13 SOME THOUGHTS ON THE ABOVE THEORIES part 2

Limitations also exist in Jung’s theory. Jung tried to give cross-cultural universality to the meaning of dreams, but his archetypal system was still essentially based on Eurocentric cognition. In the process of understanding the collective unconscious theory, I gradually feel that some aspects of Jung’s collective unconscious theory are actually a reproduction of cultural hegemony. It is undeniable that his theory provides a larger narrative dimension for understanding the deep structure of human psychology, but the problems of cultural hegemony, gender essentialism and scientific legitimacy hidden in the core of the theory become more and more obvious in the new cultural context of modern and contemporary multicultural integration and the development of science and technology. The first is its roots in Eurocentrism. On the pretext of “collective unconsciousness”, Jung stripped the cultural symbols of Asia, Africa, America and other non-European regions from their original cultural context and forcibly incorporated them into the European system centered on Greek mythology and Christianity. For example, the power of destruction and rebirth of the goddess Kali in Hinduism was classified by Jung as the prototype of the “Great Mother”. Dispelling the connotation of its original radical resistance to patriarchal oppression. Second, Jung often engaged in “academic picking” when constructing his theories, perfecting them by analyzing the dreams and art forms of non-European patients without realizing the subjectivity of these cultures. This is, in effect, a continuation of the intellectual looting of the colonial era, in which indigenous peoples’ experiences are transformed into European academic capital, while indigenous peoples remain excluded from the discourse. It seems to me that Jung’s theory is like a fine, old map of the world, on which Jung tried to condense the vast expanse of the human spirit into a finite island. However, this set is obviously not applicable in the modern and contemporary society with cultural integration, gender flow and technological breakthrough. What we need is not a new map, but a subversion of the old map and the right to draw. The individual unconscious should not be colonized by theory, we need to decolonize Jung’s theory and reconstruct it so that the collective unconscious becomes a spiritual Commons shared by multicultural subjects, rather than a cognitive tower standing in the European theoretical system.