Recently, a friend of mine asked a question to the effect of, “how do you believe in the collective unconscious when different cultures have different symbols?” It’s a very good question which I answered unsatisfactorily at the time. Let me attempt another answer.
To begin with, I will define the collective unconscious. It is a part of the unconscious which is universally shared by every human being. It is, if you will, a template for the soul. My knowledge of Jung, who coined and developed the term, is still fairly scant, but I think I know enough to defend the concept.
One thing I would like to note is that Jung’s project is inherently cross-cultural. He developed his theory of the archetypes by comparative mythology. He made extensive study of the 易经 (Yi Jing) , an ancient Chinese guide to divination. He recognizes the mandala, an ancient Hindu art form, as a vital symbol of an integrated soul. Of course, he primarily works from his own vantage-point as a 20th century German, with extensive references made to Christianity, Greek myth, and European alchemy. He also makes occasional reference to Aztec myth, if you think that the West and East are still in too close communication. He is not interested in saying that the Christian perspective is the unifying perspective, rather he treats it as a tradition with great mystical and psychological utility, another part in building his universal psychology.
I would also like to point out that he characterizes his mission as being empirical. It is not necessarily the perspective of a medieval, that the macrocosm (universe) is designed by a higher being to mimic the microcosm (soul). Rather, his claim is that a psychological being, a human, interprets the world (universe) in a way which mimics their psychology (soul). He also does not make the claim necessarily that the soul is something which is immortal, in fact, he repeatedly avoids metaphysical assertions about the real world, or the object in itself. What we do know is how the world is interpreted by psyches.
What do I mean when I say “how the world is interpreted by psyches?” The statement implies a world. In Kantian terms: an object-in-itself, noumena as opposed to phenomena. The noumena, of course, as a basic principle of phenomenology, are not experienced as they are. Rather, they are interpreted by the senses, which are a faculty of the psyche, into phenomena, which are themselves interpreted by other faculties of the soul. The true nature of the noumena are unimportant to a project which is psychological and not metaphysical.1
Then, on that note, let us take stock of some constants, or shared phenomena, of the human experience. One is death. It has been universally observed that at some point, other psyches stop making themselves known to us. That means that regardless of what happens subjectively to that psyche, they no longer present as a psyche-soma union2 objectively. Another is the predator, that is, that there are things which cause death. The process of sex and birth are universal to the creation or instantiation of a human, and most people will come to realize this in the course of their lives. Generally speaking, the only reason which people do not is because it is intentionally hidden from them by people who do know. As such, the mother is almost always present to a child, and the father usually is. Other constants include emotions themselves: happiness, sadness, anger, etc. I hope that this list of global constants in the experiences of human beings is uncontroversial.
Now, there being certain constants to the experiences of humans, it is not terribly far to say that these are constants to the psychology of humans. To elaborate: these phenomena are experienced by a psyche, so they are psychological phenomena. Them being psychological, then it is clear that there are universal psychological constants in humanity. This, I think, is grounds enough to say that there is a collective unconscious, which is, remember, a set of universally shared concepts in human psyches. We can guess as to its origins, try to reconcile them with a purely physicalist view, which was the project of evolutionary psychology in its own way, but Jung avoids doing so in favor of speculating as to its structure.
I will avoid taking the answer which ends here as the full answer to the question, because there is a greater defense of Jung’s specific conception of the collective unconscious to be made. This is what will respond to the greater spirit of the question, that is, that the difference between cultures poses a problem for the collective unconscious.
Let us take stock of our constants, re-conceptualized as Jungian psychological phenomena. We have certain global psychological characters: the predator, the father, and the mother.3 Jung calls these characters “archetypes.” Now, it will be said, very rightly, that the exact personalities of these characters will differ from person to person. My idea of a mother is not your idea of a mother, because my mother is not your mother.4 The special character of a person's archetype as it presents itself to the soul is unique to that soul. The archetype which is referred to is constant among all people.
