And later, Jung himself retreated, silently burying the idea.

And here—the moment on which everything hinges. Remember it. Jung. Bleuler. Freud. The scientists of that era. They weren’t afraid to propose biological hypotheses—even when they couldn’t test them. Courage? Yes. But not just that. Because what happened next was crucial. The hypothesis wasn’t empirically confirmed—and Jung discarded it. Without regret. Without reservation. He discarded it—and moved on. That’s called the scientific approach. Now look around. Modern esoteric schools cling to their ideas. Despite the lack of evidence. Despite everything. The same word—“hypothesis.” Two opposite worlds.

After his break with Freud in 1913 and following a personal psychotic crisis spanning from 1913 to 1919, Jung arrived at his mature theory.

Its main concepts can be formulated as follows.

The personal unconscious is what has been individually repressed from consciousness: forgotten traumas, suppressed desires, unacceptable thoughts. This is the domain Freud explored.

The collective unconscious—something deeper. Jung made a declaration that exploded the foundations of psychology: there exists a layer of the psyche that does not belong to the individual. It is common to all of humanity. But what lies at this depth? Universal psychic structures. Jung called them archetypes. They aren’t specific images but matrix-forms—invisible blueprints from which similar mythological motifs are cast, with eerie precision, across all the world’s cultures. Different continents—the same scripts. The names of these ancient entities are imprinted into the fabric of the mind: the Hero, the Shadow, the Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Great Mother. The Anima and the Animus—the eternal feminine hidden within the man, and the masculine concealed within the woman. And finally, crowning it all—the Self.

Jung arrived at this concept by observing two striking facts. First, his patients with schizophrenia often produced delusional and hallucinatory images that astonishingly matched mythological narratives from ancient cultures—cultures the patients could have known nothing about. Second, similar motifs appeared in the dreams of different people belonging to different cultures.

How could this be explained? Jung proposed that these motifs are innate. They are passed down not through learning but through the biological inheritance of the very structure of the human psyche. The brain, which has evolved over millions of years, contains “traces” of age-old shared human experiences—fear, love, loss, worship, rites of passage. These traces are the archetypes.

Schizophrenia. In this model, it is not a diagnosis. It is a catastrophe. The boundaries between the self and the collective unconscious thin, tear, and ultimately collapse. The patient is flooded with archetypal material. Foreign images surge into the mind like water through a breach. Their hallucinations and delusions are not a random collection of incoherent fragments. No. This is the invasion of collective content into the individual psyche. The patient is not insane in the banal sense. They are the ones in whom the dam has burst. They experience, in its pure, searing form, what is normally perceived only in a softened way through myths, art, and religious rituals.

This concept made a profound impression on the Western intellectual elite. Jung gained immense popularity—especially after World War II, when Europeans were searching for meaning in the wake of catastrophe. By the mid-20th century, he had become one of the most influential figures in culture—often mentioned alongside Freud and, less frequently, Einstein.

But—and this is critically important for our book—the scientific community, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, viewed Jung with skepticism. Why?

Because Jung’s central concept—the collective unconscious and archetypes—does not meet Popper’s criterion of falsifiability. Stop. What does that mean? Here’s what. It is impossible to conceive of an experiment. It is impossible to imagine an observation—any observation—that could disprove the hypothesis of the existence of archetypes. Let’s test it. Does a mythological motif appear in a patient’s dreams? The archetype is at work. Doesn’t appear? It’s working in a hidden way. Does an entirely different motif appear? That’s also an archetype, just a different one. The theory cannot be falsified. Ever. Therefore, it is not strictly scientific.

This does not mean that Jungian psychology is useless. It has yielded many subtle observations about the human psyche and made important contributions to the psychology of religion, the understanding of myth, literary studies, and cultural studies. But as a clinical discipline for treating psychoses, it—like classical psychoanalysis—has not passed rigorous scientific scrutiny.

Modern randomized controlled trials of Jungian analysis for schizophrenia are virtually nonexistent. What little exists does not demonstrate the superiority of Jungian methods over other forms of psychotherapy. And antipsychotics—drugs Jung never worked with—provide a far more predictable clinical effect.

But there is another, darker side to the Jung question. One that the psychiatric literature long skirted around, but that today deserves to be addressed head-on.

Jung became an intellectual source for a range of contemporary esoteric and pseudo-therapeutic schools—though not by his own design. He was not an esotericist in the charlatan sense. However, his language—archetypes, the collective unconscious, “wholeness of the psyche,” “individuation,” “synchronicity”—proved remarkably adaptable to loose reinterpretation.

When Tarot decks today are marketed as “Jungian Tarot.” When astrologers speak of the “archetype of Mars” in a client’s chart. When “systemic constellation” practitioners explain what’s happening in a constellation through the “activation of the Great Mother archetype.” When “past life regressionists” claim that a patient “encounters their Shadow” in their past lives. When “shamanic practices” and “women’s circles” cite Jung as their theoretical foundation.

Here is a confession few have heard. All of this is an abuse of Jung. Not interpretation. Not the development of ideas. Abuse. Jung himself was a man of strict academic culture. He wrote in the language of the times of Karl Jaspers and Martin Buber. He would never have approved of such use of his concepts. Never. He was a physician. Not a guru, not a mystic on stage. A physician methodically tied to the psychiatry of his era. And he demanded clinical caution from his students. Demanded—not requested. He wrote against what he called “spiritual inflation.” A state in which a person confuses their individual experiences with great spiritual truths. He saw this error. He named it. And he warned against it.

