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What Is Collective Consciousness?
The term collective consciousness refers to the shared beliefs, morals, attitudes, and knowledge that act as a unifying force within a society. It’s the common ground that allows an individual to see themselves as part of a larger group. This powerful concept has been explored by social theorists and psychoanalysts like Émile Durkheim, Louis Althusser, and Carl Jung to explain how individuals identify with and are shaped by the society they live in.
History credits French sociologist Émile Durkheim with coining the phrase. Durkheim was interested in what makes individuals in a society act in similar and predictable ways. He argued that society exerts a powerful external force on individuals through “social facts”—the norms, values, and structures of society.
He observed that if an individual does not conform to social conventions, they face punishment, ridicule, or social isolation. This system of external coercion shapes our behavior.
“A social fact must be recognized by the power of external coercion that it exercises or is capable of exercising over individuals.”
For Durkheim, the collective consciousness is the result of this process. Through socialization, an individual learns to be “common”—to dress, speak, and act like their neighbors. We become readable and predictable members of our social group.
Louis Althusser and the State’s Influence
The Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser explored a similar idea, focusing on how the individual is “created” by a process of external coercion from the State. He argued that the State uses “Ideological State Apparatuses”—institutions like schools, media, religion, and the legal system—to shape individuals from the outside in.
In Althusser’s view, these institutions constantly bombard the individual with the dominant ideology, ensuring that people develop common duties, aspirations, and life paths that ultimately serve to reproduce the power of the State. The “consciousness” of each individual is not something that originates internally but is pressed into being by these external forces.
Carl Jung and the Collective Unconscious
The concept of a shared consciousness was also influenced by psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Carl Jung. However, Jung’s focus was different. He coined the term collective unconscious to describe a deeper, inherited layer of the human psyche that we are not consciously aware of.
According to Jung, this unconscious realm contains a set of universal “archetypes”—mythological motifs and symbols that are the common property of all humanity. While the collective *consciousness* (Durkheim’s idea) is about the societal norms we learn and are aware of, the collective *unconscious* (Jung’s idea) is about a pre-existing, universal foundation from which we formulate deeper meanings.
The goal of Jungian psychoanalysis is often to bring elements of the unconscious into consciousness, helping a person understand the deeper reasons for their behaviors and desires.
