Although the fact is rarely acknowledged, Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961), an influential Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology, considered out-of-body experiences to originate in the collective unconscious.
Jung, pictured here with his colleague Dr Aniela Jaffé (February 20, 1903 – October 30, 1991), a Swiss analyst who was a co-worker of Jung for many years and who, like him, studied ecsomatic cases, naming them Duplication Phenomena, mentioned some of these accounts suggested "a shift in the localisation of consciousness, a sort of separation from the body".
Dr Jaffé most specifically dedicated a section of her book Apparitions and precognition to the Duplication Phenomena following a study of 1,500 accounts to report such types of experiences collected by a Swiss journal—accounts Dr Jung possessed.
While neither researcher made a career studying these, out-of-body experiences were considered to derive from the collective unconscious hypothesis and brought through unconscious psychic processes. More so, Dr Jung recognised that during losses of physical consciousness, the perception of a "separation" would occur, acknowledging that on some occasions, such phenomena would lead to perceptions that could not be otherwise normally explained by brain function, presuming, much like for the hypothesis of synchronicity, that "we must completely give up the idea of the psyche's being somehow connected to the brain".
MSc. Neuroscience,
Sleep Consciousness Researcher,
PhD Candidate.
REFERENCES
Jaffé, A. (1963). [Geistererscheinungen und Vorceichen. English] Apparitions and precognition; a study from the point of view of C. G. Jung's analytical psychology. New Hyde Park, N.Y.,, University Books.
Jung, C. G. (1955). Synchronicity: an acausal connecting principle. London.