The progress of the early rulers towards the concept of the unification of the Valley is thus directly analogous to the process undergone by the psyche when it is moving towards its own individuation. The definition which expresses the acquisition by the individual of the awareness of its own discrete existence and its interaction with the world around it, is precisely mirrored in the unfolding of the campaigns of the early rulers of the southern Valley to achieve the unification of the whole, itself an expression of individual identity.
The unification of the Valley was the ‘Great Idea’ which the early kings of Egypt pursued with remarkable determination culminating in its ultimate formulation into a politically unitary state. This was a very singular concept in that, as is the case with so many Egyptian innovations, it was entirely without precedent. No other people had ever attempted to produce a nation (the very concept was otherwise unknown) out of an extended region with a diversity of traditions and social organization.
Jung demonstrated that the recognition of the role of the collective unconscious casts light on many of the less rational or otherwise inexplicable apprehensions and motivations of the human psyche at its most profound level. In a pristine society such as Egypt’s it can be observed at work in a way quite different from the experience of later cultures. The collective unconscious is the fountain from which the archetypes flow, that concept so close to the Platonic vision of the eidos. The collective unconscious in Egypt would, in this view, be especially powerful and as pristine a phenomenon as the society itself.
To apply the idea of individuation to Egypt in the earliest centuries of its corporate existence is not, of course, to deny the role of the individual, nor the variety and diversity of the specific experiences undergone by all the individuals then living in the Valley. But in the collective phase of their experience may be found an explanation for the swift and apparently ready acceptance of forms, customs, beliefs, and social organization over extended distances and time-scales, which are evident at this time and which are otherwise difficult to explain. It is even possible that the Egyptians had some sense, in this early phase, of the psychological implications of the transition from the collective unconsciousness to the individual; this would account for their personification of the strange, indeterminate, bisexual divinity called Atum, who is sometimes spoken of as the ‘Undifferentiated One’.
World History