But history is relentless. Theories whose key concepts fail scrutiny instantly become the perfect tool for spiritual inflation. Hollow words. Untestable concepts. And thus—golden coins of counterfeit value are struck with alarming ease. Where did today’s esotericist acquire their vocabulary? A direct hit: from Jung. That is precisely where the terms were fished out, now scattered across the offices of practicing “constellation facilitators.” Ask them about the theoretical foundation of their method. What answer will you get? A diversionary pass: “It’s a Jungian approach.” The illusion of academic rigor, behind which lies—emptiness. What does any of this have to do with Jung? Exactly as much as an astrologer’s interpretation of “Uranian energy” has to do with nuclear physics.

And there’s another topic that cannot be avoided—Jung’s relationship with Nazism. It’s a sore point in his biography. In 1933–1934, Jung took the position of president of the International General Medical Psychotherapeutic Association—an organization that during this period submitted to the Nazi regime and expelled Jewish members from its German branches.

Jung defended himself until his last breath. His version sounded impeccable: he stayed in his position only to save lives. To help Jewish psychoanalysts. To preserve their ability to publish. To defend their interests. He insisted: I was never an antisemite. And some of his Jewish students—such as Erich Neumann—swore it was true. But words are just words. The truth always lies in the papers. 1933. 1934. Lines that send chills down the spine today. Between the lines pulses a diagnosis: discussions of differences between “Aryan” and “Jewish” psychologies. Formulations that are impossible to read today without physical discomfort. How could this be? A savant-savior or a cold-blooded conformist?

After the war, Jung publicly acknowledged his mistakes on this issue. He called his own formulations “stupid and unfair.” He continued to work with Jewish colleagues. In 1946, he published “After the Catastrophe” — an extended reflection on German collective guilt.

Why dredge this up now? Not to “cancel” Jung. We’re searching for something else. A warning. A danger hidden at the very heart of the theory. Where “collective” entities take the stage: “archetypes of the people,” “the soul of the race,” “the spirit of the nation.” Listen to how it sounds. Can you feel how pliant, how malleable this meat of meaning is? Historically, such constructs have been the perfect clay for ideological manipulation. The Nazis molded their dark myths from it. New Age evangelists squeezed a sweet cult from it. Nationalists of every stripe eagerly gnawed at these words to justify their rage. At different moments, they all found in Jung what they sought. Was it Jung’s fault? No. But the risk. The risk woven into his theoretical system like a wound spring in a mechanism.

What, then, does the Jungian tradition in psychiatry remain today?

The main thing is the idea of meaning in psychotic experiences. Jung, like Bleuler before him, achieved the impossible: he peered into the chaos of schizophrenic delusion. Into the roar of voices. Into the fragments of hallucinations. Is there meaning there? Jung found it. Delirium is not meaningless noise. Hallucinations are not random glitches. They have structure. They pulse with connections to the patient’s biography, their fears, their hopes, the culture they grew up in. Modern psychiatry could not deny this. It adopted this idea, incorporating it into its approach. But how? Not as Jungian ontology, but as clinical wisdom.

When a modern doctor tries to understand the delusions of a paranoid patient — why the FSB specifically, why the upstairs neighbors, why poisoning through the water supply — they are practicing what Freud and Jung taught us. They don’t reduce delusions to mere “neural noise.” Instead, they search for connections between these beliefs and the patient’s life and inner world.

This is not Jungian analysis. This is humane psychiatry. Both the Jungian and Freudian schools made immense contributions to its development.

But when Jungian concepts leave the confines of clinical work with individual patients and morph into a kind of “cosmology”—something else emerges. That’s when commercial esotericism takes over.

The early 1990s. Bert Hellinger—a name we’ll discuss in greater detail later—unleashes his method upon the world. He calls it “systemic family constellations.” Coincidence? Chance? Hardly. In his later works, Hellinger turns to Jung. His followers do so even more frequently and insistently. The mystery lies in the mechanics itself: the “family field” of constellations is presented as a close relative of the collective unconscious. Hellinger’s “orders of love” are like the living flesh of archetypal structures. And so, the trap is set. Thousands of people across the post-Soviet space stride through Jung—only to land squarely with Hellinger. And through Hellinger, they are drawn into a system that, in its original form, has nothing to do with Jung.

The same applies to regression therapy, “systemic constellations,” women’s retreats, and male initiation rites. Wherever the word “archetype” is used loosely, stripped of its strict analytical meaning, we’re likely dealing with the commercial exploitation of Jung.

Jung himself died in 1961. He never saw Woodstock, or the New Age, or Instagram psychologists. If he had, I suspect he would have been horrified. A rigorous Swiss psychiatrist who prized logic and a classical education could never have endorsed what was done with his legacy.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, through the work of Kraepelin, Bleuler, Freud, and Jung, psychiatry gained four essential instruments.

From Kraepelin — the clinical method and the dichotomy of endogenous psychoses.

From Bleuler came the very concept of schizophrenia and the understanding of its inner psychological structure.

From Freud came a language for discussing unconscious processes and an understanding of psychotic symptoms as the product of inner conflict.

From Jung comes the attention to the meaning of psychotic content and the understanding that hallucinations and delusions reflect not only personal themes but universal human ones as well.

This set of concepts still forms the foundation of how we think about schizophrenia today. Even when a modern psychiatrist doesn’t cite Freud or Jung, they are working within the paradigm those two established.

But none of this cured anything. By the 1930s, psychiatry had impeccable theory but was practically empty-handed at the patient’s bedside. In despair, frantically searching for any “working” practice, doctors of that era turned to what we’ve already read about in Chapters 5–7: insulin coma therapy, pyrotherapy, lobotomy. Alongside these radical biological interventions, theoretical exploration never ceased. In the next chapter, we’ll examine another major school that emerged at the intersection of philosophy and psychiatry in the early 20th century—the phenomenological school—and its contribution to understanding an illness that remains one of medicine’s greatest enigmas.