This means that the presentation of a specific archetype to people in different places will seem broadly different. For instance, a Minnesotan may associate the Predator most immediately with a wolf. Someone in the Appalachian mountains may associate it with a black bear. It may seem clear in the case of this specific archetype, but less clear if we speak of another archetype like the Mother. There is evidently personal difference in the way that the Mother archetype is received, as well as cultural difference. Speaking anecdotally, for example, the way the Mother archetype is received by the children of East Asian immigrants has some broad and traceable differences from the way it is received by the children of white Americans.
When people themselves become mothers, the Mother archetype becomes more dominant in their psyches. They emulate their received archetype of the Mother more, thus causing it to be received by their children in a similar way. This process of reception and emulation of archetypes happens for all archetypes. This can account for the cultural heredity of the reception of archetypes. Being raised in a certain culture causes one to receive different facets of the archetypes as those facets are emulated by the people surrounding that person. This change in the reception of the archetypes can actually account for a great deal of difference between cultures, if one thinks that specific mores are actually the emulations of specific facets of various archetypes.
I will not assert as to where cultural differences began, but I will deal with two myths which I am familiar with and explain how to conceptualize them under this system. They are both monogenic myths, which state that mankind had a single origin and differentiated from there. The first myth is the Tower of Babel,5 in which, very dramatically and suddenly, cultural and linguistic differences were imposed on humanity. This being accomplished by God, it would be very easy to think that it was at least partially effected by a sudden sundering of the various received facets of the archetypes. Of course, pre-Babel man was not complete,6 which is what would be implied by the complete reception of all of the archetypes, so it is probable that pre-Babel man merely broadly shared the facets which they did receive. This being done, the received facets were then passed down from parent to child by the process of emulation and reception as described above.
The other myth is the Out of Africa theory. It states that mankind originated somewhere in Africa, where humanity evolved to its roughly modern state, and spread across the globe from there. The process then of differentiation in received facets would be very easily modeled by the process of differentiation which gave rise to ethnic diversity. Certain facets (or, remember, mores) became more advantageous to people living in different areas, and the people which emulated them became more likely to have children which lived long enough to receive and emulate them in turn. There is also, as always in evolution, a certain degree of chance in which traits which do not necessarily confer an advantage get entrenched in a population.
I mention these myths both because I am familiar with them and because they are popular. I think, too, that most cultural individuation myths can be referred back to one or both of these two. There is another type of myth, which I am not familiar with any specific tellings of. It is the polygenic myth, which states that mankind had multiple distinct origins. Here it is not hard to see how different original populations, having different received facets, would pass them on in just the same way as in the other myths. The polygenic myth can be easily combined with the evolutionary process of culture described above. I believe, then, that I have covered all of the various theories on the origin of culture in the combinations of the material-divine split and the monogenic-polygenic split.
The last thing which I would like to elaborate on is that I have mentioned that there is also individual difference in reception of archetypes. This is, of course, not only crucial for explaining human individuation, but also is of vital importance to the evolutionary account of the origin of cultural difference. We can examine this in the example of the Mother. If two children have the same mother, then how is it that they come to have different views of the character of their mother? The short answer is that it is because they are spatially and temporally differentiated. One child sees the left side of the face of the mother, the other sees the right. The mother has reached a certain stage of her personal development when one child is five years old, but she is at quite another stage when the other child is five years old. The reception of the Mother which is formed in each of the children is different because their mother presents herself quite differently to them, as a natural result of embodiment.
This allows us to realize what utility the collective unconscious as an explanation has. It is a useful descriptive term, as I showed in the first section, but it is also a useful prescriptive paradigm. Understanding the nature of the unconscious better, we can work on understanding ourselves better. If there is a Mother archetype in me that I see only some small part of, then, by examining other people’s receptions of the Mother, I can see more facets of the Mother which were not supplied to me by my own mother. I understand more of the Mother in me by looking at the parts of her which were not emulated by my mother, and I comprehend more of my soul with a fuller understanding of one of its characters.
It is not, then, a problem for the collective unconscious that cultures and individuals perceive the same archetype in different ways. It is the very means of our salvation and of understanding the collective unconscious. By understanding it better, we understand ourselves better, and we strain a little bit further towards self-actualization.