Carl Jung Collective Unconsciousness Essay

Carl Jung had a theory that is known as collective unconsciousness which explains how our increased knowledge comes from human experience ("Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia" 542­543). Plato believed there were two worlds in which we live to experience known as the “Intelligible world” and the “Invisible World” (Chaffee 241). Aristotle did not agree completely with Plato’s theory of two worlds but instead believed in two categories of things known as “Matter” and “Form” (Chaffee 251). Carl Jung, Plato, and Aristotle all have similar but different thoughts on how we learn and how the mind works.
As a child, Carl Jung experienced many dreams of symbolic nature. These dreams are what led him to study the archetypical meaning of dreams. He believed that dream analysis is the best way to study human unconsciousness. Jung’s theory of collective unconsciousness showed that we all hold the possibility for good and evil. Jung’s dreams revealed to him that there are two sides to the dream known as the “Hero” and the “Shadow”. He believed that the hero in a dream was on a journey to battle its shadow, also known as the “monster”. If the hero wins this battle, the prize is his life. Jung’s interpretation of dreams has indicated that our dreams are based on experiences we have in life and that is needed in order to find
The metaphor explains that we only know what is true in the world based on what we see and learn from experience. The “Allegory of the Cave” is a group of prisoners that only know what they see in the shadows to be true. When one prisoner is able to leave the cave and he is surprised of what he sees outside and what he thought to be true knowledge was not at all true knowledge. He experienced much more and from that, he gained real true knowledge. This theory was created to show us that there are many stages in the interpretation of what we learn (SparkNotes