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C G Jung – The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature

I am assuming that the work of art we propose to analyse, as well as being symbolic, has its source not in the personal unconscious of the poet, but in a sphere of unconscious mythology whose primordial images are the common heritage of mankind.  I have called this sphere the collective unconscious, to distinguish it from the personal unconscious .  The latter I regard as the sum total of all those psychic processes and contents which are capable of becoming conscious and often do, but are then suppressed because of their incompatibility and kept subliminal…………

In contrast to the personal unconscious, which is a relatively thin layer immediately below the threshold of consciousness, the collective unconscious shows no tendency to become conscious under normal conditions, nor can it be brought back to recollection by any analytical technique, since it was never repressed or forgotten.  The collective unconscious is not to be thought of as a self subsistent entity; it is no more than a potentiality handed down to us from primordial times in the specific form of mnemonic images