Individuation
Lifelong Learning
http://www.jungcircle.com/ind.html
Individuation is just ordinary life and what you are made conscious of.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 442.
Individuation is by no means a rare thing or a luxury of the few, but those who know that they are in such a process are considered to be lucky. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 442.
The process of energy which produces the union of the opposites in this case is the human personality which is the carrier of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 1, Pages 71-72.
I cannot quite agree with your opinion about "individuation." It is not "individualization" but a conscious realization of everything the existence of an individual implies: his needs, his tasks, his duties, his responsibilities, etc. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 503-505.
Individuation does not isolate, it connects.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 503-505.
Before [individuation] can be taken as a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective norms must first be attained. ~Carl Jung, "Definitions," CW 6, par. 761.
Conversely, he can only adapt to his inner world and achieve harmony with himself when he is adapted to the environmental conditions. ~Carl Jung, "On Psychic Energy," par. 75.
Individuation is the transformational process of integrating the conscious with the personal and collective unconscious ~Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 301.
Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience. ~ Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 294.
If you look into yourselves, you will see … the nearby as far-off and infinite, since the world of the inner is as infinite as the world of the outer. ~Jung, The Red Book, Page 264.
Relationship paves the way for individuation and makes it possible, but is itself no proof of wholeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Page 244, Footnote 15
There always are and there always will be the two standpoints, the standpoint of the social leader who, if he is an idealist at all, seeks salvation in a more or less complete suppression of the individual, and the leader of minds who seeks improvement in the individual only. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 174.
Human beings do not stand in one world only but between two worlds and must distinguish themselves from their functions in both worlds. This is individuation. You are rejecting dreams and seeking action. Then the dreams come and thwart your actions. The dreams are a world, and the real is a world. You have to stand between the gods and men. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein January 21, 1918.
Man is a gateway, through which you pass from the outer world of Gods, daimons, and souls into the inner world, out of the greater into the smaller world. Small and inane is man, already he is behind you, and once again you find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller or inner infinity. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 354.
Hillman rejects the Jungian notion of wholeness, progress, and individuation, stating “this model fundamentally devalues the existential importance of depression and the descent into dissolution per se” (Hillman, as quoted in Shelburne, 1984, p. 44).
In other words, individuation, becoming conscious of the Self, is divine suffering. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 201.
Individuation is an expression of that biological process - simple or complicated as the case may be - by which every living thing becomes what it was destined to become from the beginning. ~Carl Jung, CW XI, Para 144.
One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para 221.
Individuation cannot be achieved without a mystery. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 13.
If you prove receptive to this "call of the wild," the longing for fulfillment will quicken the sterile wilderness of your soul as rain quickens the dry earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 190.
The individuation process is the experience of a natural law and may or may not be perceived by consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 292-294.
It seems that individuation is a ruthlessly important task to which everything else should take second place. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.
Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.
— Buddha
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 442.
Individuation is by no means a rare thing or a luxury of the few, but those who know that they are in such a process are considered to be lucky. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 442.
The process of energy which produces the union of the opposites in this case is the human personality which is the carrier of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 1, Pages 71-72.
I cannot quite agree with your opinion about "individuation." It is not "individualization" but a conscious realization of everything the existence of an individual implies: his needs, his tasks, his duties, his responsibilities, etc. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 503-505.
Individuation does not isolate, it connects.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 503-505.
Before [individuation] can be taken as a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective norms must first be attained. ~Carl Jung, "Definitions," CW 6, par. 761.
Conversely, he can only adapt to his inner world and achieve harmony with himself when he is adapted to the environmental conditions. ~Carl Jung, "On Psychic Energy," par. 75.
Individuation is the transformational process of integrating the conscious with the personal and collective unconscious ~Jung, Symbols of Transformation, 301.
Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience. ~ Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 294.
If you look into yourselves, you will see … the nearby as far-off and infinite, since the world of the inner is as infinite as the world of the outer. ~Jung, The Red Book, Page 264.
Relationship paves the way for individuation and makes it possible, but is itself no proof of wholeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Page 244, Footnote 15
There always are and there always will be the two standpoints, the standpoint of the social leader who, if he is an idealist at all, seeks salvation in a more or less complete suppression of the individual, and the leader of minds who seeks improvement in the individual only. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 174.
Human beings do not stand in one world only but between two worlds and must distinguish themselves from their functions in both worlds. This is individuation. You are rejecting dreams and seeking action. Then the dreams come and thwart your actions. The dreams are a world, and the real is a world. You have to stand between the gods and men. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein January 21, 1918.
Man is a gateway, through which you pass from the outer world of Gods, daimons, and souls into the inner world, out of the greater into the smaller world. Small and inane is man, already he is behind you, and once again you find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller or inner infinity. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Page 354.
Hillman rejects the Jungian notion of wholeness, progress, and individuation, stating “this model fundamentally devalues the existential importance of depression and the descent into dissolution per se” (Hillman, as quoted in Shelburne, 1984, p. 44).
In other words, individuation, becoming conscious of the Self, is divine suffering. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 201.
Individuation is an expression of that biological process - simple or complicated as the case may be - by which every living thing becomes what it was destined to become from the beginning. ~Carl Jung, CW XI, Para 144.
One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, para 221.
Individuation cannot be achieved without a mystery. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 13.
If you prove receptive to this "call of the wild," the longing for fulfillment will quicken the sterile wilderness of your soul as rain quickens the dry earth. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 190.
The individuation process is the experience of a natural law and may or may not be perceived by consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 292-294.
It seems that individuation is a ruthlessly important task to which everything else should take second place. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 408.
Work out your own salvation. Do not depend on others.
— Buddha
Tchelitchew, Pavel (1898-1957) - 1925 Self-Portrait (Private Collection)
The great reproach which is brought against psychology is its personal
and introspective nature, but psychology consists of all that the human
spirit has ever experienced and that can certainly not be called
personal. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 2, Page 180.
You must have guidance from within, and for that you need the attitude of the child in order to be humble and obedient, and not conceited, not having better ideas, so that you can obey the impulses that come from within. You are then like the wheel that moves out of itself. And that wheel is the sun symbolism, it is a mandala. The wheel has not only been since time immemorial a symbol of the sun, the sun itself has been a symbol-that wheel which moves over the sky with nobody moving it, the wheel moving by itself. So the sun has forever been a symbol of individuation, a symbol of the man who can stand by himself and move out of himself without being pushed. ~Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 271
You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation: you are all alone with yourself and the self doesn't exist. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 805.
In the last analysis every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can also be called "individuation." ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.
Human beings do not stand in one world only but between two worlds and must distinguish themselves from their functions in both worlds. This is individuation. You are rejecting dreams and seeking action. Then the dreams come and thwart your actions. The dreams are a world, and the real is a world. You have to stand between the gods and men. ~Jung to Sabina Spielrein January 21, 1918.
Man is a gateway, through which you pass from the outer world of Gods, daimons, and souls into the inner world, out of the greater into the smaller world. Small and inane is man, already he is behind you, and once again you find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller or inner infinity. ~Jung; The Red Book; Page 354.
Not your thinking, but your essence, is differentiation. Therefore you must not strive for what you conceive as distinctiveness, but for your own essence. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely the striving for one's own essence. ~Jung; The Red Book; Scrutinies; Page 348.
Our age is striving to bring about a conglomeration and organization of enormous masses of people in which the individual suffocates, whereas meditation on the Process of Individuation leads in the reverse direction: to the problem of the spiritual development of the individual. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. V, Page 11.
The process of individuation is founded on the instinctive urge of every living creature to reach its own totality and fulfillment. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. V, Page 11.
ZOSIMOS, a philosopher of the third century A. D., said something similar: "Nature, when it is turned upon itself, transforms itself.” ~Zosimos cited by Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. V, Page 13.
And this being has body, soul and spirit, and is, therefore, the principle of life itself, as well as the principle of individuation. Its nature is spiritual, it cannot be seen, and it contains an invisible image. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.
Thus, from the psychological (not the clinical) point of view, we can divide the psychoneuroses into two main groups: the one comprising collective people with underdeveloped individuality, the other individualists with atrophied collective adaptation. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 5.
You must have guidance from within, and for that you need the attitude of the child in order to be humble and obedient, and not conceited, not having better ideas, so that you can obey the impulses that come from within. You are then like the wheel that moves out of itself. And that wheel is the sun symbolism, it is a mandala. The wheel has not only been since time immemorial a symbol of the sun, the sun itself has been a symbol-that wheel which moves over the sky with nobody moving it, the wheel moving by itself. So the sun has forever been a symbol of individuation, a symbol of the man who can stand by himself and move out of himself without being pushed. ~Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 271
You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation: you are all alone with yourself and the self doesn't exist. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 805.
In the last analysis every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can also be called "individuation." ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.
Human beings do not stand in one world only but between two worlds and must distinguish themselves from their functions in both worlds. This is individuation. You are rejecting dreams and seeking action. Then the dreams come and thwart your actions. The dreams are a world, and the real is a world. You have to stand between the gods and men. ~Jung to Sabina Spielrein January 21, 1918.
Man is a gateway, through which you pass from the outer world of Gods, daimons, and souls into the inner world, out of the greater into the smaller world. Small and inane is man, already he is behind you, and once again you find yourselves in endless space, in the smaller or inner infinity. ~Jung; The Red Book; Page 354.
Not your thinking, but your essence, is differentiation. Therefore you must not strive for what you conceive as distinctiveness, but for your own essence. At bottom, therefore, there is only one striving, namely the striving for one's own essence. ~Jung; The Red Book; Scrutinies; Page 348.
Our age is striving to bring about a conglomeration and organization of enormous masses of people in which the individual suffocates, whereas meditation on the Process of Individuation leads in the reverse direction: to the problem of the spiritual development of the individual. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. V, Page 11.
The process of individuation is founded on the instinctive urge of every living creature to reach its own totality and fulfillment. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. V, Page 11.
ZOSIMOS, a philosopher of the third century A. D., said something similar: "Nature, when it is turned upon itself, transforms itself.” ~Zosimos cited by Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. V, Page 13.
And this being has body, soul and spirit, and is, therefore, the principle of life itself, as well as the principle of individuation. Its nature is spiritual, it cannot be seen, and it contains an invisible image. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.
Thus, from the psychological (not the clinical) point of view, we can divide the psychoneuroses into two main groups: the one comprising collective people with underdeveloped individuality, the other individualists with atrophied collective adaptation. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 5.
…the fact is that free will only exists within the limits of consciousness. Beyond those limits there is mere compulsion. ~Carl Jung; Letters Volume 1, Page 227.
Individuation is only possible with people, through people.
You must realize that you are a link in a chain, that you are not an electron suspended somewhere in space or aimlessly drifting through the cosmos. ~Carl Jung, Zarathusta Seminar, Page 103.
Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects. ~Carl Jung; Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle; Page 25.
You see as the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense relationships and not to isolation. ~Carl Jung; CW 6; Page 448; Paragraph 758.
Individuation cannot be achieved without a mystery.
The mysteries of antiquity were secrets created artificially for those who did not find any deep mystery in themselves. As the importance of the inner life increased, the meaning of the public mysteries of antiquity decreased in value. To own a mystery gives stature, conveys uniqueness, and assures that one will not be submerged in the mass. Because a secret may cause suffering it is best to keep it to oneself.
The true art is in pond us et mesura -in the right balance of weight, measure and degree.
Too much secrecy causes neurosis and a split from reality, but having no mystery permits only collective thinking and action. Mystery is essential to the experience of oneself as a unique personality, distinct from others, and for growth through repeated conflict. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 13
Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul?
You seek the way through mere appearances; you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that?
There is only one way and that is your way.
You seek the path. I warn you away from my own.
It can also be the wrong way for you.
May each go his own way. . ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 231
Believe me: It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you.
On what basis should I presume to teach you?
I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way.
My path is not your path therefore I cannot teach you.
The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 231
Without personal life, without the here and now, we cannot attain to the supra-personal.
Personal life must first be fulfilled in order that the process of the supra-personal side of the psyche can be introduced. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Page 66.
[Anahata Heart Chakra - Air Element - Antelope/Gazelle]
In anahata you behold the purusha, a small figure that is the divine self, namely, that which is not identical with mere causality, mere nature, a mere release of energy that
runs down blindly with no purpose.
People lose themselves completely in their emotions and deplete themselves, and finally they are burned to bits and nothing remains—just a heap of ashes, that is all.
The same thing occurs in lunacy: people get into a certain state and cannot get out of it. They burn up in their emotions and explode.
There is a possibility that one detaches from it, however, and when a man discovers this, he really becomes a man. Through manipura he is in the womb of nature, extraordinarily automatic; it is merely a process.
But in anvhata a new thing comes up, the possibility of lifting himself above the emotional happenings and beholding them. He discovers the purusha in his heart, the thumbling, “Smaller than small, and greater than great.”
Individuation is only possible with people, through people.
You must realize that you are a link in a chain, that you are not an electron suspended somewhere in space or aimlessly drifting through the cosmos. ~Carl Jung, Zarathusta Seminar, Page 103.
This play that I witnessed is my play, not your play.
It is my secret, not yours. You cannot imitate me.
My secret remains virginal and my mysteries are inviolable, they belong to me and cannot belong to you.
You have your own.
He who enters into his own must grope through what lies at hand, he must sense his way from stone to stone.
He must embrace the worthless and the worthy with the same love. A mountain is nothing, and a grain of sand holds kingdoms, or also nothing.
Judgment must fall from you, even taste, but above all pride, even when it is based on merit.
Utterly poor, miserable, unknowingly humiliated, go on through the gate.
Turn your anger against yourself, since only you stop yourself from looking and from living.
The mystery play is soft like air and thin smoke, and you are raw matter that is disturbingly heavy.
But let your hope, which is your highest good and highest ability, lead the way and serve you as a guide in the world of darkness) since it is of like substance with the forms of that world. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 246-247.
If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate. ~~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
In the center of anahata there is again Shiva in the form of the linga, and the small flame means the first germ-like appearance of the self. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Page 39.
Dr. Jung: Yes. It is the withdrawal from the emotions; you are no longer identical with them. If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate.
So in anahata individuation begins.
But here again you are likely to get an inflation.
Individuation is not that you become an ego—you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed
in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist.
Individuation is becoming that thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange.
Therefore nobody understands what the self is, because the self is just the thing which you are not, which is not the ego.
The ego discovers itself as being a mere appendix of the self in a sort of loose connection.
For the ego is always far down in muladhara and suddenly becomes aware of something up above in the fourth story, in anahata, and that is the self. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
The situation of Earth is released into the Air, dis-attachment with the Earthly realm. Mindfulness, you are no longer identifying with your emotions and desires.
Individuation! Becoming what is not 'me': The Self, the trans-personal. Where psychic things have their origins. The me is an appendage of the Self. Realizing values. The beginning of Purusha, the essence, the "Self" which pervades the universe.
Individuation means: becoming what is not me, nobody understands what the Self is, because the Self is exactly that which you are not, it is not the me, the me is merely an appendage of the Self.
Carl Jung; Kundalini Yoga
Individuation is only possible with people, through people.
You must realize that you are a link in a chain, that you are not an electron suspended somewhere in space or aimlessly drifting through the cosmos. ~Carl Jung, Zarathusta Seminar, Page 103.
Primitive superstition lies just below the surface of even the most tough-minded individuals, and it is precisely those who most fight against it who are the first to succumb to its suggestive effects. ~Carl Jung; Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle; Page 25.
You see as the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense relationships and not to isolation. ~Carl Jung; CW 6; Page 448; Paragraph 758.
Individuation cannot be achieved without a mystery.
