Collective unconscious and social unconscious: a necessary distinction for the social psychoanalysis of social relations

Abstract

This article examines the thesis that shared unconscious processes structure social relations, media discourse and the formation of public opinion, and subjects that thesis to a conceptual distinction that is frequently omitted: the one separating the collective unconscious of Jungian analytical psychology from the social unconscious elaborated within the group-analytic tradition. The former is posited as a phylogenetic layer of the psyche, populated by archetypes of trans-historical reach; the latter designates the arrangements, anxieties and defences that a given social formation institutes and transmits, and whose matrix is historical rather than inherited. It is argued that conflating the two planes weakens precisely the critical reading that social psychoanalysis sets out to offer, since it presents as archetypal what is in fact a product of history and of power relations. The approach is theoretical and conceptual: each notion is reconstituted in its own terms, its application is examined across three objects — the formation of Brazilian national identity, the denial of collective traumatism and the media framing of gender roles — and the limits of the field's operationalisation are discussed. The distinction, far from weakening the initial thesis, delimits more precisely what social psychoanalysis can actually explain.