Carl Jung

Collective Unconscious Empirical?

Perception Swatches

Carl Jung is very aware his assertions of a pan-human dimension to consciousness, which he calls the collective unconscious, will be suspect to many. The obvious critique would be that Carl Jung himself is somehow inducing the responses from his clients or translating their responses to his values. He however, flatly rejects this possibility and calls the results empirical.

This leads me to ask what criteria can be used to discern the difference? If we only believed in the contemporary methods of double blind experiments, etc., then we might say there’s no way to determine from the outside if his assertions are true or not. This leads to the question, did Carl Jung do any experiments to prove the reality of a collective unconscious? Can something like the collective unconscious be proved? What types of things can we prove in general? It seems there may be a variety of things that are self-evident to us as individuals that can’t be proved through external observation by others.