The mysteries of antiquity were secrets created artificially for those who did not find any deep mystery in themselves. As the importance of the inner life increased, the meaning of the public mysteries of antiquity decreased in value. To own a mystery gives stature, conveys uniqueness, and assures that one will not be submerged in the mass. Because a secret may cause suffering it is best to keep it to oneself.
The true art is in pond us et mesura -in the right balance of weight, measure and degree.
Too much secrecy causes neurosis and a split from reality, but having no mystery permits only collective thinking and action. Mystery is essential to the experience of oneself as a unique personality, distinct from others, and for growth through repeated conflict. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Psychotherapy, Page 13
Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul?
You seek the way through mere appearances; you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that?
There is only one way and that is your way.
You seek the path. I warn you away from my own.
It can also be the wrong way for you.
May each go his own way. . ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 231
Believe me: It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you.
On what basis should I presume to teach you?
I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way.
My path is not your path therefore I cannot teach you.
The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 231
Without personal life, without the here and now, we cannot attain to the supra-personal.
Personal life must first be fulfilled in order that the process of the supra-personal side of the psyche can be introduced. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Page 66.
[Anahata Heart Chakra - Air Element - Antelope/Gazelle]
In anahata you behold the purusha, a small figure that is the divine self, namely, that which is not identical with mere causality, mere nature, a mere release of energy that
runs down blindly with no purpose.
People lose themselves completely in their emotions and deplete themselves, and finally they are burned to bits and nothing remains—just a heap of ashes, that is all.
The same thing occurs in lunacy: people get into a certain state and cannot get out of it. They burn up in their emotions and explode.
There is a possibility that one detaches from it, however, and when a man discovers this, he really becomes a man. Through manipura he is in the womb of nature, extraordinarily automatic; it is merely a process.
But in anvhata a new thing comes up, the possibility of lifting himself above the emotional happenings and beholding them. He discovers the purusha in his heart, the thumbling, “Smaller than small, and greater than great.”
Individuation is only possible with people, through people.
You must realize that you are a link in a chain, that you are not an electron suspended somewhere in space or aimlessly drifting through the cosmos. ~Carl Jung, Zarathusta Seminar, Page 103.
This play that I witnessed is my play, not your play.
It is my secret, not yours. You cannot imitate me.
My secret remains virginal and my mysteries are inviolable, they belong to me and cannot belong to you.
You have your own.
He who enters into his own must grope through what lies at hand, he must sense his way from stone to stone.
He must embrace the worthless and the worthy with the same love. A mountain is nothing, and a grain of sand holds kingdoms, or also nothing.
Judgment must fall from you, even taste, but above all pride, even when it is based on merit.
Utterly poor, miserable, unknowingly humiliated, go on through the gate.
Turn your anger against yourself, since only you stop yourself from looking and from living.
The mystery play is soft like air and thin smoke, and you are raw matter that is disturbingly heavy.
But let your hope, which is your highest good and highest ability, lead the way and serve you as a guide in the world of darkness) since it is of like substance with the forms of that world. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 246-247.
If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate. ~~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
In the center of anahata there is again Shiva in the form of the linga, and the small flame means the first germ-like appearance of the self. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Page 39.
Dr. Jung: Yes. It is the withdrawal from the emotions; you are no longer identical with them. If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate.
So in anahata individuation begins.
But here again you are likely to get an inflation.
Individuation is not that you become an ego—you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed
in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist.
Individuation is becoming that thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange.
Therefore nobody understands what the self is, because the self is just the thing which you are not, which is not the ego.
The ego discovers itself as being a mere appendix of the self in a sort of loose connection.
For the ego is always far down in muladhara and suddenly becomes aware of something up above in the fourth story, in anahata, and that is the self. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
The situation of Earth is released into the Air, dis-attachment with the Earthly realm. Mindfulness, you are no longer identifying with your emotions and desires.
Individuation! Becoming what is not 'me': The Self, the trans-personal. Where psychic things have their origins. The me is an appendage of the Self. Realizing values. The beginning of Purusha, the essence, the "Self" which pervades the universe.
Individuation means: becoming what is not me, nobody understands what the Self is, because the Self is exactly that which you are not, it is not the me, the me is merely an appendage of the Self.
Carl Jung; Kundalini Yoga
Your individuality, your Self, appears in the objective facts of your
life. An event can seem incredible, unacceptable, but if it happens to
you, then it means that it is you. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff
- A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
To live oneself means: to be one's own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 249.
If a complete or divine consciousness were possible, there would be no projection, which means that there would be no world, because the world is the definiteness of the divine projection. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 132.
Jung believed that a human being is inwardly whole, but that most of us have lost touch with important parts of our selves. Through listening to the messages of our dreams and waking imagination, we can contact and reintegrate our different parts. The goal of life is individuation, the process of coming to know, giving expression to, and harmonizing the various components of the psyche. If we realize our uniqueness, we can undertake a process of individuation and tap into our true self. Each human being has a specific nature and calling which is uniquely his or her own, and unless these are fulfilled through a union of conscious and unconscious, the person can become sick.
The dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuationis, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do not fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 370
Individuation is the process of integrating the conscious with the unconscious, for the purpose of self-actualization, transforming one's psyche by bringing the personal and collective unconscious into conscious. In Jungian theory the unconscious is far too vast to ever be made fully conscious. "Trust that which gives you meaning and accept it as your guide."
The vision quest is a model for any inner journey:
“The individual undertakes his inner quest, without any show of heroic strength and achieves it, not as a triumph, but as a submission to powers higher than himself.
He accomplishes nothing by guile, which would be merely another form of heroic trial of strength. He is essentially a suppliant, not a man of power.
He can count only upon his own intrinsic human worth and is of necessity his own teacher.
He may be allowed to see the object of the heroic quest but not to possess it, or he may possess it briefly before losing it again, or he may derive spiritual insight from it as a talisman which comes and goes” (Henderson, 141).
To live oneself means: to be one's own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 249.
If a complete or divine consciousness were possible, there would be no projection, which means that there would be no world, because the world is the definiteness of the divine projection. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 132.
Jung believed that a human being is inwardly whole, but that most of us have lost touch with important parts of our selves. Through listening to the messages of our dreams and waking imagination, we can contact and reintegrate our different parts. The goal of life is individuation, the process of coming to know, giving expression to, and harmonizing the various components of the psyche. If we realize our uniqueness, we can undertake a process of individuation and tap into our true self. Each human being has a specific nature and calling which is uniquely his or her own, and unless these are fulfilled through a union of conscious and unconscious, the person can become sick.
The dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuationis, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do not fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 370
Individuation is the process of integrating the conscious with the unconscious, for the purpose of self-actualization, transforming one's psyche by bringing the personal and collective unconscious into conscious. In Jungian theory the unconscious is far too vast to ever be made fully conscious. "Trust that which gives you meaning and accept it as your guide."
The vision quest is a model for any inner journey:
“The individual undertakes his inner quest, without any show of heroic strength and achieves it, not as a triumph, but as a submission to powers higher than himself.
He accomplishes nothing by guile, which would be merely another form of heroic trial of strength. He is essentially a suppliant, not a man of power.
He can count only upon his own intrinsic human worth and is of necessity his own teacher.
He may be allowed to see the object of the heroic quest but not to possess it, or he may possess it briefly before losing it again, or he may derive spiritual insight from it as a talisman which comes and goes” (Henderson, 141).
Axiom of Maria is a precept in alchemy: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth." It is attributed to 3rd century alchemist Maria Prophetissa, also called the Jewess, sister of Moses, or the Copt. Marie-Louise von Franz gives an alternative version thus: "Out of the One comes Two, out of Two comes Three, and from the Third comes the One as the Fourth."
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) used the axiom as a metaphor for the process of individuation. One is unconscious wholeness; two is the conflict of opposites; three points to a potential resolution; the third is the transcendent function, described as a "psychic function that arises from the tension between consciousness and the unconscious and supports their union"; and the one as the fourth is a transformed state of consciousness, relatively whole and at peace.
Jung speaks of the axiom of Maria as running in various forms through the whole of alchemy like a leitmotiv. In "The Psychology of the Transference" he writes of the fourfold nature of the transforming process using the language of Greek alchemy:
"It begins with the four separate elements, the state of chaos, and ascends by degrees to the three manifestations of Mercurius in the inorganic, organic, and spiritual worlds; and, after attaining the form of Sol and Luna (i.e., the precious metal gold and silver, but also the radiance of the gods who can overcome the strife of the elements by love), it culminates in the one and indivisible (incorruptible, ethereal, eternal) nature of the anima, the quinta essentia, aqua permanens, tincture, or lapis philosophorum. This progression from the number 4 to 3 to 2 to 1 is the 'axiom of Maria'..." The Axiom of Maria may be interpreted as an alchemical analogy of the process of individuation from the many to the one, from undifferentiated unconsciousness to individual consciousness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_Maria
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) used the axiom as a metaphor for the process of individuation. One is unconscious wholeness; two is the conflict of opposites; three points to a potential resolution; the third is the transcendent function, described as a "psychic function that arises from the tension between consciousness and the unconscious and supports their union"; and the one as the fourth is a transformed state of consciousness, relatively whole and at peace.
Jung speaks of the axiom of Maria as running in various forms through the whole of alchemy like a leitmotiv. In "The Psychology of the Transference" he writes of the fourfold nature of the transforming process using the language of Greek alchemy:
"It begins with the four separate elements, the state of chaos, and ascends by degrees to the three manifestations of Mercurius in the inorganic, organic, and spiritual worlds; and, after attaining the form of Sol and Luna (i.e., the precious metal gold and silver, but also the radiance of the gods who can overcome the strife of the elements by love), it culminates in the one and indivisible (incorruptible, ethereal, eternal) nature of the anima, the quinta essentia, aqua permanens, tincture, or lapis philosophorum. This progression from the number 4 to 3 to 2 to 1 is the 'axiom of Maria'..." The Axiom of Maria may be interpreted as an alchemical analogy of the process of individuation from the many to the one, from undifferentiated unconsciousness to individual consciousness.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_Maria
The goal of psychological, as of biological, development is self-realization or individuation.
But since [we] know [our self] only as an ego, and the self, as a totality, is indescribable and indistinguishable from a God-image, self-realization . . . amounts to God's incarnation. . . . And because individuation is an heroic and often tragic task, the most difficult of all, it involves suffering, a passion of the ego: the ordinary empirical [person] we once were is burdened with the fate of losing one's self in a greater dimension and being robbed of [our] fancied freedom of will. [We] suffer, so to speak, by the violence done to [us] by the self. . . . The human and the divine suffering set up a relationship of complementarity with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, , [we] can get to know the real meaning of [our] suffering, [and we are then] on [our] way toward realizing [our] wholeness.
As the result of the integration of conscious and unconscious, [one's] ego enters the "divine" realm, where it participates in "God's suffering."
The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely "incarnation," which on the human level appears as "individuation."
The divine hero born of [wo]man is already threatened with murder; he has nowhere to lay his head, and his death is a gruesome tragedy.
The self is no mere concept or logical postulate; it is a psychic reality, only part of it conscious, while, for the rest, it embraces the life of the unconscious and is therefore inconceivable except in the form of symbols.
The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events in the conscious life - of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny ~Carl Jung; "A Psychological Approach to the Trinity"; CW 11, par. 233.
[Carl Jung on the Symbol of the Bee and Kundalini]
To Elined Kotschnig
Dear Mrs. Kotschnig, 23 July 1934
The symbol of the bee, though belonging to the general class of the insects, is a very particular one. Insects in general always point to the sympathetic system, usually demonstrating a certain activity therein, owing to the fact that insects possess only a sympathetic system which is highly automatic and mechanical.
The bee in the case of your patient shows an intense activity, a continuous vibration that produces a sort of humming sound like a swarm of bees.
It is a peculiar restlessness in the lower centers closely associated with sex.
The bee is the symbol of the dormant Kundalini that is ready to strike.
Therefore in the Tantra Yoga (Footnote 2) it is said that she produces a humming sound like a swarm of erotically excited bees.
It shows a peculiar restlessness which draws all the attention to itself, so that the conscious becomes almost inaccessible to outward impressions and arguments.
The purpose of such an activity is never what the conscious would assume, namely an immediate erotic experience.
On the contrary, it is an intense enhancing of the Self.
This is the reason why such people always fall in love with those who don't love them in return. It is in order to prevent the erotic experience, because such an experience would alienate the person from her secret purpose, which, at least for the time being, is individuation.
In this case it would mean a greater awareness of herself.
As a matter of fact the bee symbolizes that instinct which makes her thoroughly auto-erotic.
This is not wrong for the moment, as she is not grown up enough.
In certain respects she is still like a child who needs all her libido for her own development.
The bee as it is now presumably symbolizes erotic fantasies and thoughts that sting her.
The picture she has drawn proves that the bee-instinct is seeking the Rose, .i.e., the mandala, the symbol for the Self.
Sincerely yours,
C.G. Jung [Letters Volume 1; Pages 169-171
Footnote 2: ln Tantric Yoga the Kundalini serpent lies coiled up in muladhara, the nethermost chakra (cf. Wilhelm, 27 Aug. 29, n. 2 ) and in meditation is experienced as moving upwards through the other cakras. Cf. also Anon., 5 July p, n. 2.
As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 356.
Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world. The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals.
Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man's task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious. Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness.
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.
~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 326.
The numinous experience of the individuation process is, on the archaic level, the prerogative of shamans and medicine men; later, of the physician, prophet, and priest; and finally, at the civilized stage, of philosophy and religion.
The shaman's experience of sickness, torture, death, and regeneration implies, at a higher level, the idea of being made whole through sacrifice, of being changed by transubstantiation and exalted to the pneumatic man in a word, of apotheosis.
The Mass is the summation and quintessence of a development which began many thousands of years ago and, with the progressive broadening and deepening of consciousness, gradually made the isolated experience of specifically gifted individuals the common property of a larger group.
The underlying psychic process remained, of course, hidden from view and was dramatized in the form of suitable "mysteries" and "sacraments” these being reinforced by religious teachings, exercises, meditations, and acts of sacrifice which plunge the celebrant so deeply into the sphere of the mystery that he is able to become conscious of his intimate connection with the mythic happenings.
Thus, in ancient Egypt,we see how the experience of "Osirification," originally the prerogative of the Pharaohs, gradually passed to the aristocracy and finally, towards the end of the Old Kingdom, to the single individual as well.
Similarly, the mystery religions of the Greeks, originally esoteric and not talked about, broadened out into collective experience, and at the time of the Caesars it was considered a regular sport for Roman tourists to get themselves initiated into foreign mysteries.
Christianity, after some hesitation, went a step further and made celebration of the mysteries a public institution, for, as we know, it was especially concerned to introduce as many people as possible to the experience of the mystery.
So, sooner or later, the individual could not fail to become conscious of his own transformation and of the necessary psychological conditions for this, such as confession and repentance of sin.
The ground was prepared for the realization that, in the mystery of transubstantiation, it was not so much a question of magical influence as of psychological processes a realization for which the alchemists had already paved the way by putting their opus operatum at least on a level with the ecclesiastical mystery, and even attributing to it a cosmic significance since, by its means, the divine world-soul could be liberated from imprisonment in matter.
As I think I have shown, the "philosophical" side of alchemy is nothing less than a symbolic anticipation of certain psychological insights, and these to judge by the example of Gerhard Dorn were pretty far advanced by the end of the sixteenth century.
63 Only our intellectualized age could have been so deluded as to see in alchemy nothing but an abortive attempt at chemistry, and in the interpretative methods of modern psychology a mere "psychologizing," i.e., annihilation, of the mystery.
