The Collective and The Personal

Running through Jung's work is the contrast between ‘personal’ and ‘collective’. It seems a simple enough contrast, and we are inclined to take it rather for granted. However, these are not simple opposites. Surely the opposite of ‘personal’ should be ‘impersonal’ and the opposite of ‘collective’ might well be ‘individual’? Jung clearly wished to say something more than these straightforward oppositions imply. Many difficulties arise from his particular usage. One instance is his idea that the persona is a segment of the collective psyche (JUNG 15). Here the persona is individual but not personal, i.e., both individual and collective. Another instance is to be found in the introduction to Psychology and alchemy. Jung, discussing Christ as a symbol of the self together with other religious figures, states:

Not only is the self indefinite, but—paradoxically enough—it also includes the quality of definiteness and even that of uniqueness. This is probably one of the reasons why precisely those religions founded by historical personages have become world religions, such as Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. The inclusion in a religion of a unique human personality—especially when conjoined to an indefinable divine nature—is consistent with the absolute individuality of the self, which combines uniqueness with etermity and the individual with the universal. The self is a union of opposites par excellence, and this is where it differs essentially from the Christian (JUNG 17).

Here Jung is taking Christ as a collective symbol which he regards as a symbol of the self. He is therefore seeing the archetype combining, as opposites, both collectivity and individuality. This leads to difficulty, in practice, of identifying ‘personal’ material. Mary Williams has pointed out that Jung acknowledged the problem of drawing a boundary-line between the personal and collective unconscious (WILLIAMS 27), and Rosemary Gordon has shown how symbols may act as a bridge between the co