30/06/2025
I’ve recently been pondering the relationship between personal and collective unconscious as they reveal themselves through the lens of Family and Systemic Constellations.
Every step we take toward reconciliation in our personal lives informs the collective field and has a powerful impact on all the systems we are part of, such as our families (current, of origin, spiritual), workplace, nation, society, and so on.
Whilst the effect of Systemic work on personal life is well documented and part of participants’ lived experience, we rarely focus on its collective impact. I believe this is because the effect on the individual can often be immediate and observable during and after sessions, whereas collective changes are harder to prove in ways that satisfy our conscious mind.
Yet, there are powerful dynamics which are regularly explored in Family and Systemic constellations that talk about the collective rather than the individual, even when the latter is the apparent focus and reason of the exploration.
Defining a few terms
Personal and collective unconscious
Carl Jung describes the personal unconscious as that part of the psyche that stores forgotten or actively repressed experiences, unique to the individual. We tend to think that we store in the unconscious only ‘bad’ memories. In reality, it holds a mix of negative, positive and neutral events, and these constitute powerful undercurrents that shape our behaviour.
The collective unconscious is an overarching field containing themes and images shared by the human family – the archetypes. Examples of archetypes are the Mother, the Child and the Victim, which are universal symbols found in all cultures, past and present. Exploring how these universal symbols shape our personal stories is paramount in the understanding of our own fears, dreams and overall behaviour.
This framework is, of course, just one way to make sense of reality, but it offers us a useful shared language for this reflection.
Why does it matter?
One of the most powerful dynamics I’ve experienced in Systemic work is that between Victims and Perpetrators.
Often, these constellations stem from the request of a Rescuer who is breaking down under the weight of an impossible task- that of bearing the load of a victim–perpetrator dynamic that does not belong to them. This is a movement the Rescuer makes out of love – and out of the conflict between belonging and being rejected, which ancestrally triggers the fear of being expelled by the tribe and dying.
For the Rescuer, healing comes from taking responsibility for their own life, which allows the other members of their system to take on their own responsibility. This is a subject I’ll develop more in other posts.
What I want to focus on now is what happens between Victim and Perpetrator. Once the Rescuer steps back, they are finally allowed to be with what is and connect at the heart level. The movement I’ve seen and experienced again and again is that of reconciliation – something that words are insufficient to describe, and that transforms guilt, shame, anger and other difficult emotions into responsibility, acceptance, love and, finally, peace.
This happens at a personal level between the representatives of that specific constellation. However, the personal and collective fields are interwoven.
There are a number of studies, including one described by Cavanaugh and Dillbeck (2017), that show the connection between individual and collective consciousness. In their work, the authors explore the effect of group meditation on crime rates and find that violence decreased in communities where enough people practised a form of Transcendental meditation due to what they described as a “field-like” effect.
Similarly, experiencing the possibility of reconciliation in body, mind and spirit, as it occurs during systemic work, imprints the collective unconscious. When we resolve trauma and suffering in the ‘personal’ systemic field, the new information informs the collective field, thus influencing society and the human family as a whole.
In the end, we can only heal ourselves — and by doing so, we can help heal the world, one heart at a time.