Just as the alchemists knew that the production of their stone was a miracle that could only happen "Deo concedente," so the modern psychologist is aware that he can produce no more than a description, couched in scientific symbols, of a psychic process whose real nature transcends consciousness just as much as does the mystery of life
or of matter.
At no point has he explained the mystery itself, thereby causing it to fade.
He has merely, in accordance with the spirit of Christian tradition, brought it a little nearer to individual consciousness, using the empirical material to set forth the individuation process and show it as an actual and experienceable fact.
To treat a metaphysical statement as a psychic process is not to say that it is "merely psychic," as my critics assert in the fond belief that the word "psychic" postulates something known.
It does not seem to have occurred to people that when we say "psyche" we are alluding to the densest darkness it is possible to imagine.
The ethics of the researcher require him to admit where his knowledge comes to an end.
This end is the beginning of all wisdom.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Pages 294-296, Para 448.
Bruneel, Crystal Lotus Travelpod vs. 6
In every adult there lurks a child--an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the personality which wants to develop and become whole.
To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is. ~Carl Jung
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the “House of the Gathering.” Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day. – Carl Jung
“God is reality itself.” ~Carl Jung
“What happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured.” ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion
“We all must do what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own version of life. And there will be error. If you avoid error you do not live.” - Carl Jung; C.G. Jung Speaking
“The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration.” -Carl Jung; Alchemical Studies
“The God-image in man was not destroyed by the Fall but was only damaged and corrupted (‘deformed’), and can be restored through God’s grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. The psychological equivalent of this is the integration of the collective unconscious which forms an essential part of the individuation process.” -Carl Jung; Aion
To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality is. ~Carl Jung
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the “House of the Gathering.” Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day. – Carl Jung
“God is reality itself.” ~Carl Jung
“What happens in the life of Christ happens always and everywhere. In the Christian archetype all lives of this kind are prefigured.” ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion
“We all must do what Christ did. We must make our experiment. We must make mistakes. We must live out our own version of life. And there will be error. If you avoid error you do not live.” - Carl Jung; C.G. Jung Speaking
“The divine process of change manifests itself to our human understanding . . . as punishment, torment, death, and transfiguration.” -Carl Jung; Alchemical Studies
“The God-image in man was not destroyed by the Fall but was only damaged and corrupted (‘deformed’), and can be restored through God’s grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. The psychological equivalent of this is the integration of the collective unconscious which forms an essential part of the individuation process.” -Carl Jung; Aion
"Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors."
--Andrew Boyd.
“Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky” ~Carl Jung, Book of Job, Para. 758.
The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. Lower down; that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence *at bottom' the psyche is simply “world.” ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
Jung used the term to represent a “whole person” or to utilize Maslow’s term, a “self-actualized” person. The confusion arises in that “self-actualization” is a necessary stepping stone in moving toward “self-transcendence.” The confusion in that much of what Jung describes as “individuation” is actually “self-transcendence.”
Self-transcendence is the dissolution of the self-actualized individual into the “whole.” “Whole” in the collective consciousness includes Divine Consciousness - God. It is the “Awakening” or “Enlightenment” process. This process is not the individual realizing they exist within the whole, but the individual dissolving “self” and becoming one with the “whole.”
“We (psychologists) are accustomed to explaining participation mystique as a state resulting from the presence of projections. And we also say conversely that that projection constitutes a part of unconscious identity and thereby leads to participation mystique…”--Neumann
Empirically speaking, consciousness can never comprehend the whole, but it is probable that the whole is unconsciously present in the ego. This would be equivalent to the highest possible state of completeness or perfection. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Paragraph 171
Eight Stages / Battles throughout life (epigenetic principle):
infancy: trust vs. mistrust
The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch. --Carl Gustav Jung, The Symbolic Life, Collected Works 18, par.1400
Persona
The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.
"The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" (1928). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.305
Whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see first of all his own face. Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself. The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face.
"Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.43
Every calling or profession has its own characteristic persona. It is easy to study these things nowadays, when the photographs of public personalities so frequently appear in the press. A certain kind of behaviour is forced on them by the world, and professional people endeavour to come up to these expectations. Only, the danger is that they become identical with their personas-the professor with his text-book, the tenor with his voice. Then the damage is done; henceforth he lives exclusively against the background of his own biography. . . . The garment of Deianeira has grown fast to his skin, and a desperate decision like that of Heracles is needed if he is to tear this Nessus shirt from his body and step into the consuming fire of the flame of immortality, in order to transform himself into what he really is. One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.
"Concerning Rebirth" (1940). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.221
I once made the acquaintance of a very venerable personage - in fact, one might easily call him a saint. I stalked round him for three whole days, but never a mortal failing did I find in him. My feeling of inferiority grew ominous, and I was beginning to think seriously of how I might better myself. Then, on the fourth day, his wife came to consult me.... Well, nothing of the sort has ever happened to me since. But this I did learn: that any man who becomes one with his persona can cheerfully let all disturbances manifest themselves through his wife without her noticing it, though she pays for her self-sacrifice with a bad neurosis.
"The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" (1928). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.306
Since the differentiated consciousness of civilized man has been granted an effective instrument for the practical realization of its contents through the dynamics of his will, there is all the more danger, the more he trains his will, of his getting lost in one-sidedness and deviating further and further from the laws and roots of his being.
"The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (1940) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.276
When there is a marked change in the individual's state of consciousness, the unconscious contents which are thereby constellated will also change. And the further the conscious situation moves away from a certain point of equilibrium, the more forceful and accordingly the more dangerous become the unconscious contents that are struggling to restore the balance. This leads ultimately to a dissociation: on the one hand, ego-consciousness makes convulsive efforts to shake off an invisible opponent (if it does not suspect its next-door neighbour of being the devil!), while on the other hand it increasingly falls victim to the tyrannical will of an internal "Government opposition" which displays all the characteristics of a daemonic subman and superman combined. When a few million people get into this state, it produces the sort of situation which has afforded us such an edifying object-lesson every day for the last ten years.* These contemporary events betray their psychological background by their very singularity. The insensate destruction and devastation are a reaction against the deflection of consciousness from the point of equilibrium. For an equilibrium does in fact exist between the psychic ego and non-ego, and that equilibrium is a religion a "careful consideration" of ever-present unconscious forces which we neglect at our peril.
"The Psychology of Transference" (1946). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy. P.394 *The years 1935-1945
Nothing is so apt to challenge our self-awareness and alertness as being at war with oneself. One can hardly think of any other or more effective means of waking humanity out of the irresponsible and innocent half-sleep of the primitive mentality and bringing it to a state of conscious responsibility.
"Psychological Typology" (1936). In CW 6: Psychological Types. P. 964
Hidden in the neurosis is a bit of still undeveloped personality, a precious fragment of the psyche lacking which a man is condemned to resignation, bitterness, and everything else that is hostile to life. A psychology of neurosis that sees only the negative elements empties out the baby with the bath-water, since it neglects the positive meaning and value of these "infantile' i.e., creative-fantasies.
"The State of Psychotherapy Today" (1934). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P.355
We yield too much to the ridiculous fear that we are at bottom quite impossible beings, that if everyone were to appear as he really is a frightful social catastrophe would ensue. Many people today take "man as he really is" to mean merely the eternally discontented, anarchic, rapacious element in human beings, quite forgetting that these same human beings have also erected those firmly established forms of civilization which possess greater strength and stability than all the anarchic undercurrents. The strengthening of his social personality is one of the essential conditions for man's existence. Were it not so, humanity would cease to be. The selfishness and rebelliousness we meet in the neurotic's psychology are not "man as he really is" but an infantile distortion. In reality the normal man is "civic minded and moral"; he created his laws and observes them, not because they are imposed on him from without-that is a childish delusion-but because he loves law and order more than he loves disorder and lawlessness.
"Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.442
The true genius nearly always intrudes and disturbs. He speaks to a temporal world out of a world eternal. He says the wrong things at the right time. Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of eternity. Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of eternal truth is healing.
"What India Can Teach Us" (1939). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P. 1004
The genius will come through despite everything, for there is something absolute and indomitable in his nature. The so-called "misunderstood genius" is rather a doubtful phenomenon. Generally he turns out to be a good-for-nothing who is forever seeking a soothing explanation of himself.
"The Gifted Child" (1943). In CW 17: The Development of Personality. P. 248
Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.
"On the Relation of Analytical Psychology of Poetry" (1922). In CW 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. P.129
To be "normal" is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. But for people of more than average ability, people who never found it difficult to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world's work-for them the moral compulsion to be nothing but normal signifies the bed of Procrustes-deadly and insupportable boredom, a hell of sterility and hopelessness.
"Problems of Modern Psychotherapy" (1929). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy. P. 161
Nothing in us ever remains quite uncontradicted, and consciousness can take up no position which will not call up, somewhere in the dark corners of the psyche, a negation or a compensatory effect, approval or resentment. This process of coming to terms with the Other in us is well worth while, because in this way we get to know aspects of our nature which we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted.
Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) CW 14: P. 706
The "other" in us always seems alien and unacceptable; but if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of self-knowledge.
"Psychological Aspects of the Kore" (1941). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. P. 918
If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round. Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments.
"Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung" (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.737
The Shadow
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.
"Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.131
It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster's body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.35
We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women who pass by without exciting attention, and who betray to the world nothing of the conflicts that rage within them except possibly by a nervous breakdown. What is so difficult for the layman to grasp is the fact that in most cases the patients themselves have no suspicion whatever of the internecine war raging in their unconscious. If we remember that there are many people who understand nothing at all about themselves, we shall be less surprised at the realization that there are also people who are utterly unaware of their actual conflicts.
"New Paths in Psychology" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.425
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the "House of the Gathering." Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.
"Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.140
There is a deep gulf between what a man is and what he represents, between what he is as an individual and what he is as a collective being. His function is developed at the expense of the individuality. Should he excel, he is merely identical with his collective function; but should he not, then, though he may be highly esteemed as a function in society, his individuality is wholly on the level of his inferior, undeveloped functions, and he is simply a barbarian, while in the former case he has happily deceived himself as to his actual barbarism.
Psychological Types (1921). CW 6: P.III
Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries. Only monkeys parade with it.
The Integration of the Personality. (1939)
How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious? Primitive man's perception of objects is conditioned only partly by the objective behaviour of the things themselves, whereas a much greater part is often played by intrapsychic facts which are not related to the external objects except by way of projection. This is due to the simple fact that the primitive has not yet experienced that ascetic discipline of mind known to us as the critique of knowledge. To him the world is a more or less fluid phenomenon within the stream of his own fantasy, where subject and object are undifferentiated and in a state of mutual interpenetration.
"Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939) In CW 9, Part 1: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 187
We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together.
"Answer to Job" (1952). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.12
The world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman objects: it was projected, as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At most it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another: already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals. Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, rumours, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is.
"Psychology and Religion" (1938) In CW II: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P. 140
When we must deal with problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leads through obscurity and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer.
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.752
Everything that man should, and yet cannot, be or do- be it in a positive or negative sense - lives on as a mythological figure and anticipation alongside his consciousness, either as a religious projection or-what is still more dangerous - as unconscious contents which then project themselves spontaneously into incongruous objects, e.g., hygienic and other "salvationist" doctrines or practices. All these are so many rationalized substitutes for mythology, and their unnaturalness does more harm than good.
"The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (1940). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.287
The hero's main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness: it is the long-hoped-for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious. The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being whose existence no one had suspected before. "And God said, 'Let there be light"' is the projection of that immemorial experience of the separation of consciousness from the unconscious.
"The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (1940). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.284
--Andrew Boyd.
“Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky” ~Carl Jung, Book of Job, Para. 758.
The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. Lower down; that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence *at bottom' the psyche is simply “world.” ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
Jung used the term to represent a “whole person” or to utilize Maslow’s term, a “self-actualized” person. The confusion arises in that “self-actualization” is a necessary stepping stone in moving toward “self-transcendence.” The confusion in that much of what Jung describes as “individuation” is actually “self-transcendence.”
Self-transcendence is the dissolution of the self-actualized individual into the “whole.” “Whole” in the collective consciousness includes Divine Consciousness - God. It is the “Awakening” or “Enlightenment” process. This process is not the individual realizing they exist within the whole, but the individual dissolving “self” and becoming one with the “whole.”
“We (psychologists) are accustomed to explaining participation mystique as a state resulting from the presence of projections. And we also say conversely that that projection constitutes a part of unconscious identity and thereby leads to participation mystique…”--Neumann
Empirically speaking, consciousness can never comprehend the whole, but it is probable that the whole is unconsciously present in the ego. This would be equivalent to the highest possible state of completeness or perfection. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Paragraph 171
Eight Stages / Battles throughout life (epigenetic principle):
infancy: trust vs. mistrust
- early childhood: autonomy vs. shame and doubt
preschool: initiative vs. guilt
school age: industry vs. inferiority
puberty: identity vs. identity confusion
young adulthood: intimacy vs. isolation
middle adulthood: generativity vs. stagnation
late adulthood: integrity vs. despair
The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch. --Carl Gustav Jung, The Symbolic Life, Collected Works 18, par.1400
Persona
The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.
"The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" (1928). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.305
Whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see first of all his own face. Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself. The mirror does not flatter, it faithfully shows whatever looks into it; namely, the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of the actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face.
"Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.43
Every calling or profession has its own characteristic persona. It is easy to study these things nowadays, when the photographs of public personalities so frequently appear in the press. A certain kind of behaviour is forced on them by the world, and professional people endeavour to come up to these expectations. Only, the danger is that they become identical with their personas-the professor with his text-book, the tenor with his voice. Then the damage is done; henceforth he lives exclusively against the background of his own biography. . . . The garment of Deianeira has grown fast to his skin, and a desperate decision like that of Heracles is needed if he is to tear this Nessus shirt from his body and step into the consuming fire of the flame of immortality, in order to transform himself into what he really is. One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.
"Concerning Rebirth" (1940). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.221
I once made the acquaintance of a very venerable personage - in fact, one might easily call him a saint. I stalked round him for three whole days, but never a mortal failing did I find in him. My feeling of inferiority grew ominous, and I was beginning to think seriously of how I might better myself. Then, on the fourth day, his wife came to consult me.... Well, nothing of the sort has ever happened to me since. But this I did learn: that any man who becomes one with his persona can cheerfully let all disturbances manifest themselves through his wife without her noticing it, though she pays for her self-sacrifice with a bad neurosis.
"The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" (1928). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.306
Since the differentiated consciousness of civilized man has been granted an effective instrument for the practical realization of its contents through the dynamics of his will, there is all the more danger, the more he trains his will, of his getting lost in one-sidedness and deviating further and further from the laws and roots of his being.
"The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (1940) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.276
When there is a marked change in the individual's state of consciousness, the unconscious contents which are thereby constellated will also change. And the further the conscious situation moves away from a certain point of equilibrium, the more forceful and accordingly the more dangerous become the unconscious contents that are struggling to restore the balance. This leads ultimately to a dissociation: on the one hand, ego-consciousness makes convulsive efforts to shake off an invisible opponent (if it does not suspect its next-door neighbour of being the devil!), while on the other hand it increasingly falls victim to the tyrannical will of an internal "Government opposition" which displays all the characteristics of a daemonic subman and superman combined. When a few million people get into this state, it produces the sort of situation which has afforded us such an edifying object-lesson every day for the last ten years.* These contemporary events betray their psychological background by their very singularity. The insensate destruction and devastation are a reaction against the deflection of consciousness from the point of equilibrium. For an equilibrium does in fact exist between the psychic ego and non-ego, and that equilibrium is a religion a "careful consideration" of ever-present unconscious forces which we neglect at our peril.
