The Collective Unconscious
Jung proposed that beneath our personal memories lies a deeper layer of psyche containing recurring human patterns — ways of experiencing danger, care, power, loss, belonging, transformation and relationship. Across cultures these patterns appear through myths, dreams, stories and symbols, though their actual form varies enormously depending on culture, history, religion, gender, race, class, disability, family and individual biography. Hero, Mother and Trickster are not identical pictures stored inside everybody’s head — they’re recurring shapes, expressed differently depending on who’s expressing them and in what world.
Picture it, if it helps, as a vast shared library — not because everyone holds an identical copy of every book, but because certain stories keep getting written, in different languages, by people who’ve never met each other.
In therapy, symbols can sometimes give language to experiences that are hard to explain directly. Rather than a therapist deciding what an image means, therapist and client can get curious together about what it evokes, what it hides, and whether it expands or restricts how the person understands themselves. There usually isn’t one “exactly right” picture to retrieve. There’s a conversation to have.
Where this gets specific for disability
Archetypes can help us recognise recurring human experience. They can also become cages. Disabled people are frequently met through cultural stories before they’re met as individuals: the tragic victim, the heroic survivor, the dependent burden, the inspirational figure, the innocent saint, the wounded healer, the wise disabled sage. Those images don’t stay politely inside books and films. They walk into families, healthcare systems, psychotherapy rooms, and a disabled person’s own sense of self, often before anyone involved has said a single honest word.
So a disability-informed Jungian approach asks two questions side by side, not one: what symbols genuinely live within me? And, just as important: what stories has someone else placed onto me?
These recurring images can sometimes help us recognise that intensely personal experience also has cultural and human dimensions. That’s worth something. But it’s worth being honest about its limits too: a disabled person can recognise the Hero myth perfectly and still have no accessible transport, no community, and no real support. Symbolic insight doesn’t replace a working lift.
The shadow, the persona — a quick recalibration
Two quick definitions worth getting right before the stories below. The Shadow isn’t simply “our hidden feelings” — it’s the qualities, feelings, impulses or possibilities we struggle to recognise as part of ourselves, which can include anger, desire, power, dependence, ambition, sexuality, need and vulnerability, not only the obviously unflattering stuff. And the Persona isn’t simply “the masks we wear” — it’s the social identities and roles through which we meet the world, which isn’t automatically the same thing as being fake. That distinction matters enormously for anyone who manages disclosure and visibility strategically, which most disabled people do, constantly.
Who is writing the story?
Five short scenes. Each one is really asking the same underlying question, from a different angle: is this story mine, my Shadow’s, my family’s, my therapist’s, or something ableism handed me before I even walked into the room?
1. Mara — when the Hero becomes an expectation to overcome
Mara rolls down a mossy path to a quiet pond behind her house — her wheelchair simply how she gets there, nothing more dramatic than that. The water ripples, and a figure in shining armour steps out of the mist: the Hero. He kneels and says, “I have come to teach you to overcome.”
Mara doesn’t take the weapon he offers. She gets angry instead. “Overcome what?” she asks. “My body? The stairs? Other people’s pity? Their idea of me?”
Her Shadow surfaces next, carrying the fear underneath the anger — that maybe she really is as weak as the Hero’s offer implied she needed rescuing from. A Wise Elder’s lantern casts a gentler light and asks the only question that actually matters here: “Which battle is yours, and which battle has been handed to you?”
Mara doesn’t lift a magic bow and shoot arrows of triumph into the sky. She decides, slowly, which parts of the Hero’s courage and agency actually belong to her — and which parts were just someone else’s expectation, dressed up as a gift.
That’s individuation. Not a magic weapon. A negotiation.
2. Jax — persona as protection, masking, and selective disclosure
After his leg injury, Jax paints a golden mask across his reflection each morning. The tremor in his hands makes him feel unsteady, and the mask’s smooth shine whispers safety: wear me, and no one will see it as weakness. With the mask on, strangers pass him by without pity. That protection is real — worth respecting, not dismissing.
At an art class he meets Eva, who dances on crutches. She’s not there to teach him a lesson about carefree authenticity — she’s an actual person, which means she also gets irritated when someone moves her crutches without asking, complains loudly about the inaccessible bus route, and masks plenty herself when it’s useful to. She isn’t a symbol of liberation. She’s just someone living her own complicated life alongside his.
Watching her navigate her day without asking his permission to exist that way, something shifts for Jax anyway — not because she performed freedom at him, but because her ordinary complexity quietly made room for his.
He doesn’t scrape the gold from his face for good and step into a world of only honest smiles. The question was never whether he should always remove the mask. It’s whether he knows when he’s wearing it — and whether he still has a choice about it.
3. Lina — the difference between psychological meaning and structural barriers
Lina’s hospital room feels like a small island — white walls, humming machines, a labyrinth of identical hallways every night in her dreams. One night, wings of moonlight lift her above the maze.
But she doesn’t use them to fly away from her body and never look back. From above, she sees the maze more clearly instead: some corridors are genuinely blocked. Some doors have steps that were never going to work for her. Some walls belong to her illness. Some belong to the hospital’s design. Some belong to fear. Some belong to what other people expected her recovery to look like. The wings don’t dissolve the maze — they help her tell its parts apart.
The next morning, when she reaches a ramp that wobbles under her wheels, she doesn’t close her eyes and imagine flying over it. A wobbly ramp isn’t an inner obstacle to transcend — it’s an accessibility failure. She says, plainly, to the first staff member she sees: “This ramp isn’t safe.” The imagination gave her clarity. The clarity is what lets her advocate.
4. Ari — shadow, fear of exclusion, and internalised ableism
Ari’s Shadow waits in the corner of her mind, taunting her whenever her body aches or she can’t keep pace with friends. One rainy afternoon, instead of rushing past it, she stops. She offers it tea.
“Everyone keeps moving without us,” the Shadow says, shivering. Ari doesn’t argue with the fear. She asks it a better question instead: “Who taught you that slower means left behind?”
The Shadow doesn’t have a clean answer — because the honest answer is that no single person taught it that. A whole culture organised around speed and productivity did. Ari sits with that for a while, then asks one more question, gentler than the first: “Do we need to move faster — or do we need people who know how to stay?”
She reaches out her hand. “Come with me,” she says — not “let’s walk together,” because walking was never the only way through. The Shadow takes it anyway.
5. Projection — the story that enters before anyone speaks
A disabled therapist meets a new client for the first time. Before either of them has said a real word, the client is already wondering, somewhere below conscious thought: can they actually cope with my problems? Will I end up having to take care of them instead? Are they going to be inspirational about this? Do they secretly understand suffering better than a non-disabled therapist would?
The therapist notices something too — a flicker of their own urge to reassure, to prove capability, to manage the client’s visible uncertainty before it’s even been spoken aloud. Neither person is doing anything wrong. Something cultural walked into the room ahead of both of them.
The clinical work isn’t pretending that didn’t happen. It’s asking, together: can we notice the story that arrived here uninvited, without either of us being forced to live inside it?
This cuts both ways, and it’s worth being honest about the second direction too: the collective unconscious doesn’t only sit in the client. A therapist can just as easily, unconsciously, cast themselves as the healer and a disabled client as the damaged one to be healed. Or cast the client as heroic and quietly stop making room for their despair. Or cast them as fragile and lower expectations that were never asked to be lowered. Watching for this in both directions is some of the most clinically useful work a disability-informed Jungian approach can actually teach.