Personality development:

Recognition of our universal

conditions
I’m pulling some old posts together, so forgive me if I repeat myself here.  If
you’re like me, it never hurts to hear something again.

Again, there are two universal conditions to which each of us must

successfully adapt: the external world of society and culture and the internal
world of the objective psyche. Jung called the external world the collective
consciousness (or sometimes the collective psyche) and the internal world the
collective unconscious. Successful adaptation basically means that we have
recognized the unconscious components of our personality and their effects
on us.

As I said in the
post on the necessity of the ego, essentially we are surrounded by the
collective on two fronts: the collective consciousness in our external world
and the collective unconscious in our inner world. Both the external and the
internal world have a certain level of autonomy over us.  By this I  mean that
certain things just happen to us and there’s nothing we can do about it.

From the external front, collective consciousness, we are barraged with

cultural norms, social pressures and social roles (personas). All of these
promote – and to some extent, enforce – societal and cultural conventionalism. 
Conventionality assimilates individuality.

On the internal front, we have the unconscious, which encompasses both a

personal (biographical) and a collective (archetypal) aspect. For example, we
are born into certain families and that family dynamic has a profound impact,
not only on how we see ourselves, but also on how we see the world.  That
lens is part of your personal unconscious.

The universal conditions at the collective level are the archetypes, which form
the basic structure of the uniquely human psyche. Archetypes are generalized
patterns of human perception and behavior