"The Psychology of Transference" (1946). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy. P.394 *The years 1935-1945
Nothing is so apt to challenge our self-awareness and alertness as being at war with oneself. One can hardly think of any other or more effective means of waking humanity out of the irresponsible and innocent half-sleep of the primitive mentality and bringing it to a state of conscious responsibility.
"Psychological Typology" (1936). In CW 6: Psychological Types. P. 964
Hidden in the neurosis is a bit of still undeveloped personality, a precious fragment of the psyche lacking which a man is condemned to resignation, bitterness, and everything else that is hostile to life. A psychology of neurosis that sees only the negative elements empties out the baby with the bath-water, since it neglects the positive meaning and value of these "infantile' i.e., creative-fantasies.
"The State of Psychotherapy Today" (1934). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P.355
We yield too much to the ridiculous fear that we are at bottom quite impossible beings, that if everyone were to appear as he really is a frightful social catastrophe would ensue. Many people today take "man as he really is" to mean merely the eternally discontented, anarchic, rapacious element in human beings, quite forgetting that these same human beings have also erected those firmly established forms of civilization which possess greater strength and stability than all the anarchic undercurrents. The strengthening of his social personality is one of the essential conditions for man's existence. Were it not so, humanity would cease to be. The selfishness and rebelliousness we meet in the neurotic's psychology are not "man as he really is" but an infantile distortion. In reality the normal man is "civic minded and moral"; he created his laws and observes them, not because they are imposed on him from without-that is a childish delusion-but because he loves law and order more than he loves disorder and lawlessness.
"Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious" (1935). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.442
The true genius nearly always intrudes and disturbs. He speaks to a temporal world out of a world eternal. He says the wrong things at the right time. Eternal truths are never true at any given moment in history. The process of transformation has to make a halt in order to digest and assimilate the utterly impractical things that the genius has produced from the storehouse of eternity. Yet the genius is the healer of his time, because anything he reveals of eternal truth is healing.
"What India Can Teach Us" (1939). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P. 1004
The genius will come through despite everything, for there is something absolute and indomitable in his nature. The so-called "misunderstood genius" is rather a doubtful phenomenon. Generally he turns out to be a good-for-nothing who is forever seeking a soothing explanation of himself.
"The Gifted Child" (1943). In CW 17: The Development of Personality. P. 248
Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.
"On the Relation of Analytical Psychology of Poetry" (1922). In CW 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. P.129
To be "normal" is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. But for people of more than average ability, people who never found it difficult to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world's work-for them the moral compulsion to be nothing but normal signifies the bed of Procrustes-deadly and insupportable boredom, a hell of sterility and hopelessness.
"Problems of Modern Psychotherapy" (1929). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy. P. 161
Nothing in us ever remains quite uncontradicted, and consciousness can take up no position which will not call up, somewhere in the dark corners of the psyche, a negation or a compensatory effect, approval or resentment. This process of coming to terms with the Other in us is well worth while, because in this way we get to know aspects of our nature which we would not allow anybody else to show us and which we ourselves would never have admitted.
Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955) CW 14: P. 706
The "other" in us always seems alien and unacceptable; but if we let ourselves be aggrieved the feeling sinks in, and we are the richer for this little bit of self-knowledge.
"Psychological Aspects of the Kore" (1941). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. P. 918
If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round. Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments.
"Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung" (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.737
The Shadow
Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected.
"Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.131
It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster's body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.35
We know that the wildest and most moving dramas are played not in the theatre but in the hearts of ordinary men and women who pass by without exciting attention, and who betray to the world nothing of the conflicts that rage within them except possibly by a nervous breakdown. What is so difficult for the layman to grasp is the fact that in most cases the patients themselves have no suspicion whatever of the internecine war raging in their unconscious. If we remember that there are many people who understand nothing at all about themselves, we shall be less surprised at the realization that there are also people who are utterly unaware of their actual conflicts.
"New Paths in Psychology" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P.425
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow. Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts. He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against. He lives in the "House of the Gathering." Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day.
"Psychology and Religion" (1938). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.140
There is a deep gulf between what a man is and what he represents, between what he is as an individual and what he is as a collective being. His function is developed at the expense of the individuality. Should he excel, he is merely identical with his collective function; but should he not, then, though he may be highly esteemed as a function in society, his individuality is wholly on the level of his inferior, undeveloped functions, and he is simply a barbarian, while in the former case he has happily deceived himself as to his actual barbarism.
Psychological Types (1921). CW 6: P.III
Taking it in its deepest sense, the shadow is the invisible saurian tail that man still drags behind him. Carefully amputated, it becomes the healing serpent of the mysteries. Only monkeys parade with it.
The Integration of the Personality. (1939)
How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious? Primitive man's perception of objects is conditioned only partly by the objective behaviour of the things themselves, whereas a much greater part is often played by intrapsychic facts which are not related to the external objects except by way of projection. This is due to the simple fact that the primitive has not yet experienced that ascetic discipline of mind known to us as the critique of knowledge. To him the world is a more or less fluid phenomenon within the stream of his own fantasy, where subject and object are undifferentiated and in a state of mutual interpenetration.
"Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939) In CW 9, Part 1: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P. 187
We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together.
"Answer to Job" (1952). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.12
The world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman objects: it was projected, as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At most it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another: already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals. Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, rumours, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is.
"Psychology and Religion" (1938) In CW II: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P. 140
When we must deal with problems, we instinctively resist trying the way that leads through obscurity and darkness. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness. But to penetrate the darkness we must summon all the powers of enlightenment that consciousness can offer.
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.752
Everything that man should, and yet cannot, be or do- be it in a positive or negative sense - lives on as a mythological figure and anticipation alongside his consciousness, either as a religious projection or-what is still more dangerous - as unconscious contents which then project themselves spontaneously into incongruous objects, e.g., hygienic and other "salvationist" doctrines or practices. All these are so many rationalized substitutes for mythology, and their unnaturalness does more harm than good.
"The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (1940). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.287
The hero's main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness: it is the long-hoped-for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious. The coming of consciousness was probably the most tremendous experience of primeval times, for with it a world came into being whose existence no one had suspected before. "And God said, 'Let there be light"' is the projection of that immemorial experience of the separation of consciousness from the unconscious.
"The Psychology of the Child Archetype" (1940). In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. P.284
Thirty years later I again stood on that slope. I was a married man, had children, a house, a place in the world, and a head full of ideas and plans, and suddenly I was again the child who had kindled a fire full of secret significance and sat down on a stone without knowing whether it was I or I was it. I thought suddenly of my life in Zurich, and it seemed alien to me, like news from some remote world and time.
This was frightening, for the world of my childhood in which I had just become absorbed was eternal, and I had been wrenched away from it and had fallen into a time that continued to roll onward, moving farther and farther away. The pull of that other world was so strong that I had to tear myself violently from the spot in order not to lose hold of my future.
I have never forgotten that moment, for it illuminated in a flash of lightning the quality of eternity in my childhood...
Thus the pattern of my relationship to the world was already prefigured: today as then I am a solitary, because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not; even want to know.~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections.
This was frightening, for the world of my childhood in which I had just become absorbed was eternal, and I had been wrenched away from it and had fallen into a time that continued to roll onward, moving farther and farther away. The pull of that other world was so strong that I had to tear myself violently from the spot in order not to lose hold of my future.
I have never forgotten that moment, for it illuminated in a flash of lightning the quality of eternity in my childhood...
Thus the pattern of my relationship to the world was already prefigured: today as then I am a solitary, because I know things and must hint at things which other people do not know, and usually do not; even want to know.~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections.
"Throughout the individuation self enters the world of consciousness, while at the same time, its nature originally psychoid dissociates so that manifests much more than in internal images of real-life events.
Therefore, Jung expanded its definition of the individuation process as a succession of internal images, describing them as 'life' itself: "In the final analysis, all life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, why this realization can also be called 'individuation'. "
Individuation consists basically in constantly required, to match the interior images with outer experience. constantly renewed attempts Or, to put it another way, is the effort to "make become entirely our own intent what the destination you want us to do "(W.Bergengruen).
Successful In moments, a part of the self is realized as the indoor and outdoor unit. then the man can rest in itself, because it is self-realized and radiates the effect of authenticity. " ~Aniela Jaffé - The Myth of Meaning in the work of CG Jung.
To be "normal" is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. But for people of more than average ability, people who never found it difficult to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world's work-for them the moral compulsion to be nothing but normal signifies the bed of Procrustes-deadly and insupportable boredom, a hell of sterility and hopelessness. ~Carl Jung
Therefore, Jung expanded its definition of the individuation process as a succession of internal images, describing them as 'life' itself: "In the final analysis, all life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, why this realization can also be called 'individuation'. "
Individuation consists basically in constantly required, to match the interior images with outer experience. constantly renewed attempts Or, to put it another way, is the effort to "make become entirely our own intent what the destination you want us to do "(W.Bergengruen).
Successful In moments, a part of the self is realized as the indoor and outdoor unit. then the man can rest in itself, because it is self-realized and radiates the effect of authenticity. " ~Aniela Jaffé - The Myth of Meaning in the work of CG Jung.
To be "normal" is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. But for people of more than average ability, people who never found it difficult to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world's work-for them the moral compulsion to be nothing but normal signifies the bed of Procrustes-deadly and insupportable boredom, a hell of sterility and hopelessness. ~Carl Jung
[Carl Jung and the “Decisive Question.]
The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?
That is the telling question of his life.
Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.
Thus we demand that the world grant us recognition for qualities which we regard as personal possessions: our talent or our beauty.
The more a man lays stress on false possessions, and the less sensitivity he has for what is essential, the less satisfying is his life.
He feels limited because he has limited aims, and the result is envy and jealousy.
If we understand and feel that here in this life we already have a link with the infinite, desires and attitudes change.
In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted. In our relationships to other men, too, the crucial question is whether an element of boundlessness is expressed in the relationship.
The feeling for the infinite, however, can be attained only if we are bounded to the utmost.
The greatest limitation for man is the "self"; it is manifested in the experience: "I am only that!" Only consciousness of our narrow confinement in the self forms the link to the limitlessness of the unconscious.
In such awareness we experience ourselves concurrently as limited and eternal, as both the one and the other.
In knowing ourselves to be unique in our personal combination that is, ultimately limited we possess also the capacity for becoming conscious of the infinite. But only then!
In an era which has concentrated exclusively upon extension of living space and increase of rational knowledge at all costs, it is a supreme challenge to ask man to become conscious of his uniqueness and his limitation.
Uniqueness and limitation are synonymous.
Without them, no perception of the unlimited is possible--and, consequently, no coming to consciousness either--merely a delusory identity with it which takes the form of intoxication with large numbers and an avidity for political power.
Our age has shifted all emphasis to the here and now, and thus brought about a daemonization of man and his world.
The phenomenon of dictators and all the misery they have wrought springs from the fact that man has been robbed of transcendence by the shortsightedness of the super-intellectuals.
Like them, he has fallen a victim to unconsciousness. But man's task is the exact opposite: to become conscious of the contents that press upward from the unconscious.
Neither should he persist in his unconsciousness, nor remain identical with the unconscious elements of his being, thus evading his destiny, which is to create more and more consciousness.
As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.
~Carl Jung and Memories Dreams and Reflections.
Unconsciousness:
A state of psychic functioning marked by lack of control over the instincts and identification with complexes. Unconsciousness is the primal sin, evil itself, for the Logos.["Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype," ibid., par. 178.]
The world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman objects: it was projected, as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At most it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another: already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals. Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, rumors, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is. ~"Psychology and Religion" (1938) In CW II: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P. 140.
'The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves''.~Carl Jung
An extreme state of unconsciousness is characterized by the predominance of compulsive instinctual processes, the result of which is either uncontrolled inhibition or a lack of inhibition throughout. The happenings within the psyche are then contradictory and proceed in terms of alternating, non-logical antitheses. In such a case the level of consciousness is essentially that of a dream-state. A high degree of consciousness, on the other hand, is characterized by a heightened awareness, a preponderance of will, directed, rational behaviour, and an almost total absence of instinctual determinants. The unconscious is then found to be at a definitely animal level. The first state is lacking in intellectual and ethical achievement, the second lacks naturalness.["Psychological Factors in Human Behavior," CW 8, par. 249.]
The greatest danger about unconsciousness is proneness to suggestion. The effect of suggestion is due to the release of an unconscious dynamic, and the more unconscious this is, the more effective it will be. Hence the ever-widening split between conscious and unconscious increases the danger of psychic infection and mass psychosis.["The Structure and Dynamics of the Self," CW 9ii, par. 390.]
“When a summit of life is reached, when the bud unfolds and from the lesser the greater emerges, then, as Nietzsche says, “One becomes Two,” and the greater figure, which one always was but which remained invisible, appears to the lesser personality with the force of a revelation.
He who is truly and hopelessly little will always drag the revelation of the greater down to the level of his littleness, and will never understand that the day of judgment for his littleness has dawned. But the man who is inwardly great will know that the long expected friend of his soul, the immortal one, has now really come, “to lead captivity captive”: that is, to seize hold of him by whom this immortal had always been confined and held prisoner, and to make his life flow into that greater life-a moment of deadliest peril!
Nietzsche’s prophetic vision of the Tightrope Walker reveals the awful danger that lies in having a “tightrope-walking” attitude towards an event to which St. Paul gave the most exalted name he could find.” ~Carl Jung; The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; Page 121.
The goal of individuation is the synthesis of the self
“I have called this wholeness that transcends consciousness the ‘self.’ The goal of the individuation process is the synthesis of the self. …the symbols of wholeness frequently occur at the beginning of the individuation process.” Carl Jung (CW 9i, para. 278)
“The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other.” (CW 7, par. 269. ]
Individuation as a vocation, as "addressed by a voice":
"What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise.
What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extra-ordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from it’s well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation. He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called….
The original meaning of “to have a vocation” is “to be addressed by a voice.” The clearest examples of this are to be found in the avowels of the Old Testament prophets. That it is not just a quaint old-fashioned way of speaking is proved by the confessions of historical personalities such as Goethe and Napoleon, to mention only two familiar examples, who made no secret of their feeling of vocation."
~Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 17, The Development of the Personality.
*
"Only the living presence of the eternal images can give the human psyche that gives dignity to man moral position to keep close to his own soul and convince yourself that it's worth staying faithful to him.
Only then will understand that the conflict it is, that discord and tribulation are his riches and should not be wasted attacking others, and that if the destination should charge you a di life in the form of guilt, that debt is to himself.
Then it will recognize the value of your psyche, because no one can be liable to a mere nothing. [...] For the conflict is resolved designed, needs to return to the psyche of the individual, which had its beginning unconscious. Need celebrate the Last Supper with himself, eat his flesh and drink his blood,.
Meaning they must recognize and accept the other in yourself [...] Is this perhaps the meaning of Christ's teaching, according to which each must take his own cross? Because, having to support yourself, how one can be able to afflict others? "
~Carl Gustav Jung - Mysterium Coniunctionis.
Recovery, the aim of individuation, "is not only achieved by work on the inside figures but also, as conditio sine qua non, by a readaptation in outer life" —including the recreation of a new and more viable persona. To "develop a stronger persona... might feel inauthentic, like learning to "play a role"... but if one cannot perform a social role then one will suffer". Thus one goal for individuation is for people to "develop a more realistic, flexible persona that helps them navigate in society but does not collide with nor hide their true self". Eventually, "in the best case, the persona is appropriate and tasteful, a true reflection of our inner individuality and our outward sense of self."
Individuation as a vocation, as "addressed by a voice":
"What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and to rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist? Not necessity, for necessity comes to many, and they all take refuge in convention. Not moral decision, for nine times out of ten we decide for convention likewise.
What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extra-ordinary? It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from it’s well-worn paths. True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation. He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called….
