Jungian Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
In 1913, Carl Gustav Jung broke with Sigmund Freud — the mentor who had called him his "crown prince," the heir apparent of the psychoanalytic movement — over a question that seemed, on the surface, theoretical: whether the libido was fundamentally sexual energy or something broader, a generalized life-force. Beneath that question was a deeper one: whether the unconscious mind was primarily a repository of repressed personal memories, or something vastly larger. The break was painful. It was also the beginning of everything. In the years that followed, Jung descended into what he later called his "confrontation with the unconscious" — a period of deliberate self-exploration, bordering on breakdown, in which he allowed the contents of his unconscious to surface in visions, fantasies, and conversations with inner figures that seemed to possess their own independent intelligence. He painted them. He wrote them down in what became the Red Book ( Liber Novus ), a han...