Collective Unconscious Collective Unconscious, is a psychological term, coined by psychiatrist Carl Jung, describing the notion that an entire species of living organisms can communally possess latent memories underneath the conscious, separate awareness of individuals. It explains that our existence at this point in human history is informed by subconscious memories passed down to us from previous generations that go all the way back into our collective human history, if not farther.
EXAMPLES: If Carl Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious are to be believed, then it would explain how audiences are capable of empathizing with characters in movies that exist far back into the past. Why? Because despite being separated by time, humans can still empathize with real and fictitious characters from the past because we unconsciously understand what it was like to exist in a different point in our collective human history. Not only do we empathize, but we sympathize as well–since no matter how much time passes, human beings are essentially still feeling the same emotions: love, hate, passion, anger, happiness and sorrow. Not only do these emotions happen to us, as people, everyday, but they happen to everyone, everyday. And have happened to everyone, everyday, as far back into human history as you can go–which means there is still an emotional connection between us and anyone who has ever lived; making the past an infinite resource for movie-material. A scene in the midpoint of the 1988 animated film AKIRA, the characters Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata) and Kei (Mami Koyama) literally have a conversation about the physical nature of the main character, Akira. The characters go so far as to, in essence, discuss Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious in regards to all human existence; that memories can be inherited generation to generation, and
that life itself is a continual process that has been ongoing from the very first single-celled organism. In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the audience is introduced to a tribe of nomadic, cave-dwelling ape-men who symbolically represent mankind’s distant ancestors. At the onset of the film, this tribe of early sapiens are upon the verge of extinction–they are starving, thirsting, and are a leopard’s target for an easymeal. Despite that this tribe of foragers aren’t human, it is still easily understood that they represent us because they are what eventually will become human. Therefore, as an audience, a part of ourselves is anthropomorphized into these characters and we relate to their desperation to find food and gain intelligence. This leads to our understanding of two things when they learn to use bones as weapons: that necessity is the mother of invention, and that death and war have always been a precursor to our growth and knowledge as a people.
EXAMPLES: If Carl Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious are to be believed, then it would explain how audiences are capable of empathizing with characters in movies that exist far back into the past. Why? Because despite being separated by time, humans can still empathize with real and fictitious characters from the past because we unconsciously understand what it was like to exist in a different point in our collective human history. Not only do we empathize, but we sympathize as well–since no matter how much time passes, human beings are essentially still feeling the same emotions: love, hate, passion, anger, happiness and sorrow. Not only do these emotions happen to us, as people, everyday, but they happen to everyone, everyday. And have happened to everyone, everyday, as far back into human history as you can go–which means there is still an emotional connection between us and anyone who has ever lived; making the past an infinite resource for movie-material. A scene in the midpoint of the 1988 animated film AKIRA, the characters Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata) and Kei (Mami Koyama) literally have a conversation about the physical nature of the main character, Akira. The characters go so far as to, in essence, discuss Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious in regards to all human existence; that memories can be inherited generation to generation, and
that life itself is a continual process that has been ongoing from the very first single-celled organism. In 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the audience is introduced to a tribe of nomadic, cave-dwelling ape-men who symbolically represent mankind’s distant ancestors. At the onset of the film, this tribe of early sapiens are upon the verge of extinction–they are starving, thirsting, and are a leopard’s target for an easymeal. Despite that this tribe of foragers aren’t human, it is still easily understood that they represent us because they are what eventually will become human. Therefore, as an audience, a part of ourselves is anthropomorphized into these characters and we relate to their desperation to find food and gain intelligence. This leads to our understanding of two things when they learn to use bones as weapons: that necessity is the mother of invention, and that death and war have always been a precursor to our growth and knowledge as a people.
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