The original meaning of “to have a vocation” is “to be addressed by a voice.” The clearest examples of this are to be found in the avowels of the Old Testament prophets. That it is not just a quaint old-fashioned way of speaking is proved by the confessions of historical personalities such as Goethe and Napoleon, to mention only two familiar examples, who made no secret of their feeling of vocation."
~Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 17, The Development of the Personality.
The Witness, Adam Scott Miller
"The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other." ~Carl Jung, The Function of the Unconscious, Collected Works 7, Paragraph 269
The existence of an individual consciousness makes man aware of the difficulties of his inner as well as his outer life.
Just as the world about him takes on a friendly or a hostile aspect to the eyes of primitive man, so the influences of his unconscious seem to him like an opposing power, with which he has to come to terms just as with the visible world. His countless magical practices serve this end.
On higher levels of civilization, religion and philosophy fulfil the same purpose. Whenever such a system of adaptation breaks down a general unrest begins to appear, and attempts are made to find a suitable new form of relationship to the unconscious.
These things seem very remote to our modern, "enlightened" eyes. When I speak of this hinterland of the mind, the unconscious, and compare its reality with that of the visible world, I often meet with an incredulous smile.
But then I must ask how many people there are in our civilized world who still believe in mana and spirits and suchlike theories-in other words, how many millions of Christian Scientists and spiritualists are there?
I will not add to this list of questions. They are, merely intended to illustrate the fact that the problem of invisible psychic determinants is as alive today as ever it was. The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual.
His conscious mind is an ephemeral phenomenon that accomplishes all provisional adaptations and orientations, for which reason one can best compare its function to orientation in space.
The unconscious, on the other hand, is the source of the instinctual forces of the psyche and of the forms. or categories that regulate them, namely the archetypes. All the, most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly ,true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule.
In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize ;md assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us. ~Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche.
Mankind wishes to love in God only their ideas, that is to say, the ideas which they project into God. By that they wish to love their unconscious, that Is, that remnant of ancient humanity and the centuries-old past In all people, namely, the common property left behind from all development which is given to all men, like the sunshine and the air.
But in loving this inheritance they love that which is common to all. Thus they turn back to the mother of humanity, that is to say, to the spirit of the race, and regain in this way something of that connection and of that mysterious and irresistible power which is imparted by the feeling of belonging to the herd. It is the problem of Antaeus, who preserves his gigantic strength only through contact with mother earth. ~Carl Jung; Psychology of the Unconscious; Pages 200 – 201.
"Know that the daimons would like to inflame you to embrace their work, which is not yours. And, you fool, you believe that it is you and that it is your work. Why? Because you can't distinguish yourself from your soul. But you are distinct from her, and you should not pursue whoring with other souls as if you yourself were a soul, but instead you are a powerless man who needs all his force for his own completion. Why do you look to the other?
What you see in him lies neglected in yourself You should be the guard before the prison of your soul. You also your soul's eunuch, who protects her from Gods and men, or protects the Gods and men from her. Power is given to the weak man, a poison that paralyzes even the Gods, like a poison sting bestowed upon the little bee whose force is far inferior to yours. Your soul could seize this poison and thereby endanger even the Gods. So put the soul under wraps, distinguish yourself from her, since not only your fellow men but also the Gods must live." ~Carl Jung; Red Book.
The existence of an individual consciousness makes man aware of the difficulties of his inner as well as his outer life.
Just as the world about him takes on a friendly or a hostile aspect to the eyes of primitive man, so the influences of his unconscious seem to him like an opposing power, with which he has to come to terms just as with the visible world. His countless magical practices serve this end.
On higher levels of civilization, religion and philosophy fulfil the same purpose. Whenever such a system of adaptation breaks down a general unrest begins to appear, and attempts are made to find a suitable new form of relationship to the unconscious.
These things seem very remote to our modern, "enlightened" eyes. When I speak of this hinterland of the mind, the unconscious, and compare its reality with that of the visible world, I often meet with an incredulous smile.
But then I must ask how many people there are in our civilized world who still believe in mana and spirits and suchlike theories-in other words, how many millions of Christian Scientists and spiritualists are there?
I will not add to this list of questions. They are, merely intended to illustrate the fact that the problem of invisible psychic determinants is as alive today as ever it was. The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual.
His conscious mind is an ephemeral phenomenon that accomplishes all provisional adaptations and orientations, for which reason one can best compare its function to orientation in space.
The unconscious, on the other hand, is the source of the instinctual forces of the psyche and of the forms. or categories that regulate them, namely the archetypes. All the, most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly ,true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy, and ethics are no exception to this rule.
In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize ;md assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us. ~Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche.
Mankind wishes to love in God only their ideas, that is to say, the ideas which they project into God. By that they wish to love their unconscious, that Is, that remnant of ancient humanity and the centuries-old past In all people, namely, the common property left behind from all development which is given to all men, like the sunshine and the air.
But in loving this inheritance they love that which is common to all. Thus they turn back to the mother of humanity, that is to say, to the spirit of the race, and regain in this way something of that connection and of that mysterious and irresistible power which is imparted by the feeling of belonging to the herd. It is the problem of Antaeus, who preserves his gigantic strength only through contact with mother earth. ~Carl Jung; Psychology of the Unconscious; Pages 200 – 201.
"Know that the daimons would like to inflame you to embrace their work, which is not yours. And, you fool, you believe that it is you and that it is your work. Why? Because you can't distinguish yourself from your soul. But you are distinct from her, and you should not pursue whoring with other souls as if you yourself were a soul, but instead you are a powerless man who needs all his force for his own completion. Why do you look to the other?
What you see in him lies neglected in yourself You should be the guard before the prison of your soul. You also your soul's eunuch, who protects her from Gods and men, or protects the Gods and men from her. Power is given to the weak man, a poison that paralyzes even the Gods, like a poison sting bestowed upon the little bee whose force is far inferior to yours. Your soul could seize this poison and thereby endanger even the Gods. So put the soul under wraps, distinguish yourself from her, since not only your fellow men but also the Gods must live." ~Carl Jung; Red Book.
June Singer beautifully describes the Individuation Process as learning to sail your boat on the waters of life: “In learning how to sail you do not change the current of the water (realities of life) nor do you have any effect on the wind (spiritual forces), but you learn to hoist your sail and turn it this way and that to utilize the greater forces which surround you. By understanding them, you become one with them, and in doing so are able to find you own direction – so long as its in harmony with, and does not try to oppose, the greater forces in being…… you do not feel helpless any longer…. you may even become a guide to others”.
Singer writes: “The unconscious contains that portion of the human potential which needs to be actualized in order for individuals to move toward individuation, that is, toward becoming whatever they are innately capable of being”. As such it is the Urgrund of our being, the original basis from which everything valuable may develop. The unconscious is at its basis collective in character.
Jung insists that each individual develop consciously a unique Weltanschauung, a philosophy of life, in accordance with the “given” factors of the personality which are present at birth (and unfold according to their genre and in their own time) and also those “acquired” factors which include the environment into which one is born and the circumstances and events of life. This philosophy envisions a person as a unitary and total being; with its particular nature as an individual ànd with its human nature, embedded in general principles drawn from the history of human consciousness and experience. http://www.vanrein.be/essays/Singer%20on%20Jung.htm
Jung concluded that the pathway to psychological health, which he called individuation, demands a psychological wholeness in which nothing is left out. The less-than-whole life is one of inner conflict where the ego struggles to ignore, repress, or deny a part of the psyche.
The only solution to the one-sided conflict, said Jung, is the union of opposites (Jung, 1941/1959, p. 168). “The underlying thought,” he observed, “is clear: no white without black, and no holiness without the devil” (Jung 1950/1959, p. 339). Because this is painful, the ego runs from it, with projection and compensation. However--
…real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.… By accepting the darkness, the patient has not, to be sure, changed it into light, but she has kindled a light that illuminates the darkness within. By day no light is needed, and if you don't know it is night you won't light one, nor will any light be lit for you unless you have suffered the horror of darkness. (Jung, 1950/1959, pp. 335, 337)
"It is my conviction that a basis for the settlement of conflicting views would be found in the recognition of different types of attitude - a recognition not only of the existence of such types, but also the fact that every man is so imprisoned in his type that he is simply incapable of fully understanding another standpoint. Failing a recognition of this exacting demand, a violation of the other standpoint is practically inevitable" --Carl Jung
Singer writes: “The unconscious contains that portion of the human potential which needs to be actualized in order for individuals to move toward individuation, that is, toward becoming whatever they are innately capable of being”. As such it is the Urgrund of our being, the original basis from which everything valuable may develop. The unconscious is at its basis collective in character.
Jung insists that each individual develop consciously a unique Weltanschauung, a philosophy of life, in accordance with the “given” factors of the personality which are present at birth (and unfold according to their genre and in their own time) and also those “acquired” factors which include the environment into which one is born and the circumstances and events of life. This philosophy envisions a person as a unitary and total being; with its particular nature as an individual ànd with its human nature, embedded in general principles drawn from the history of human consciousness and experience. http://www.vanrein.be/essays/Singer%20on%20Jung.htm
Jung concluded that the pathway to psychological health, which he called individuation, demands a psychological wholeness in which nothing is left out. The less-than-whole life is one of inner conflict where the ego struggles to ignore, repress, or deny a part of the psyche.
The only solution to the one-sided conflict, said Jung, is the union of opposites (Jung, 1941/1959, p. 168). “The underlying thought,” he observed, “is clear: no white without black, and no holiness without the devil” (Jung 1950/1959, p. 339). Because this is painful, the ego runs from it, with projection and compensation. However--
…real liberation comes not from glossing over or repressing painful states of feeling, but only from experiencing them to the full.… By accepting the darkness, the patient has not, to be sure, changed it into light, but she has kindled a light that illuminates the darkness within. By day no light is needed, and if you don't know it is night you won't light one, nor will any light be lit for you unless you have suffered the horror of darkness. (Jung, 1950/1959, pp. 335, 337)
"It is my conviction that a basis for the settlement of conflicting views would be found in the recognition of different types of attitude - a recognition not only of the existence of such types, but also the fact that every man is so imprisoned in his type that he is simply incapable of fully understanding another standpoint. Failing a recognition of this exacting demand, a violation of the other standpoint is practically inevitable" --Carl Jung
Thomas's account of the soul's relationship to the body raises a question: how is the rational soul individuated after its separation from the human body at the time of death? The state of affairs, wherein the soul begins as a human state but persists after death, presents a particularly difficult problem for his theory. Thomas insists that the human soul can survive the death of the body, yet he also maintains that it is substantial form and the proper function of the human being. Thus, he must account for the form of a material object’s continuing to exist despite the cessation of that object’s existence. It is not immediately apparent that Thomas appropriately answers the question of individuation.
Especially problematic for Thomas’s theory is the period after the death of the body and before its resurrection. Thomas appears to insist that matter individuates, but during this interim state, however, there is no individuating matter. If our souls are the form of the species human, and thus are identical, what prevents the individuated multiplicity of human souls from collapsing into a single, universal soul when their matter dissolves? Further, even absent this threat, is there anything that makes one soul different from that of another during the interim between first and resurrected life? http://www.kristahyde.com/research
Especially problematic for Thomas’s theory is the period after the death of the body and before its resurrection. Thomas appears to insist that matter individuates, but during this interim state, however, there is no individuating matter. If our souls are the form of the species human, and thus are identical, what prevents the individuated multiplicity of human souls from collapsing into a single, universal soul when their matter dissolves? Further, even absent this threat, is there anything that makes one soul different from that of another during the interim between first and resurrected life? http://www.kristahyde.com/research
separation and individuation, Claude McCoy
You Must Obey Your Own Law. ~Carl Jung
"The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing...He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths...There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing.
In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no different from anybody else," they will chorus or, "there's no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid"...He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within.
"His own law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law...The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization--absolute and unconditional--of its own particular law...To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being...he has failed to realize his own life's meaning.
The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way "Tao," and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one's destination reached, one's mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things." — C.G. Jung
"The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing...He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths...There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing.
In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no different from anybody else," they will chorus or, "there's no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid"...He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within.
"His own law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law...The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization--absolute and unconditional--of its own particular law...To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being...he has failed to realize his own life's meaning.
The undiscovered vein within us is a living part of the psyche; classical Chinese philosophy names this interior way "Tao," and likens it to a flow of water that moves irresistibly towards its goal. To rest in Tao means fulfillment, wholeness, one's destination reached, one's mission done; the beginning, end, and perfect realization of the meaning of existence innate in all things." — C.G. Jung
The numinous experience of the individuation process is, on the archaic level, the prerogative of shamans and medicine men; later, of the physician, prophet, and priest; and finally at the civilized stage, of philosophy and religion.
The shaman’s experience of sickness, torture, and death, and regeneration implies, at a higher level, the idea of being made whole through sacrifice of being changed by transubstantiation and exalted to the pneumatic man-in a word, of apotheosis.
The Mass is the summation and quintessence of a development which began many thousands of years ago and, with the progressive broadening and deepening of consciousness, gradually made the isolated experience of specifically gifted individuals the common property of a larger group.
The underlying psychic process remained, of course, hidden from view and was dramatized in the form of suitable “mysteries” and “sacraments,” these being reinforced by religious teachings, exercise, meditations, and acts of sacrifice which plunge the celebrant so deeply into the sphere of the mystery that he is able to become conscious of his intimate connection with the mythic happenings.
Thus, in ancient Egypt, we see how the experience of “Osirification,” originally the prerogative of the Pharaohs, gradually passed to the aristocracy and finally, towards the end of the Old Kingdom, to the single individual as well.
Similarly, the mystery religions of the Greeks, originally esoteric and not talked about, broadened out into collective experience, and at the time of the Caesars it was considered a regular sport for Roman tourists to get themselves initiated into foreign mysteries.
Christianity, after some hesitation, went a step further and made celebration of the mysteries a public institution, for, as we know, it was especially concerned to introduce as many people as possible to the experience of the mystery. So, sooner or later, the individual could not fail to become conscious of his own transformation and of the necessary psychological conditions for this. Such as confession and repentance of sin.
The ground was prepared for the realization that, in the mystery of transubstantiation, it was not so much a question of magical influence as the psychological processes-a realization for which the alchemists had already paved the way by putting their “opus operatum” at least on a level with the ecclesiastical mystery, and even attributing to it a cosmic significance since, by its means, the divine world-soul could be liberated from imprisonment in matter.
As I think I have shown, the “philosophical” side of alchemy is nothing less than a symbolic anticipation of certain psychological insights, and these-to judge by the example of Gerhard Dorn-were pretty far advanced by the end of the sixteenth century. Only our intellectualized age could have been so deluded as to see in alchemy nothing but an abortive attempt at chemistry, and in the interpretative methods of modern psychology a mere “psychologizing,” i.e. annihilation, of the mystery.
Just as the alchemists knew that the production of their stone was a miracle that could only happen ‘Deo concedente,” so the modern psychologist is aware that he can produce no more than a description, couched in scientific symbols, of a psychic process whose real nature transcends consciousness just as much as does the mystery of life or of matter. At no point has he explained the mystery itself, thereby causing it to fade. He has merely, in accordance with the spirit of Christian tradition, brought it a little nearer to individual consciousness, using the empirical material to set forth the individuation process and show it as an actual and experienceable fact.
To treat a metaphysical statement as a psychic process is not to say that it is “merely psychic,” as my critics assert-in the fond belief that the word “psychic” postulates something known. It does not seem to have occurred to people that when we say “psyche” we are alluding to the densest darkness it is possible to imagine. The ethics of the researcher require him to admit where his knowledge comes to an end.
This end is the beginning of true wisdom.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Transformation Symbolism in the Mass, Pages 294-296, Paragraph 448.
