Collective consciousness

[10] This term returns in Sigmund Freud’s book about mass psychology and essentially overlaps with Durkheims concept of collective consciousness.

Durkheim used the term in his books The Division of Labour in Society (1893), The Rules of the Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912).

In The Division of Labour, Durkheim argued that in traditional/primitive societies (those based around clan, family or tribal relationships), totemic religion played an important role in uniting members through the creation of a common consciousness.

The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own.

This relates to the concept of collective consciousness, as if there is a lack of integration or solidarity in society then suicide rates will be higher.

It incorporates social movements that are based on some sort of collective identity; these identities can include, for instance, gender, sexual orientation, race, and ability, and can be incorporated by collective-based movements into a broader historical material analysis of class struggle.

In Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, the ongoing conflict between civil society, the bureaucracy, and the state necessitates the emergence of a collective consciousness that can often act as an intermediary between these different realms.

As Zukerfeld states, “Even though it impels us, as a first customary gesture, to analyse the subjective (such as individual consciousness) or intersubjective bearers (such as the values of a given society), in other words those which Marxism and sociology examine, now we can approach them in an entirely different light.”[16] “Cognitive materialism”[15] is presented in the work by Zukerfeld as a sort of ‘third way’ between sociological knowledge and Marxism.

Society is made up of various collective groups, such as the family, community, organizations, regions, nations which as Burns and Egdahl state "can be considered to possess agential capabilities: to think, judge, decide, act, reform; to conceptualize self and others as well as self's actions and interactions; and to reflect.".

Informal groups, that meet infrequently and spontaneously, have a tendency to represent significant aspects of their community as episodic memories.

"Current discourse analysis drifts away from the 'culturalist turn' of the last two or three decades and its concern with individual and collective memory as an extended target of historical research".