Jung's theory of the human psyche is that it is made up of three parts: the ego (conscious mind), the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. As C. George Boeree, Ph.D., explains it, the collective unconscious is "the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviors, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences. The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes.
"An archetype is an unlearned tendency to experience things in a certain way. The archetype has no form of its own, but it acts as an 'organizing principle' on the things we see or do. The archetype is like a black hole in space: You only know it's there by how it draws matter and light to itself."
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