The shaman’s experience of sickness, torture, and death, and regeneration implies, at a higher level, the idea of being made whole through sacrifice of being changed by transubstantiation and exalted to the pneumatic man-in a word, of apotheosis.
The Mass is the summation and quintessence of a development which began many thousands of years ago and, with the progressive broadening and deepening of consciousness, gradually made the isolated experience of specifically gifted individuals the common property of a larger group.
The underlying psychic process remained, of course, hidden from view and was dramatized in the form of suitable “mysteries” and “sacraments,” these being reinforced by religious teachings, exercise, meditations, and acts of sacrifice which plunge the celebrant so deeply into the sphere of the mystery that he is able to become conscious of his intimate connection with the mythic happenings.
Thus, in ancient Egypt, we see how the experience of “Osirification,” originally the prerogative of the Pharaohs, gradually passed to the aristocracy and finally, towards the end of the Old Kingdom, to the single individual as well.
Similarly, the mystery religions of the Greeks, originally esoteric and not talked about, broadened out into collective experience, and at the time of the Caesars it was considered a regular sport for Roman tourists to get themselves initiated into foreign mysteries.
Christianity, after some hesitation, went a step further and made celebration of the mysteries a public institution, for, as we know, it was especially concerned to introduce as many people as possible to the experience of the mystery. So, sooner or later, the individual could not fail to become conscious of his own transformation and of the necessary psychological conditions for this. Such as confession and repentance of sin.
The ground was prepared for the realization that, in the mystery of transubstantiation, it was not so much a question of magical influence as the psychological processes-a realization for which the alchemists had already paved the way by putting their “opus operatum” at least on a level with the ecclesiastical mystery, and even attributing to it a cosmic significance since, by its means, the divine world-soul could be liberated from imprisonment in matter.
As I think I have shown, the “philosophical” side of alchemy is nothing less than a symbolic anticipation of certain psychological insights, and these-to judge by the example of Gerhard Dorn-were pretty far advanced by the end of the sixteenth century. Only our intellectualized age could have been so deluded as to see in alchemy nothing but an abortive attempt at chemistry, and in the interpretative methods of modern psychology a mere “psychologizing,” i.e. annihilation, of the mystery.
Just as the alchemists knew that the production of their stone was a miracle that could only happen ‘Deo concedente,” so the modern psychologist is aware that he can produce no more than a description, couched in scientific symbols, of a psychic process whose real nature transcends consciousness just as much as does the mystery of life or of matter. At no point has he explained the mystery itself, thereby causing it to fade. He has merely, in accordance with the spirit of Christian tradition, brought it a little nearer to individual consciousness, using the empirical material to set forth the individuation process and show it as an actual and experienceable fact.
To treat a metaphysical statement as a psychic process is not to say that it is “merely psychic,” as my critics assert-in the fond belief that the word “psychic” postulates something known. It does not seem to have occurred to people that when we say “psyche” we are alluding to the densest darkness it is possible to imagine. The ethics of the researcher require him to admit where his knowledge comes to an end.
This end is the beginning of true wisdom.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Transformation Symbolism in the Mass, Pages 294-296, Paragraph 448.
http://markwelch.com/whirligig/
"Abandonment, exposure, danger etc. are all elaborations of the "child's" insignificant beginnings and of its mysterious and miraculous birth. In the psychology of the individual there is always, at such moments, an agonising situation of conflict from which there seems no way out-at least for the conscious mind, since as far is this is concerned, tertium non datur. But out of this collision of opposites the unconscious psyche always creates a third thing of an irrational nature which the conscious mind neither expects nor understands. It presents itself in a form that is neither a straight "yes" nor a straight "no," and is consequently rejected by both. For the conscious mind knows nothing beyond the opposites and, as a result, has no knowledge of the thing that unites them. Since, however, the solution of the conflict through the union of opposites is of vital importance, and is moreover the thing that the conscious mind is looking for, some inkling of the creative act, and of the significance of it, nevertheless gets through. From this comes the numinous character of the "child". A meaningful but unknown content always has a secret fascination for the conscious mind. The new configuration is a nascent whole; it is on its way to wholeness, at least in so far as it excels in "wholeness" the conscious mind when torn by opposites and surpasses it in completeness. For this reason all uniting symbols have a redemptive significance. Out of this situation the child emerges as a symbolic content, manifestly separated or even isolated from its background (the mother) but sometimes including the mother in its perilous situation, threatened on the one hand by the negative attitude of the conscious mind and on the other by the horror vacui of the unconscious, which is quite ready to swallow up all its progeny, since it produces them only in play, and destruction is an inescapable part of its play." CW 9 p.167-168.
The light of the Dawn praised by our medieval thinkers as the Aurora Consurgens, the rising morning light, is awe-inspiring, it fills your heart with joy and admiration or with irritation and fear and even with hatred, according to the nature of whatever it reveals to you.
The ego receives the light from the self. Though we know of the self, yet it is not known. You may see a big town and know its name and geographical position, yet you do not know a single one of its inhabitants. You may even know a man through daily intercourse, yet you can be entirely ignorant of his real character.
The ego is contained in the self as it is contained in the universe of which we know only the tiniest section. A man of greater insight and intelligence than mine can know myself, but I could not know him as long as my consciousness is inferior to his. Although we receive the light of consciousness from the self and although we know it to be the source of our illumination, we do not know whether it possesses anything we would call consciousness.
However beautiful and profound the sayings of your Wisdom are, they are essentially outbursts of admiration and enthusiastic attempts at formulating the overwhelming impressions an ego-consciousness has received from the impact of a superior subject. Even if the ego should be (as I think) the supreme point of the self, a mountain infinitely higher than Mt. Everest, it would be nothing but a little grain of rock or ice, never the whole mountain.
Even if the grain recognizes itself as being part of the mountain and understands the mountain as an immense agglomeration of particles like itself, it does not know their ultimate nature, because all the others are, like itself, individuals, incomparable and incomprehensible in the last resort. (The individual alone is the ultimate reality and can know of existence at all.)
If the self could be wholly experienced, it would be a limited experience whereas in reality its experience is unlimited and endless. It is our ego-consciousness that is capable of only of limited experience. We can only say that the self is limitless, but we cannot experience its infinity.
I can say that my consciousness is the same as that of the self, but it is nothing but words, since there is not the slightest evidence that I participate more or further in the self than my ego-consciousness reaches. What does the grain know of the whole mountain, although it is visibly a part of it? If I were one with the self, I would have knowledge of everything,
I would speak Sanskrit, read cuneiform script, know the events that took place in prehistory, be acquainted with the life of other planets, etc. There is unfortunately nothing of the kind.
You should not mix up your own enlightenment with the self-revelation of the self. When you recognize yourself, you have not necessarily recognized the self but perhaps only an infinitesimal part of it, though the self has given you the light.
Your standpoint seems to coincide with that of our medieval mystics, who tried to dissolve themselves in God. You all seem to be interested in how to get back to the self, instead of looking for what the self wants you to do in the world, where-for the time being at least—we are located, presumable for a certain purpose.
The universe does not seem to exist for the sole purpose of man denying or escaping it. Nobody can be more convinced of the importance of the self than me. But as a young man does not stay in his father’s house but goes out into the world, so I don’t look back to the self but collect it out of manifold experiences and put it together again.
What I have left behind, seemingly lost, I meet in everything that comes my way and I collect it, reassembling it as it were. In order to get rid of opposites, I needs must accept them first, but his leads away from the self. I must also earn how opposites can be united, and not how they can be avoided.
As long as I am on the first part of the road I have to forget the self in order to get properly into the mill of the opposites, otherwise I live only fragmentarily and conditionally. Although the self is my origin, it is also the goal of my quest. When it was my origin, I did not know myself, and when I did learn about myself, I did not know the self.
I have to discover it in my actions, where first it reappears under strange masks. That is one of the reasons why I must study symbolism, otherwise I risk not recognizing my own father and mother when I meet them again after many years of my absence.
Hoping I have answered your question, I remain,
Yours, sincerely, C.G. Jung. [November 22, 1954]
"[I]n the psychological theory of Carl Jung [metanoia] denotes a process of reforming the psyche as a form of self-healing, a proposed explanation for the phenomenon of psychotic breakdown. Here, metanoia is viewed as a potentially productive process, and therefore patients' psychotic episodes are not necessarily always to be thwarted.
In Carl Jung's psychology, metanoia indicates a spontaneous attempt of the psyche to heal itself of unbearable conflict by melting down and then being reborn in a more adaptive form. Jung believed that psychotic episodes in particular could be understood as existential crises which were sometimes attempts at self-reparation. Jung's concept of metanoia influenced R. D. Laing and the therapeutic community movement which aimed, ideally, to support people whilst they broke down and went through spontaneous healing, rather than thwarting such efforts at self-repair by strengthening their existing character defences and thereby maintaining the underlying conflict."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metanoia_(psychology)
The individual is obliged by the collective demands to purchase his individuation at the cost of an equivalent work for the benefit of society. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 452.
Individuation and collectivity are a pair of opposites, two divergent destinies. They are related to one another by guilt. ~Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life, Page 452.
In the last analysis every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can also be called "individuation." ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.
You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation: you are all alone with yourself and the self doesn't exist. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 805.
Individuation is only possible with people, through people. You must realize that you are a link in a chain, that you are not an electron suspended somewhere in space or aimlessly drifting through the cosmos. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 103.
Individuation is not that you become an ego—you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating; he is a philosophically distilled egotist. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
Where one is identified with the collective unconscious, there is no recognition of the things which come from the unconscious, they cannot be distinguished from those of the self. Such a condition is a possession by the anima or animus. Possession by the animus or anima creates a certain psychological hermaphroditism. The principle of individuation demands a dissociation or differentiation of the male and the female in ourselves. We must dissociate our self from the unconscious. ~Carl Jung, Cornwall Seminar, Page 26.
Before [individuation] can be taken as a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective norms must first be attained. If a plant is to unfold its specific nature to the full, it must first be able to grow in the soil in which it is planted. ~Carl Jung; "Definitions," CW 6, par. 761.
The difference between the "natural" individuation process, which runs its course unconsciously, and the one that is consciously realized is tremendous. In the first case, consciousness nowhere intervenes; the end remains as dark as the beginning. In the second case, so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated with light and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight. The encounter between conscious and unconscious has to ensure that the light that shines in the darkness is not only comprehended by the darkness, but comprehends it (from "Answer to Job" in CW 11, par. 756).
Insofar as this process [of individuation], as a rule, runs its course unconsciously as it has from time immemorial, it means no more than that the acorn becomes an oak, the calf a cow, and the child an adult. But if the individuation process is made conscious, consciousness must confront the unconscious and a balance between the opposites must be found . ~Carl Jung; "Answer to Job"; CW 11, par. 755.
Alchemy has performed for me the great and invaluable service of providing material in which my experience could find sufficient room, and has thereby made it possible for me to describe the individuation process at least in its essential aspects. ~Carl Jung; Mysterium Coniunctionis; Paragraph 792.
The goal of the individuation process is the synthesis of the self. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Page 278.
Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself. ~Carl Jung; "On the Nature of the Psyche," 1947.
The problem of crucifixion is the beginning of individuation; there is the secret meaning of the Christian symbolism, a path of blood and suffering. ~Carl Jung; Quoted in Aspects of Jung’s Personality and Work by Gerhard Adler
The dead who besiege us are souls who have not fulfilled the principium individuationis, or else they would have become distant stars. Insofar as we do nto fulfill it, the dead have a claim on us and besiege us and we cannot escape them. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 370
You see as the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense relationships and not to isolation. ~Carl Jung; CW 6; Page 448; Paragraph 758.
The mystery of the Eucharist transforms the soul of the empirical man, who is only a part of himself, into his totality, symbolically expressed by Christ. In this sense, therefore, we can speak of the Mass as the rite of the individuation process. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Religion
The God-image in man was not destroyed by the Fall but was only damaged and corrupted (‘deformed’), and can be restored through God’s grace. The scope of the integration is suggested by the descent of Christ’s soul to hell, its work of redemption embracing even the dead. The psychological equivalent of this is the integration of the collective unconscious which forms an essential part of the individuation process. ~Carl Jung; Aion; Page 39; Para 72.
The problem of crucifixion is the beginning of individuation; there is the secret meaning of the Christian symbolism, a of blood and suffering. ~Carl Jung, unpublished letter, quoted in Gerhard Adler, Aspects of Jung's Personality and Work, p. 12.
Individuation and individual existence are indispensable for the transformation of God. Human consciousness is the only seeing eye of the Deity. ~Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, 336, 409, Letters II, 314ff.
The individuation process is a development on the native soil of Christianity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 395-398.
Thus the devil is a preliminary stage of individuation, in the negative it has the same goal as the divine quaternity, namely, wholeness. Although it is still darkness, it already carries the germ of light within itself. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 372.
The division into four is a principium individuationis; it means to become one or a whole in the face of the many figures that carry the danger of destruction in them. It is what overcomes death and can bring about rebirth. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 372.
One could say that the whole world with its turmoil and misery is in an individuation process. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 442.
Individuation is by no means a rare thing or a luxury of the few, but those who know that they are in such a process are considered to be lucky. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 442.
Individuation is just ordinary life and what you are made conscious of. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 442.
In the process of individuation, too, new contents can announce themselves in this devouring form and darken consciousness; this is experienced as a depression, that is to say, as being pulled downward. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 373.
I cannot quite agree with your opinion about "individuation." It is not "individualization" but a conscious realization of everything the existence of an individual implies: his needs, his tasks, his duties, his responsibilities, etc. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 503-505.
Individuation does not isolate, it connects. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 503-505.
A child, too, enters into this sublimity, and there detaches himself from this world and his manifold individuations more quickly than the aged. So easily does he become what you also are that he apparently vanishes. Sooner or later all the dead become what we also are. But in this reality we know little or nothing about that mode of being, and what shall we still know of this earth after death? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 343.
The analysis of older people provides a wealth of dream symbols that psychically prepare the dreams for impending death. It is in fact true, as Jung has emphasized, that the unconscious psyche pays very little attention to the abrupt end of bodily life and behaves as if the psychic life of the individual, that is, the individuation process, will simply continue. … The unconscious “believes” quite obviously in a life after death. ~Marie-Louise von Franz (1987), ix.
Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 294.
Individuation is the transformational process of integrating the conscious with the personal and collective unconscious ~Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Page 301.
When these two aspects [physical and psychological] work together, it may easily happen that the cure takes place in the intermediate realm, in other words that it consists of a complexio oppositorum, like the lapis. In this case the illness is in the fullest sense a stage of the individuation process…. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 375.
Human beings do not stand in one world only but between two worlds and must distinguish themselves from their functions in both worlds. This is individuation. You are rejecting dreams and seeking action. Then the dreams come and thwart your actions. The dreams are a world, and the real is a world. You have to stand between the gods and men. ~Carl Jung to Sabina Spielrein January 21, 1918.
Relationship paves the way for individuation and makes it possible, but is itself no proof of wholeness. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Page 244, Footnote 15
Our age is striving to bring about a conglomeration and organization of enormous masses of people in which the individual suffocates, whereas meditation on the Process of Individuation leads in the reverse direction: to the problem of the spiritual development of the individual. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. V, Page 11.
The process of individuation is founded on the instinctive urge of every living creature to reach its own totality and fulfilment. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. V, Page 11.
This is the reason why such people always fall in love with those who don't love them in return. It is in order to prevent the erotic experience, because such an experience would alienate the person from her secret purpose, which, at least for the time being, is individuation. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 169-170.
Like neurosis, psychosis in its inner course is a process of individuation, but one that is usually not joined up with consciousness and therefore runs its course in the unconscious as an Ouroboros. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 371.
