Psychology was established as a discipline, an area of knowledge and a field of research organized by European scientific methodology, back in the 19th century. Its primary objectives were to intervene in institutions such as schools, prisons and hospitals, promoting an understanding of the individual that made it possible to control bodies by mapping how they behaved. In this sense, psychology emerges as a field marked by liberal European thought that supported the primacy of the individual while trying to discipline them for the supposed progress of society (^{Figueiredo & Santi, 2003}).

The European intellectual effervescence from the end of the 19th century to the first decades of the 20th century gave birth to Psychoanalysis and other fertile fields of individual listening such as, for example, Binswanger’s phenomenological orientation and C. G. Jung’s Analytical Psychology. The latter had his interaction with Psychoanalysis between 1906 and 1912, as we know, following his own path in the elaboration of his ideas from that year onwards. With Psychoanalysis, Analytical Psychology shares the hypothesis of the unconscious. Among its many divergences with psychoanalytic proposals, however, is the very definition of the unconscious.

C. G. Jung’s proposal for the unconscious would not consist merely on the contents repressed by the subject that need to constitute another psychic space in itself. For ^{Jung (2015, vol. VII/2)}, the unconscious would be formed by three vectors, namely: the repressed contents of Freud and Psychoanalysis; the contents forgotten due to memory failure; everything that is virtually unknown. This notion of the unconscious is formulated from an opposition to consciousness, bringing us to a final idea that the unknown, the forgotten and the repressed are somehow united, constituting this great unconscious.

Jung’s interest in expanding the idea of the unconscious that was present in Psychoanalysis at the beginning of the 20th century is justified by his work with psychotic patients and his observation of images in dreams, reports and manual productions of these patients that referred to motifs present in religions and mythologies. When recognizing such images in different cultures apparently without any connection with each other, ^{Jung (2014, vol. IX/1, par. 711)} postulates the concept of collective unconscious, which he proposes to be “a disposition capable of producing in all times and places the same symbols or, at least, very similar to each other”. We must also note Jung’s word association experiments (^{2012, vol. II}), which gave a more prominent place to the idea of forgetfulness, which could be either a derivation of the repressed, in the case of forgetting what one does not want to remember, or a trivial forgetfulness relegated to the unconscious of everyday memory.

It is important to make a pause in our reflection at this point to recognize the Jungian epistemological turn in his hypothesis of the collective unconscious. Until he published his thesis on the archetypes and the collective unconscious, first seen in public in his work Symbols of Transformation, the debates in Psychoanalysis dealt with an unconscious as an effect of certain experiences of the individual in our society. When Jung elaborates the unconscious as a disposition capable of producing something (in this case, symbols), there is a drastic logical turn in the conception of what the psyche is. For Jung, unlike Psychoanalysis, the unconscious becomes a cause that produces effects: the complexes. In this sense, it becomes understandable that ^{Jung (2015, vol. VII/2)} treats the ego as a complex because it is also an effect of unconscious production, like any other complex.

Jung then proposes that the ego is responsible for their journey of individuation, which will constitute a process that will lead the subject to their singularity or, in the words of ^{Jung (2015, vol. VII/2)}, individuation will make the subject a unique individual, one that is not divided. The idea of division is seen in both Psychoanalysis and Analytical Psychology, but the suggestion of a process of individuation leads to the imagination that this division can somehow be overcome by another psychic organization. As if it were utopian to imagine an undivided being, Jung proposes instead that psychic elements can be reorganized in a way other than a tension between opposites. In this idea, the notion that the division that shakes the self would be between two terms that are in tension with each other is implicit. ^{Jung (2013, vol. VIII/2)} then says that, once the individual is able to withstand the tension, a third conflict-solving element can emerge and thus reconfigure the way the psyche relates to those aspects, achieving this re-elaboration that would eventually dissolve the conflict. Again, we see in the proposal this role given to the ego as a kind of participant observer, without it being the cause or driving force of its own process of individuation. Even if we imagine an active egoic attitude that needs to be exercised in order to elaborate unconscious contents, once again the unconscious appears as the cause of a transformation in consciousness, leaving to the ego a role of observing, facilitating and interacting with the unconscious action that occurs in the process. In Analytical Psychology, two important acts are assigned to the conscious ego: the recognition of one’s own unconscious and the ability to withstand the conflicts that unconscious contents provoke when stressed.

With his epistemological turn in which the unconscious ceases to be an effect and can be reimagined as a producer of psychic processes, Jung subverts a point in the liberal ideology that founded Psychology itself: in the Jungian conception, there is no willpower or affirmation of individual desire that is enough to transform a situation. The action of the unconscious is necessary for a transformation to take place or, in the author’s own words, the deo concedente factor is a necessity (^{Jung, 2014, vol. IX/1}).

