Do you believe in love at first sight? Have you ever caught your very first glimpse of someone and decided, then and there, that they were your perfect other half — that this was the person you had been looking for, and that once you had them your life would finally be complete? This sense of two souls meeting is something most of us will feel once or twice in a lifetime, and it has a great deal to do with the psychology of Carl Jung.
The Collective Unconscious
Jung proposed the concept of the collective unconscious (Collective Unconscious). If a person's unconscious is a warehouse, then the collective unconscious is like a city made up of thousands upon thousands of warehouses. According to this concept, a person is not a blank slate; rather, certain things are present from birth — personality, traits, desires and so on are already configured. It is rather like how some hatchlings, the moment they break out of the egg, will instantly take the first large moving creature they see to be their mother — even if that is only a teddy bear and not a real mother bird.
From a biological standpoint, this phenomenon is the Innate Releasing Mechanism. These mechanisms exist within us all along, and once we trigger them correctly they run of their own accord. Take, for example, the way hero stories always seem to follow a very fixed pattern — a village living happily, until one day evil descends; the protagonist must then endure great hardship to defeat that evil, comes to realise what is most precious to them, and at last everything returns to peace. Children do not need to make a special effort to learn the definition of a hero; they watch a hero film and naturally understand what makes a hero a hero, and this is precisely how the collective unconscious reveals itself.
Jung believed there are certain things we can grasp without needing to learn them deliberately, precisely because we possess the collective unconscious and have inherited the knowledge it carries.
The Archetype
The forms that carry the collective unconscious are called archetypes (Archetype). Every person holds countless archetypes within them, just as we carry an inner concept of the hero. When our experience matches the original latent image in similarity (Similarity) and proximity (Proximity), the archetype is activated. This is why a child who sees, in a hero film, a character that matches the hero in similarity and proximity will have the hero archetype within them activated, and so comes to understand the concept of the hero.
The Complex
Different figures also live within our archetypes — a lover, parents, and so on. As long as an archetype develops appropriately, it can set off an interaction between the archetype and the consciousness of the psyche, turning it into part of an individual's psyche; Jung called this a complex (Complex).
For example, a new life already carries the concept of a mother from the moment it is born. When it sees someone close to the mother archetype, a mother complex arises in the personal unconscious — just as a hatchling, breaking out of its egg, sees a teddy bear at first glance (something close to the mother archetype) and so mistakes it for its mother.
Anima and Animus
Returning to the original question: if I do not even know this stranger in front of me, why am I drawn to him or her at a single glance? Jung held that within humanity's collective unconscious there exists an archetype of the opposite sex — the "soul image" (Soul Image), namely the Anima and the Animus. The Anima refers to the unconscious feminine side of a man's personality and image. The Animus, in turn, is the masculine figure within a woman.
Before puberty, people show fewer differences between the sexes, and their thoughts and behaviour are also more alike. As we grow older, we gradually take on the traits associated with our gender identity. In a social context, for instance, men tend to place more weight on building an image of competence, outspokenness and bravery. In doing so they suppress certain feminine traits of their own and shut them out of consciousness, where these traits gather into the symbol of a feminine archetype known as the Anima. A man might, for example, shut out the gentler, more tender side of himself, and so suppress the urge to express his need for emotional connection.
And these traits that have been shut out of consciousness — the traits of one's own "opposite-sex version" — are the soul image (the Anima / Animus).
Is the Person I Love Really Just Myself?
According to Jung's psychology, love at first sight springs from a projection (Projection) of the soul image — that is, projecting the opposite-sex version of yourself (the traits you once suppressed) onto the other person. Because of this, the person who most catches the eye is not necessarily the one with the most exquisite features, the best figure or the best circumstances; rather, it is the one who best lets you project the Anima / Animus image you hold in your heart.
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Love at First Sight and the Attraction of Opposites
Jung's psychology places great value on inner balance (Homeostasis): just as our bodies have all kinds of mechanisms to help us reach physiological balance, the same is true psychologically, and we can achieve it through dreaming and self-reflection.
The inner balance at work in love at first sight means we are more readily drawn to a person who carries the very traits hidden within our own psyche. If you are a straight-laced sort of person, then when you see a more playful, humorous member of the opposite sex, it sets off some of the parts hidden within your psyche — and this is what lets us tumble into the river of love in an instant, with that sense of having found the other half who completes us.
Human civilisation has gone through a great deal of historical evolution, and human consciousness is passed down collectively in just this way, generation after generation. Jung's psychology strongly encourages us to explore the different facets of our psychology; he also argued that we in fact carry a treasure of the psyche within us. Opening that treasure is, of course, not the work of a single day, but to some degree, realising that you are the treasure of the entire evolution of human civilisation — and that you hold latent potential and undeveloped facets worth exploring — can be something that lifts everyone's spirits.
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