Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Jung builds on his idea of memories as windows into the unconscious by citing individual examples from his own life and framing them as evidence for his theory. Jung’s life thus becomes a case study in the mythic building blocks—personal and collective—that constitute human consciousness.

In Chapters 1 and 2, Jung catalogs his dreams and childhood memories, some of which, he notes, are only flashes—quick images attached to emotion. As he unpacks his life, he offers reflections on how the symbols impacted his perspective. For example, he references a memory of himself at three years old when his mother spent a few months in a hospital. Jung notes the impression that her absence left on him, saying, “I was deeply troubled by my mother’s being away. From then on, I always felt mistrustful when the word ‘love’ was spoken” (8). Jung asserts that this experience connected him to the symbols of the anima and animus, revealing to him how both the feminine and the masculine have roles to play in the psyches of individuals. Jung argues that the incorporation of both is necessary to achieve wholeness—a theory that challenges Freud’s constructions of libido and repression. Rather, Jung sees symbols as parts of a whole—important parts of bigger narratives that he calls personal and collective mythologies.

Jung illustrates the concept of a personal mythology by drawing attention to the recursive symbols in his personal visions and memories, similar to the recurring motif of stones in the text. For Jung, personal mythology refers to the individual archetypes, symbols, and patterns that emerge in an individual’s history, visions, and dreams. The process of individuation requires an uncovering of the deepest parts of a person’s mythology and the unification of the shadow—the dark parts of a person’s psyche—and the conscious. Jung exhibits this process throughout the work by digging into the complexities of his memories and visions. He recalls that when he was in school, he enjoyed escaping into nature. He noticed that the natural world was full of both beauty and ugliness and that both were needed to give life complexity. Similarly, Jung’s construction of consciousness as psychic wholeness incorporates the complexity of all parts of the self—both dark and light.

Jung differentiates personal and collective mythology by contrasting the work of individuation—unpacking the archetypes of the individual—with the work of analytical psychology—uncovering the universal archetypes of the collective conscious. For Jung, collective mythology deeply impacts personal mythology since he believes that personal mythologies are interwoven with a universal, primordial mythology that makes up part of a collective consciousness. Collective mythology is filled with universal symbols like the hero, the anima/animus, and the great mother. Jung points to myriad examples of these archetypes in both Western and non-Western cultures, connecting his theories about collective consciousness with his discovery of the Bantu term “ubuntu”—meaning “I am because you are”—which Jung renames “kinship libido.” In both types of mythologies, archetypes emerge from rhizomes, the deepest layers of unconscious experience.