When formulating the hypothesis of the collective unconscious, expanding the boundaries of the understanding of the unconscious itself and proposing the ego as an effect of the unconscious, the liberal idea of the ego’s determination and perseverance loses strength and it becomes necessary to reposition the will of the ego in the face of countless elements that affect them. However, this new proposition of the unconscious also brings with it a problem: where would this collective unconscious, broad and magnanimous, which produces and is not produced be located? What would be its mode of action, from what point it can be conceived? Could the unconscious be a subject, some kind of force with the capacity to act on the world? ^{Jung (2013, Vol. VIII)} suggests at one point that the archetype is psychoid, that is, it is beyond the psyche. At another point, the author (^{Jung, 2014, vol. IX/1}) treats the collective unconscious as a kind of repository of the memory of the human species, referring to a somewhat genetic aspect of archetypes. By not properly elaborating on these ideas, the author leaves room for a transcendental interpretation of his hypothesis, which could lead us to a religious conception of the psyche. As ^{Butler (2003)} points out, the universalizing attempt to expand a concept has the advantage of producing consistency and unity to that proposition, however at the expense of the logical challenge of continuing the discussion: if the unconscious does it, who or what is it about? Who created it as a subject capable of acting on the world? Avoiding further discussion paralyzes us at the transcendental level that leads us to the most obvious response of appealing to a higher entity or other universalizing categories that describe little and have little clarity, such as “life”, “the universe” or “god”.

If we take this discussion further away from a biological, hereditary or genetic hypothesis for the unconscious, we would call into question that the memory of the species is constituted from material events that were lived out by our species throughout its millennia of existence. Such events, which were supposedly recorded in this great collective repository of images and symbols, make up a historical process of the human species that has been organized throughout its past through various social and political forms, cultivating means of subsistence and survival of the species itself. In other words, the psychoid formation of archetypes and the collective unconscious could not be other than the social, political and cultural events that were experienced by humanity throughout its history. If we admit this proposition, we move far enough away from a transcendental premise as the basis for the hypothesis of the collective unconscious.

We would still have to think about what leads images and symbols to survive in memory to the point of constituting something collective, so powerful that they would be capable of persisting over time and crossing generations through our historical process. Here, it makes sense to align ourselves with ^{Dantas (2019)}, who reminds us that the archetype is determined by the presence of numinosity, that is, the impact of intense fascination or unparalleled terror that an archetypal experience can provoke. The numinous, in turn, would be determined by being charged with affection, which produces an overwhelming effect on the individual sufficient for a powerful record of that experience in memory. When we articulate a theory of affects together with the attempt to make the collective unconscious something historical, we can imagine it as something other than governed by the metaphysics of substance. Furthermore, the idea of a present or residual affective charge helps us understand the idea of unconscious action, which would be moved by shared affections that provide typically human experiences, such as the experience of care promoted by others that leads us to the conception of motherhood or the social impulse to organize relationships, groups and communities that establishes most readings of the paternal function from a symbolic point of view.

^{Butler (2003)}, when discussing the conception of genre, formulates the idea of metaphysics of substance to designate the processes by which something is repeated ad infinitum in certain cultures to generate an appearance of naturalization regarding something that is, in fact, historical. and socially constructed, stating that “certain gender configurations take the place of the real and consolidate and increase their hegemony through an apt and successful self-naturalization” (^{Butler, 2003, p. 69}).

The collective unconscious, if seen without the reifying lens of the metaphysics of substance, can be imagined as the set of unconscious aspects, that is, repressed, forgotten and unknown, according to Jung’s conception, throughout the historical process of the cultures of our species. The affective charge present in certain experiences carries them along the thread of our history through generations. The idea of a psychoid archetype in this context would connect to all events and experiences that, in fact, are not exactly ours nor precisely make up our psyche, but were present in this endless thread of ancestry to which our historical process belongs.

The advantage of imagining a historical collective unconscious lies precisely in the possibility of filtering through the idea of metaphysics of substance everything that was considered archetypal without a more detailed and in-depth examination of what this would imply. A good example of this situation are the concepts of anima and animus in ^{Jung (2014, vol. IX)}, which elevated gender to the archetypal dimension. As we can see in ^{Pessoa (2021)}, gender is best examined if understood as a cultural complex, so that we can explain and locate the historical, social and political crossings that lead to some conceptions of gender being expected or considered ideal , while other gender performances are designated as inappropriate or pathological. If we recall that Psychology was born in a context in which its objectives focused on cataloging and standardizing, it is understandable that a Gender Psychology formulated in the first decades of the 20th century is also thought of based on the same parameters. In order to advance on the topic and understand why gender is a category that causes enormous suffering among people, therefore constituting a relevant topic for Psychology, it is necessary that we develop other ways of thinking about gender.

Of course, gender here is also an example of many other phenomena that may have been unduly regarded as archetypal. Discussions in the field of gender studies are especially interesting for Psychology because, alongside the categories of race and class, they are fertile grounds for discussing the issue of identities. As ^{Dantas (2019)} tells us, in Jung the initial division of the human seems to be metaphorized as that between male and female. The male-female pair would, in some way, bring an outline of an original tension between opposites. This vision, if historically positioned, can be understood as an effect of the historical and cultural context of European thought, as elaborated in ^{Pessoa (2022)}. As ^{Oyeumi (2021)} shows us, the use of gender as the main marker of difference between humans is something typically European, which is not reproduced in other cultures. When recounting the history of the Yoruba people in southern Nigeria, ^{Oyeumi (2021)} teaches us that the fundamental marker of difference in that society is age rather than gender.

Regarding what we understand as the Western people, that is, the European peoples and the peoples brutally colonized and reconstituted by Europeans, ^{Oyeumi’s speech (2021)} makes clear to us that understanding gender becomes inexorable, as regarding the peoples deeply marked by the history of violent colonization imposed by European people understanding the categories of race and class and how they affect us becomes inexorable also. To try to advance the understanding of gender identities in this context, I will address two distinct experiences: the identities of LGBT people and masculinities.