Whenever I see an article by Mungo MacCallum a wry smile of anticipation creeps over my face and I become impatient to read what he has to say. I like his laconic humour, his iconoclasm, sometimes his outragedness. He says what others fear to say. He can look the world straight in the eye and not flinch. If he cares what others say about him, he certainly does not show it. He seems to be secure in his own view of the world. All this attracts me to him. And whenever we have talked, which has not been often, we have had an easy dialogue.

His article "Jung at Heart" (October) set me thinking. Much of it I liked. Some of it, as one might expect, was outrageously funny: imagine Turnbull, Rudd, Adams and Albrechtsen being one! Yet, in developing his insightful argument, and indeed in overstating it, he is in danger of overlooking or neglecting an important insight.

There are mood swings in electorates, and in the Australian electorate in particular. They are, at times, palpable. To be sure, not everyone is affected by them. Nor do those who are affected or influenced end up with exactly the same views. But nationally, and indeed internationally, ideas do sweep around and citizens or voters do imbibe them.

I became acutely aware of this when I conducted focus-group discussions. Although on most subjects I recorded a wide range of views, I often found that in disparate groups similar words, which I had heard before to describe a situation or idea, were being used again and again. Not just similar ideas, but similar words, or the same words were being offered or spoken by people who sometimes lived hundreds or even thousands of kilometres apart.

This seemed particularly to be the case with new or emotionally charged subjects, although it was not confined to these areas. Over the years, new subjects included the environment and conservation, women's issues, sex roles and, later, global warming. Emotionally charged subjects included abortion and race relations.

In each of these subject areas, stereotypical comments would often emerge - as though people a long way from each other had already had a dialogue on the subject and had agreed on words to describe their attitudes to it - often in the form of complex words or phrases. One imagined either that they had been talking or, alternatively, that the words had been sucked, ready-made in whole or in part, from the air, or imbibed through osmosis.

Part of the explanation, of course, can be found in the media. People accept what they want from the media and make it their own, discarding, in the process, what they don't want. But this is not the end of it.

There are times that seem right or propitious for particular ideas. Opposition to apartheid was one idea whose time had come, both in South Africa and in the liberal democracies, when the struggle heightened in South Africa. Women's liberation was another - perhaps in this case being promoted by such events as the introduction of the pill and the demand for more women to enter the workforce.

Conservation and care for the environment is clearly another. There was a need; there was an educated class willing and able to act as teachers and instructors; there were young people looking for a cause which was not socially or politically dangerous; there was the possibility of widely diverse activity. So it took off. Its time had come.

Few people who lived through the build-up to the Labor victory of 1972 would deny that change was in the air. This is not to say that all voters thought that change was desirable, but it is to say that enough people thought so to make the mood palpable. The advertising boffin who coined the words "It's time" knew what he or she was doing.

To this extent the Jungian collective unconscious seems to have substance, but don't push it too hard, Mungo.