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In this paper I am concerned with the uses to which we put Jung's concepts of the personal and collective unconscious in therapeutic work. I shall suggest that we have tended to regard material in terms of either-or or nothing-but personal or collective, a division which, though often necessary for exposition, is undesirable in practice since it may add to the splitting tendencies already operative in the psyche.
I hope to show that this tendency has historical roots, and will suggest how the two concepts can be brought together, using quotations from Jung's own writings to elaborate my thesis. Jung did not always separate the two concepts in the arbitrary manner sometimes attributed to him, and was aware of the dangers of doing so.
The history of the split starts, I suggest, from the split between Jung and Freud. Some clues as to how this occurred are conveniently clustered in Jung's Foreword to the fourth Swiss edition of Symbols of Transformation, his breakaway work, first published in 1912 but revised in 1952.
There he writes (C.W., 5, p. xxiii) that the matter of the book came upon him “like a landslide … the explosion of all those psychic contents which could find no room, no breathing space, in the constricting atmosphere of Freudian psychology”. He states that one of his principal aims in writing the book was “to free medical psychology from the subjective and personalistic bias that characterized its outlook at that time, and to make it possible to understand the unconscious as an objective and collective psyche” (p. xxiv). Thus this book became “a landmark set up on the spot where two ways divided”. He remarks that this division, as well as separating him from Freud, marked the beginning of the second half of his life. As events proved, it also marked the separation of the personal from the collective unconscious. The former, to which he henceforth paid scant attention, was more or less ceded to Freud, and the latter became Jung's province (1948, C.W., 8, p.