Freud and The Concept of Inherited Racial Memories

When Freud's and Jung's theories are described, Freud's view of the unconscious is generally represented in terms of the vicissitudes of the psychosexual stages of development, while authors elaborate upon Jung's theories of the collective unconscious.10, 11 The impression is left that Jung, but not Freud, conceptualized and thought important the presence of inherited memories in mankind. This representation is inaccurate.

Freud's references to structures that are similar to those of Jung's collective unconscious appear to occur first in Totem and Taboo.8 In the preface to that work, Freud writes,

The essays treated here … represent my first efforts to apply viewpoints and results of psychoanalysis to unexplained problems of racial psychology. In method this book contrasts with that of W. Wundt and the works of the Zurich Psychoanalytical School. The former tries to accomplish the same object through assumptions and procedures from nonanalytic psychology, while the latter follow the opposite course and strive to settle problems of invididual psychology by referring to material of racial psychology. I am pleased to say that the first stimulus for my own works came from these two sources.

In the chapter entitled “Infantile Recurrence,” Freud writes, in explaining the recurrence of the Oedipus complex,

I have taken as the basis of my whole position the existence of a collective mind, in which mental processes occur just as they do in the mind of an individual. In particular, I have supposed that the sense of guilt for an action has persisted for many thousands of

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years and has remained operative in generations which can have had no knowledge of that action…. Without the assumption of a collective mind, which makes it possible to neglect the interruptions of mental acts caused by the extinction of the individual, social psychology in general cannot exist. Unless psychical processes were continued from one generation to another, if each generation were obliged to acquire i