Collective unconscious

I’d like to comment on something I consider important. Although the Neanderthal became extinct thousands of years ago, long before the first civilisations, the myths about yetis, the abominable snowmen and sasquatch have a profound explanation. In Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung said:

The archetype in dream symbolism

By “history” I do not mean the fact that the mind builds itself up by conscious reference to the past through language and other cultural traditions. I am referring to the biological, prehistoric, and unconscious development of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of the animal… My views about the “archaic remnants,” which I call “archetypes” or “primordial images,” have been constantly criticized by people who lack a sufficient knowledge of the psychology of dreams and of mythology. [page 67]

The Swiss psychologist illustrated this with a case that impressed me:

A very important case came to me from a man who was himself a psychiatrist. One day he brought me a handwritten booklet he had received as a Christmas present from his 10-year-old daughter. It contained a whole series of dreams she had had when she was eight. They made up the weirdest series of dreams that I have ever seen, and I could well understand why the father was more than just puzzled by them. Though childlike, they were uncanny, and they contained images whose origin was wholly incomprehensible to the father. Here are the relevant motifs from the dreams. [page 69]

I’ll just mention a couple of dreams, and Jung’s brief interpretation that describes what we call “the collective unconscious”:

A drop of water is seen, as it appears when looked at through a microscope. The girl sees that the drop is full of tree branches. This portrays the origin of the world.

A small mouse is penetrated by worms, snakes, fishes, and human beings. Thus the mouse becomes human. This portrays the four stages of the origin of mankind…

Precisely a little mouse-like creature that survived the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was our remote ancestor! Unfortunately, something happened to the little girl:

The father was convinced that the dreams were authentic, and I have no reason to doubt it. I knew the little girl myself, but this was before she gave her dreams to her father, so that I had no chance to ask her about them. She lived abroad and died of an infectious disease about a year after that Christmas. [page 70]

In my humble opinion, this can help to understand the myths about yetis and the abominable snowmen…

My highly edited PDF version of the series on the extermination of the Neanderthals can now be read here.