Objective Psyche
Jung uses the phrase “objective psyche” to discuss the view that the unconscious is a realm of “objects” (complexes and archetypal images) as much as the surrounding world is a realm of persons and things. These inner objects impinge on consciousness in the same way that external objects do. They are not part of the ego, but they affect the ego, and the ego must relate and adapt to them. Thoughts, for instance, occur to us, they “fall into” our consciousness (in German, Einfall, literally something that “falls into” consciousness, but also an “inspiration”). For Jung, the intuitions and thoughts that appear from the unconscious and are not the products of deliberate efforts to think but are inner objects, bits of the unconscious that land on the surface of the ego occasionally. (Jung sometimes liked to say that thoughts are like birds: They come and nest in the trees of consciousness for a little while and then they fly away. They are forgotten and disappear.) The deeper one goes into the objective psyche, moreover, the more objective it becomes because it is less and less related to the ego’s subjectivity: “It is, at one and the same time, absolute subjectivity and universal truth, for in principle it can be shown to be present everywhere, which certainly cannot be said of conscious contents of a personalistic nature. The elusiveness, capriciousness, haziness, and uniqueness that the lay mind always associates with the idea of the psyche applies only to consciousness and not to the absolute unconscious.” Unlike consciousness, the unconscious is regular, predictable, and collective. “The qualitatively rather than quantitatively definable units with which the unconscious works, namely the archetypes, therefore have a nature that cannot with certainty be designated as psychic”.
Stein, Murray. Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction. Chicago, Ill., Open Court, 1998, pp. 181–182.