Collective life unconscious

Collective life unconscious: Distinguished from Karl Jung’s psychoanalytic (or as he calls it “analytic”) category of the “collective unconscious” as the collective life unconscious with Jung’s archetypal collective unconscious a secondary expression of it. For example, Jung considers the figure of Goethe’s Faust as an “archetype” of the collective unconscious. There is the “conscious soul” of the on-the-brink-of-suicide philosopher, Faust, and the “unconscious soul” of Mephistopheles, the “shadow self” and “true spirit of life against the arid scholar”, which is expressed in destructive form because it is unrecognized and repressed. In life-ground onto-ethics, the collective life unconscious admits of this level of analysis, but grounds the split between consciously organizing regime and unconscious shadow realm at a deeper level of disconnection of ruling values from life-ground itself on both individual and collective planes.

Source: ‘What is Good? What is Bad? The Value of All Values across Time, Place and Theories’ by John McMurtry, Philosophy and World Problems, Volume I-III, UNESCO in partnership with Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems: Oxford, 2004-11.