And this being has body, soul and spirit, and is, therefore, the principle of life itself, as well as the principle of individuation. Its nature is spiritual, it cannot be seen, and it contains an invisible image. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.
Jung gave great importance to the papal bull of the Assumptio Maria. He held that it "points to the hieros gamos in the pleroma, and this in turn implies, as we have said, the future birth of the divine child, who, in accordance with the divine trend toward incarnation, will choose as his birthplace the empirical man. This metaphysical process is known as the individuation process in the psychology of the unconscious" ~Liber Novus, Footnote 200, Page 299.
In other words, individuation, becoming conscious of the Self, is divine suffering. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 201.
Before [individuation] can be taken as a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective norms must first be attained. ~Carl Jung, "Definitions," CW 6, par. 761.
The first step in individuation is tragic guilt. The accumulation of guilt demands expiation" ~Carl Jung, CW I5, §I094).
Animals generally signify the instinctive forces of the unconscious, which are brought into unity within the mandala. This integration of the instincts is a prerequisite for individuation. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 660.
The help which alchemy affords us in understanding the symbols of the individuation process is, in my opinion, of the utmost importance. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 219.
Individuation does not only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal, but that he is to become partially divine as well. That means practically that he becomes adult, responsible for his existence, knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also depends on man. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 408.
Individuation does not only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal, but that he is to become partially divine as well. That means practically that he becomes adult, responsible for his existence, knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also depends on man. ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 408.
Individuation does not only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal, but that he is to become partially divine as well. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.
That [Individuation] means practically that he becomes adult, responsible for his existence, knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also depends on man. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 316.
We continually pray that "this cup may pass from us" and not harm us. Even Christ did so, but without success. . . . We might. . . discover, among other things, that in every feature Christ's life is a prototype of individuation and hence cannot be imitated: one can only live one's own life totally in the same way with all the consequences this entails. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 76-77.
We have to realize the inborn divine will, which is the process of individuation. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 9.
Individuation cannot be achieved without a mystery. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 13.
"Uniqueness" lies simply and solely in the relationship between individuated persons, who have no other relationships at all except individual, i.e., unique ones. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 475.
Individuation is an expression of that biological process - simple or complicated as the case may be - by which every living thing becomes what it was destined to become from the beginning. ~Carl Jung, CW XI, Para 144.
If you succeed in remembering yourself, if you succeed in making a difference between yourself and that outburst of passion, then you discover the self; you begin to individuate. ~~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Pages 39-40.
P. W. Martin, author of Experiments in Depth, used to say that the really individuated partner in the Jung couple was Mrs. Jung! ~Elined Prys Kotschnig; ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff - A Collection of Remembrances; Page 40
The Path of Individuation
The path of Individuation is the psychological equivalent of initiation. The goal of individuation is self-realization through increasing conscious relationship with the Self, archetype of wholeness.
This Self includes both positive and negative traits of an individual which, in the beginning of analysis, are generally projected out, or attributed to, the environment. As the ego continues its heroic journey through the labyrinthine psyche, it comes into confrontation with personifications of various archetypal characters.
During the maturing process, these characters emerge from the undifferentiated mass of unconscious contents. Though their presence in the psyche was implied from the beginning, they begin to unfold in unique patterns in the life of the individual. One meets such intriguing archetypal figures (complexes) as the shadow, persona, hero, anima/animus, puer, wise old man, trickster, great mother, healer, divine child, self, etc. When these figures, and their behavior patterns, remain unconscious, they are projected onto other people, as "my enemy," "my great love," "my wise teacher," etc.
In time we learn to distinguish these recurrent patterns from the personalities of the people with whom he is involved. Another way these patterns lay claim to an individual and exert their influence is through the identification of the ego with the archetype. Then we have cases of "I am the great lover," "I am the great teacher of wisdom," or "I am especially gifted and prodigious."
Using Tree of Life pathworking techniques as a mode of creative imagination, personified forms are encountered as gods or goddesses, and the aspirant comes to a conscious relationship with them, both internal and external. He learns to recognize them when he sees them. Most importantly, he has a framework for experiencing these internal and external. He learns to recognize them when he sees them. Most importantly, he has a framework for experiencing these internal personalities as distinct from his individuality; they are, after all, collective patterns which can manifest in anyone under the proper circumstances. This attempt leads to self-realization through the transcendent function, which is a symbol of the union of opposites.
In Magick, it is known as the Holy Guardian Angel. We are not alone. We are not totally encased in our ego-selves. There is a companion, a comrade, a guardian angel, a greater self who is always with us. When looked at in this way, it is seen at once that individuation is more than behavior modifying oneself out of bad habits. Individuation is a religious endeavor. (5) This is no way to finally dispose of undesirable qualities or weaknesses.
Rather it is a method of coming to conscious knowledge of the gamut of motivations and possible behavior of which one is capable. It is a process of rebalancing psychic functioning, integrating the fragments of archetypal patterns which underlie human existence. It is not the road for all. Frequently those who choose to pursue it are impelled by depression, illness, breakdown of current adaptation to reality, or stagnation. The unconscious manifestations demand attention in a form the ego cannot ignore indefinitely. One does not choose the path of individuation, but rather is chosen by it.
If the ego can withstand the temptations, ordeals, and peril at the hands of the unknown, it is eventually rewarded with an expanded experience of self and a rejuvenation, or rebirth. In his essay on the "Relationship between the Ego and the Unconscious," Jung has stated that
It is impossible to achieve individuation by conscious intention, because conscious intention invariably leads to a typical attitude that excludes whatever does not fit in with it. This assimilation of the unconscious contents leads, on the contrary to a condition in which the conscious intention is excluded and supplanted by a process of development that seems irrational. This process alone signifies individuation, and its product is individuality as we have defined it; particular and universal at once....Only when the unconscious is assimilated does the individuality emerge more clearly, together with the psychological phenomenon which links the ego with the non-ego and is designated by the word attitude. But this time it is no longer a typical attitude but an individual one.
What the conscious ego can do in regard to individuation is make the commitment to attempt to work in harmony with the unfolding subconscious process, to give it his constant attention, and to place proper value on the experience. This creates the experience of "being in harmony with the cosmos," which is another variation on the Hermetic Axiom, "As Above, So Below."
There are definite parallels between the ancient arts of Hermetic philosophy, yoga, and alchemy and the modern concept of psychological individuation. Once there is some progress on the search for meaning, individuation becomes a way of life. It allows one to see through the mundane aspects of life to the divine patterns animating existence. Stated in the broadest possible terms, individuation seems to be the innate urge of life to realized itself consciously.
The transpersonal life energy, in the process of self-unfolding, using human consciousness, a product of itself, as an instrument for its own self-realization. (6) The unconscious stores our entire history, both personal and collective, and also potentially has the ability of anticipating our future. It does not, however, function on the ego's linear time-line; in sacred time, there is a melding of past/present/future so that symbols produced at any given time may or may not indicate the current state of subconsciousness. Frequently, symbols of wholeness appear at the beginning of the work, and are strictly prognosticative.
In Magick, the same occurs in the Vision of the Holy Guardian Angel. This is a far cry from the resulting maturity on the path which brings Knowledge and Conversation with one's Angel. Individuation arises out of the conflict between ego and unconscious. If you can't imagine a conflict with your Angel, just remember Jacob who wrestled with his angel. The conflict was an ordeal, but the conflict made him Jacob. Without it he would be among the nameless masses, not a paradigm for contemporary man.
Every disease, every calamity, every failure, every neurosis has its symbolic content. The symbolic content enters the soul through the locus of misfortune or the wound of the body, and then it becomes the task of the soul to make friends with this stranger in its midst. There may be a struggle, but ultimately it is not a struggle but an expansive process with a releasing effect as if one grows beyond one's former boundaries and the whole psychic system reaches toward infinity. The crisis actually made the process possible. It was the calamity that befell that gave us a glimpse of the void. It opened a slit to another world and we saw into that which lies beyond. The trauma weakens the boundaries between man and the archetypal world. As a result, when the healing finally takes place, he is not merely restored to his former self. He is recreated and is now a larger person than he was before.
Inner life begins to open up: when one looks inside, there is no longer the opaque blackness, but a rich field of experience filled with entities who long for attention or worship. This does much to alleviate feelings of isolation and despair, providing that one has proper guidance in this realm. This guiding force also emerges from the unconscious: The unconscious, through dreams and through its manifestations in everyday life, provides all the information we need to know. The unconscious, with its ingenious way of symbolizing, sets the picture before us: this is how it is, there are these and these obstacles, but there is a chance of breaking through to a new position with a wider perspective. Or the unconscious may place violent objections in the path, warning of disaster if the stirring up of archetypal material is encouraged to continue.
Individuation requires the balancing, objective viewpoint of another who not only cares for your soul, but is intimately familiar with the recurrent themes of archetypal processes. This helps the ego to avoid becoming possessed by any given pattern. Both commitment and will are required in the process, for once begun, it must be followed through to its goal, lest one be lost forever in the abyss of the transcendent imagination. New discoveries must not only be made, but assimilated. As in Magic, there must be concurrent experience, and psychological insight concerning the meaning of the experience.
The individual meaningfulness of an experience is what creates the unique personality of those with an awareness of the self. The instinctive feeling of significance is expanded upon by rooting experiences in their mythical patterns. The ego must never presume to wield power over the unconscious lest it provoke a reactionary attack for this spiritual pride. This inflation disturbs the progress of the work by returning the ego to the unconscious state of identifying itself with the powers and potency of the unconscious. This control fantasy is the basis of many neuroses.
In his essay on the "Relationship between the Ego and the Unconscious", Jung has stated that:
It is impossible to achieve individuation by conscious intention, because conscious intention invariably leads to a typical attitude that excludes whatever does not fit in with it. The assimilation of the unconscious contents leads, on the contrary to a condition in which the conscious intention is excluded and supplanted by a process of development that seems irrational. This process alone signifies individuation, and its product is individuality as we have defined it; particular and universal at once...Only when the unconscious is assimilated does the individuality emerge more clearly, together with the psychological phenomenon which links the ego with the non-ego and is designated by the word attitude. But this time it is no longer a typical attitude but an individual one.
What the conscious ego can do in regard to individuation is make the commitment to attempt to work in harmony with the unfolding subconscious process, to give it his constant attention, and to place proper value on the experience. This creates the experience of "being in harmony with the cosmos," which is another variation on the Hermetic Axiom, "As Above, so Below." There are definite parallels between the ancient arts of Hermetic philosophy, yoga, and alchemy and the modern concept of psychological individuation. Once there is some progress on the search for meaning, individuation becomes a way of life. It allows one to see through the mundane aspects of life to the divine patterns animating existence. Stated in the broadest possible terms, individuation seems to be the innate urge of life to realize itself consciously.
The transpersonal life energy, in the process of self-unfolding, uses human consciousness, a product of itself, as an instrument for its own self-realization.(8) The unconscious stores our entire history, both personal and collective, and also potentially has the ability of anticipating our future. It does not, however, function on the ego's linear time-line; in sacred time, there is a melding of past/present/future so that symbols produced at any given time may or may not indicate the current state of consciousness.
Frequently, symbols of wholeness appear at the beginning of the work, and are strictly prognosticative. In Magick, the same occurs in the Vision of the Holy Guardian Angel. This is a far cry from the resulting maturity on the path which brings Knowledge and Conversation with one's Angel. Individuation arises out of the conflict between ego and unconscious. If you can't imagine a conflict with your Angel, just remember Jacob who wrestled with his angel. The conflict was an ordeal, but the conflict made him Jacob. Without it he would be among the nameless masses, not a paradigm for contemporary man. --Iona Miller
The path of Individuation is the psychological equivalent of initiation. The goal of individuation is self-realization through increasing conscious relationship with the Self, archetype of wholeness.
This Self includes both positive and negative traits of an individual which, in the beginning of analysis, are generally projected out, or attributed to, the environment. As the ego continues its heroic journey through the labyrinthine psyche, it comes into confrontation with personifications of various archetypal characters.
During the maturing process, these characters emerge from the undifferentiated mass of unconscious contents. Though their presence in the psyche was implied from the beginning, they begin to unfold in unique patterns in the life of the individual. One meets such intriguing archetypal figures (complexes) as the shadow, persona, hero, anima/animus, puer, wise old man, trickster, great mother, healer, divine child, self, etc. When these figures, and their behavior patterns, remain unconscious, they are projected onto other people, as "my enemy," "my great love," "my wise teacher," etc.
In time we learn to distinguish these recurrent patterns from the personalities of the people with whom he is involved. Another way these patterns lay claim to an individual and exert their influence is through the identification of the ego with the archetype. Then we have cases of "I am the great lover," "I am the great teacher of wisdom," or "I am especially gifted and prodigious."
Using Tree of Life pathworking techniques as a mode of creative imagination, personified forms are encountered as gods or goddesses, and the aspirant comes to a conscious relationship with them, both internal and external. He learns to recognize them when he sees them. Most importantly, he has a framework for experiencing these internal and external. He learns to recognize them when he sees them. Most importantly, he has a framework for experiencing these internal personalities as distinct from his individuality; they are, after all, collective patterns which can manifest in anyone under the proper circumstances. This attempt leads to self-realization through the transcendent function, which is a symbol of the union of opposites.
In Magick, it is known as the Holy Guardian Angel. We are not alone. We are not totally encased in our ego-selves. There is a companion, a comrade, a guardian angel, a greater self who is always with us. When looked at in this way, it is seen at once that individuation is more than behavior modifying oneself out of bad habits. Individuation is a religious endeavor. (5) This is no way to finally dispose of undesirable qualities or weaknesses.
Rather it is a method of coming to conscious knowledge of the gamut of motivations and possible behavior of which one is capable. It is a process of rebalancing psychic functioning, integrating the fragments of archetypal patterns which underlie human existence. It is not the road for all. Frequently those who choose to pursue it are impelled by depression, illness, breakdown of current adaptation to reality, or stagnation. The unconscious manifestations demand attention in a form the ego cannot ignore indefinitely. One does not choose the path of individuation, but rather is chosen by it.
If the ego can withstand the temptations, ordeals, and peril at the hands of the unknown, it is eventually rewarded with an expanded experience of self and a rejuvenation, or rebirth. In his essay on the "Relationship between the Ego and the Unconscious," Jung has stated that
It is impossible to achieve individuation by conscious intention, because conscious intention invariably leads to a typical attitude that excludes whatever does not fit in with it. This assimilation of the unconscious contents leads, on the contrary to a condition in which the conscious intention is excluded and supplanted by a process of development that seems irrational. This process alone signifies individuation, and its product is individuality as we have defined it; particular and universal at once....Only when the unconscious is assimilated does the individuality emerge more clearly, together with the psychological phenomenon which links the ego with the non-ego and is designated by the word attitude. But this time it is no longer a typical attitude but an individual one.
What the conscious ego can do in regard to individuation is make the commitment to attempt to work in harmony with the unfolding subconscious process, to give it his constant attention, and to place proper value on the experience. This creates the experience of "being in harmony with the cosmos," which is another variation on the Hermetic Axiom, "As Above, So Below."
There are definite parallels between the ancient arts of Hermetic philosophy, yoga, and alchemy and the modern concept of psychological individuation. Once there is some progress on the search for meaning, individuation becomes a way of life. It allows one to see through the mundane aspects of life to the divine patterns animating existence. Stated in the broadest possible terms, individuation seems to be the innate urge of life to realized itself consciously.
