

The collective unconscious, however, is the deepest level of the psyche, containing the accumulation of inherited psychic structures and archetypal experiences. The personal unconscious is a reservoir of material that was once conscious but has been forgotten or suppressed, much like Freud's notion.

He agreed with Freud that the unconscious is a determinant of personality, but he proposed that the unconscious be divided into two layers: the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. Ĭarl Gustav Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, developed the concept further. Seeing as these unconscious thoughts are normally cryptic, psychoanalysts are considered experts in interpreting their messages. Unconscious thoughts are not directly accessible to ordinary introspection, but are supposed to be capable of being 'tapped' and 'interpreted' by special methods and techniques such as meditation, free association (a method largely introduced by Freud), dream analysis, and verbal slips (commonly known as a Freudian slip), examined and conducted during psychoanalysis. In a sense, this view places the conscious self as an adversary to its unconscious, warring to keep the unconscious hidden.

In the psychoanalytic view, the unconscious is a force that can only be recognized by its effectsâit expresses itself in the symptom. However, the contents did not necessarily have to be solely negative. Freud viewed the unconscious as a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression. In psychoanalytic terms, the unconscious does not include all that is not conscious, but rather what is actively repressed from conscious thought or what a person is averse to knowing consciously.
