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In his later years, Jung preferred to use the term ‘the objective psyche’ rather than ‘the collective unconscious’. The former represents much more accurately the phenomenon that Jung means to describe, namely the marvellous juxtaposition of the subjective and the objective. Nothing was more striking to Jung than the fact that the archetypes, those fundamental organizing principles of the psyche, have a homologous expression in the natural world.
In a letter to , dated 17 October 1957 ( C. G. Jung: Letters, ed. G. Adler, Vol. 2, p. 396) Jung writes:
This, too, is an expression of something that has always claimed my deepest interest and my greatest attention: the manifestation of archetypes, or archetypal forms, in all the phenomena of life: in biology, physics, history, folklore, and art, in theology and mythology, in parapsychology, as well as in the symptoms of insane patients and neurotics, and finally in the dreams and the life of every individual man and woman. The intimation of forms hovering in a background not in itself knowable gives life the depth which, it seems to me, makes it worth living.
In an earlier letter in the same year, to Werner Nowacki (Vol. 2, p. 351) Jung says:
Matter and psyche are thus the terminal points of a polarity. The still largely unexplored area between them forms the terra incognita of future research. Here tremendous problems open out which you have approached from the physical side …
Further on, Jung urges young people to take up the challenge and pursue these explorations. Dr Michael Conforti and his group have been doing just that in the Assisi Conference for some years now, exploring the manifestations of archetypal forms in physics, biology, etc.
Dr Alden Josey, in a work entitled ‘Molecules As Mandalas’, has taken up the challenge. In Dr Josey we have a happy interlacing of two realms: in his first career Dr Josey was a scientist who did research in organic chemistry; in his second career he became a Jungian analyst