The transpersonal life energy, in the process of self-unfolding, using human consciousness, a product of itself, as an instrument for its own self-realization. (6) The unconscious stores our entire history, both personal and collective, and also potentially has the ability of anticipating our future. It does not, however, function on the ego's linear time-line; in sacred time, there is a melding of past/present/future so that symbols produced at any given time may or may not indicate the current state of subconsciousness. Frequently, symbols of wholeness appear at the beginning of the work, and are strictly prognosticative.
In Magick, the same occurs in the Vision of the Holy Guardian Angel. This is a far cry from the resulting maturity on the path which brings Knowledge and Conversation with one's Angel. Individuation arises out of the conflict between ego and unconscious. If you can't imagine a conflict with your Angel, just remember Jacob who wrestled with his angel. The conflict was an ordeal, but the conflict made him Jacob. Without it he would be among the nameless masses, not a paradigm for contemporary man.
Every disease, every calamity, every failure, every neurosis has its symbolic content. The symbolic content enters the soul through the locus of misfortune or the wound of the body, and then it becomes the task of the soul to make friends with this stranger in its midst. There may be a struggle, but ultimately it is not a struggle but an expansive process with a releasing effect as if one grows beyond one's former boundaries and the whole psychic system reaches toward infinity. The crisis actually made the process possible. It was the calamity that befell that gave us a glimpse of the void. It opened a slit to another world and we saw into that which lies beyond. The trauma weakens the boundaries between man and the archetypal world. As a result, when the healing finally takes place, he is not merely restored to his former self. He is recreated and is now a larger person than he was before.
Inner life begins to open up: when one looks inside, there is no longer the opaque blackness, but a rich field of experience filled with entities who long for attention or worship. This does much to alleviate feelings of isolation and despair, providing that one has proper guidance in this realm. This guiding force also emerges from the unconscious: The unconscious, through dreams and through its manifestations in everyday life, provides all the information we need to know. The unconscious, with its ingenious way of symbolizing, sets the picture before us: this is how it is, there are these and these obstacles, but there is a chance of breaking through to a new position with a wider perspective. Or the unconscious may place violent objections in the path, warning of disaster if the stirring up of archetypal material is encouraged to continue.
Individuation requires the balancing, objective viewpoint of another who not only cares for your soul, but is intimately familiar with the recurrent themes of archetypal processes. This helps the ego to avoid becoming possessed by any given pattern. Both commitment and will are required in the process, for once begun, it must be followed through to its goal, lest one be lost forever in the abyss of the transcendent imagination. New discoveries must not only be made, but assimilated. As in Magic, there must be concurrent experience, and psychological insight concerning the meaning of the experience.
The individual meaningfulness of an experience is what creates the unique personality of those with an awareness of the self. The instinctive feeling of significance is expanded upon by rooting experiences in their mythical patterns. The ego must never presume to wield power over the unconscious lest it provoke a reactionary attack for this spiritual pride. This inflation disturbs the progress of the work by returning the ego to the unconscious state of identifying itself with the powers and potency of the unconscious. This control fantasy is the basis of many neuroses.
In his essay on the "Relationship between the Ego and the Unconscious", Jung has stated that:
It is impossible to achieve individuation by conscious intention, because conscious intention invariably leads to a typical attitude that excludes whatever does not fit in with it. The assimilation of the unconscious contents leads, on the contrary to a condition in which the conscious intention is excluded and supplanted by a process of development that seems irrational. This process alone signifies individuation, and its product is individuality as we have defined it; particular and universal at once...Only when the unconscious is assimilated does the individuality emerge more clearly, together with the psychological phenomenon which links the ego with the non-ego and is designated by the word attitude. But this time it is no longer a typical attitude but an individual one.
What the conscious ego can do in regard to individuation is make the commitment to attempt to work in harmony with the unfolding subconscious process, to give it his constant attention, and to place proper value on the experience. This creates the experience of "being in harmony with the cosmos," which is another variation on the Hermetic Axiom, "As Above, so Below." There are definite parallels between the ancient arts of Hermetic philosophy, yoga, and alchemy and the modern concept of psychological individuation. Once there is some progress on the search for meaning, individuation becomes a way of life. It allows one to see through the mundane aspects of life to the divine patterns animating existence. Stated in the broadest possible terms, individuation seems to be the innate urge of life to realize itself consciously.
The transpersonal life energy, in the process of self-unfolding, uses human consciousness, a product of itself, as an instrument for its own self-realization.(8) The unconscious stores our entire history, both personal and collective, and also potentially has the ability of anticipating our future. It does not, however, function on the ego's linear time-line; in sacred time, there is a melding of past/present/future so that symbols produced at any given time may or may not indicate the current state of consciousness.
Frequently, symbols of wholeness appear at the beginning of the work, and are strictly prognosticative. In Magick, the same occurs in the Vision of the Holy Guardian Angel. This is a far cry from the resulting maturity on the path which brings Knowledge and Conversation with one's Angel. Individuation arises out of the conflict between ego and unconscious. If you can't imagine a conflict with your Angel, just remember Jacob who wrestled with his angel. The conflict was an ordeal, but the conflict made him Jacob. Without it he would be among the nameless masses, not a paradigm for contemporary man. --Iona Miller
[The process of Individuation is not “Mysticism,” “Shamanism,” “Alchemy,” or “Gnosticism”. But, in reality, individuation is an expression of that biological process.]
Psychology, like every empirical science, cannot get along without auxiliary concepts, hypotheses, and models. But the theologian as well as the philosopher is apt to make the mistake of taking them for metaphysical postulates. The atom of which the physicist speaks is not an hypostasis, it is a model.
Similarly, my concept of the archetype or of psychic energy is only an auxiliary idea which can be exchanged at any time for a better formula. From a philosophical standpoint my empirical concepts would be logical monsters, and as a philosopher I should cut a very sorry figure.
Looked at theologically, my concept of the anima, for instance, is pure Gnosticism; hence I am often classed among the Gnostics. On top of that, the individuation process develops a symbolism whose nearest affinities are to be found in folklore, in Gnostic, alchemical, and such like "mystical" conceptions, not to mention shamanism.
When material of this kind is adduced for comparison, the exposition fairly swarms with "exotic" and "far-fetched" proofs, and anyone who merely skims through a book instead of reading it can easily succumb to the illusion that he is confronted with a Gnostic system. In reality, however, individuation is an expression of that biological process simple or complicated as the case may be by which every living thing becomes what it was destined to become from the beginning.
This process naturally expresses itself in man as much psychically as somatically. On the psychic side it produces those well-known quaternity symbols, for instance, whose parallels are found in mental asylums as well as in Gnosticism and other exoticisms, and last but not least in Christian allegory.
Hence it is by no means a case of mystical speculations, but of clinical observations and their interpretation through comparison with analogous phenomena in other fields. It is not the daring fantasy of the anatomist that can be held responsible when he discovers the nearest analogies to the human skeleton in certain African anthropoids of which the layman has never heard.
It is certainly remarkable that my critics, with few exceptions, ignore the fact that, as a doctor and scientist, I proceed from facts which everyone is at liberty to verify. Instead, they criticize me as if I were a philosopher, or a Gnostic with pretensions to supernatural knowledge.
As a philosopher and speculating heretic I am, of course, easy prey. That is probably the reason why people prefer to ignore the facts I have discovered, or to deny them without scruple. But it is the facts that are of prime importance to me and not a provisional terminology or attempts at theoretical reflections.
The fact that archetypes exist is not spirited away by saying that there are no inborn ideas. I have never maintained that the archetype “an sich” is an idea, but have expressly pointed out that I regard it as a form without definite content.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Forward to White’s “God and the Unconscious,” Pages 306-307, Paragraphs 460-461.
Psychology, like every empirical science, cannot get along without auxiliary concepts, hypotheses, and models. But the theologian as well as the philosopher is apt to make the mistake of taking them for metaphysical postulates. The atom of which the physicist speaks is not an hypostasis, it is a model.
Similarly, my concept of the archetype or of psychic energy is only an auxiliary idea which can be exchanged at any time for a better formula. From a philosophical standpoint my empirical concepts would be logical monsters, and as a philosopher I should cut a very sorry figure.
Looked at theologically, my concept of the anima, for instance, is pure Gnosticism; hence I am often classed among the Gnostics. On top of that, the individuation process develops a symbolism whose nearest affinities are to be found in folklore, in Gnostic, alchemical, and such like "mystical" conceptions, not to mention shamanism.
When material of this kind is adduced for comparison, the exposition fairly swarms with "exotic" and "far-fetched" proofs, and anyone who merely skims through a book instead of reading it can easily succumb to the illusion that he is confronted with a Gnostic system. In reality, however, individuation is an expression of that biological process simple or complicated as the case may be by which every living thing becomes what it was destined to become from the beginning.
This process naturally expresses itself in man as much psychically as somatically. On the psychic side it produces those well-known quaternity symbols, for instance, whose parallels are found in mental asylums as well as in Gnosticism and other exoticisms, and last but not least in Christian allegory.
Hence it is by no means a case of mystical speculations, but of clinical observations and their interpretation through comparison with analogous phenomena in other fields. It is not the daring fantasy of the anatomist that can be held responsible when he discovers the nearest analogies to the human skeleton in certain African anthropoids of which the layman has never heard.
It is certainly remarkable that my critics, with few exceptions, ignore the fact that, as a doctor and scientist, I proceed from facts which everyone is at liberty to verify. Instead, they criticize me as if I were a philosopher, or a Gnostic with pretensions to supernatural knowledge.
As a philosopher and speculating heretic I am, of course, easy prey. That is probably the reason why people prefer to ignore the facts I have discovered, or to deny them without scruple. But it is the facts that are of prime importance to me and not a provisional terminology or attempts at theoretical reflections.
The fact that archetypes exist is not spirited away by saying that there are no inborn ideas. I have never maintained that the archetype “an sich” is an idea, but have expressly pointed out that I regard it as a form without definite content.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Forward to White’s “God and the Unconscious,” Pages 306-307, Paragraphs 460-461.
The persona, for Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, was the social face the individual presented to the world—"a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual".[1]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_%28psychology%29
Identification For the growing the development of a viable social persona is a vital part of adapting to, and preparing for, adult life in the external social world. “A strong ego relates to the outside world through a flexible persona; identification with a specific persona (doctor, scholar, artist, etc.) inhibits psychological development.[2] Thus for Jung “the danger is that [people] become identical with their personas—the professor with his textbook, the tenor with his voice.”[3] The result could be “the shallow, brittle, conformist kind of personality which is 'all persona', with its excessive concern for 'what people think'”[4]—an unreflecting state of mind 'in which people are utterly unconscious of any distinction between themselves and the world in which they live. They have little or no concept of themselves as beings distinct from what society expects of them'.[5] The stage was set thereby for what Jung termed enantiodromia—the emergence of the repressed individuality from beneath the persona later in life: 'the individual will either be completely smothered under an empty persona or an enantiodromia into the buried opposites will occur'.[6]
Disintegration “The breakdown of the persona constitutes the typically Jungian moment both in therapy and in development” — the “moment” when “that excessive commitment to collective ideals masking deeper individuality—the persona—breaks down... disintegrates.”[7] Given Jung’s view that “the persona is a semblance... the dissolution of the persona is therefore absolutely necessary for individuation.”[8] Nevertheless, its disintegration may well lead initially to a state of chaos in the individual: ’one result of the dissolution of the persona is the release of fantasy... disorientation.’[9] As the individuation process gets under way, ’the situation has thrown off the conventional husk and developed into a stark encounter with reality, with no false veils or adornments of any kind’.[10]
Negative restoration One possible reaction to the resulting experience of archetypal chaos was what Jung called "the regressive restoration of the persona", whereby the protagonist "laboriously tries to patch up his social reputation within the confines of a much more limited personality... pretending that he is as he was before the crucial experience."[11] Similarly in treatment there can be "the persona-restoring phase, which is an effort to maintain superficiality";[12] or even a longer phase designed not to promote individuation but to bring about what Jung caricatured as "the negative restoration of the persona" — that is to say, a reversion to the status quo'.[13]
Absence The alternative is to endure living with the absence of the persona — and for Jung "the man with no persona... is blind to the reality of the world, which for him has merely the value of an amusing or fantastic playground."[14] Inevitably, the result of "the streaming in of the unconscious into the conscious realm, simultaneously with the dissolution of the 'persona' and the reduction of the directive force of consciousness, is a state of disturbed psychic equilibrium."[15] Those trapped at such a stage remain "blind to the world, hopeless dreamers... spectral Cassandras dreaded for their tactlessness, eternally misunderstood."[16]
Restoration Recovery, the aim of individuation, "is not only achieved by work on the inside figures but also, as conditio sine qua non, by a readaptation in outer life"[17]—including the recreation of a new and more viable persona. To "develop a stronger persona... might feel inauthentic, like learning to "play a role"... but if one cannot perform a social role then one will suffer".[18] Thus one goal for individuation is for people to "develop a more realistic, flexible persona that helps them navigate in society but does not collide with nor hide their true self".[19] Eventually, "in the best case, the persona is appropriate and tasteful, a true reflection of our inner individuality and our outward sense of self."[20]
Later developments The persona has become one of the most widely adopted aspects of Jungian terminology, passing into almost common parlance: "a mask or shield which the person places between himself and the people around him, called by some psychiatrists the persona."[21] For Eric Berne, "the persona is formed during the years from six to twelve, when most children first go out on their own... to avoid unwanted entanglements or promote wanted ones."[22] He was interested in "the relationship between ego states and the Jungian persona', and considered that 'as an ad hoc attitude, persona is differentiated also from the more autonomous identity of Erikson."[23] Perhaps more contentiously, in terms of life scripts, he distinguished "the Archetypes (corresponding to the magic figures in a script) and the Persona (which is the style the script is played in)".[24]
Post-Jungians would loosely call the persona "the social archetype of the conformity archetype",[25] though Jung himself was always concerned to distinguish the persona as an external function from those images of the unconscious he called archetypes. Thus whereas Jung recommended conversing with archetypes as a therapeutic technique he himself had employed—"For decades I always turned to the anima when I felt my emotional behavior was disturbed, and I would speak with the anima about the images she communicated to me"[26]—he stressed that "It would indeed be the height of absurdity if a man tried to have a conversation with his persona, which he recognized merely as a psychological means of relationship."[27]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_%28psychology%29
Identification For the growing the development of a viable social persona is a vital part of adapting to, and preparing for, adult life in the external social world. “A strong ego relates to the outside world through a flexible persona; identification with a specific persona (doctor, scholar, artist, etc.) inhibits psychological development.[2] Thus for Jung “the danger is that [people] become identical with their personas—the professor with his textbook, the tenor with his voice.”[3] The result could be “the shallow, brittle, conformist kind of personality which is 'all persona', with its excessive concern for 'what people think'”[4]—an unreflecting state of mind 'in which people are utterly unconscious of any distinction between themselves and the world in which they live. They have little or no concept of themselves as beings distinct from what society expects of them'.[5] The stage was set thereby for what Jung termed enantiodromia—the emergence of the repressed individuality from beneath the persona later in life: 'the individual will either be completely smothered under an empty persona or an enantiodromia into the buried opposites will occur'.[6]
Disintegration “The breakdown of the persona constitutes the typically Jungian moment both in therapy and in development” — the “moment” when “that excessive commitment to collective ideals masking deeper individuality—the persona—breaks down... disintegrates.”[7] Given Jung’s view that “the persona is a semblance... the dissolution of the persona is therefore absolutely necessary for individuation.”[8] Nevertheless, its disintegration may well lead initially to a state of chaos in the individual: ’one result of the dissolution of the persona is the release of fantasy... disorientation.’[9] As the individuation process gets under way, ’the situation has thrown off the conventional husk and developed into a stark encounter with reality, with no false veils or adornments of any kind’.[10]
Negative restoration One possible reaction to the resulting experience of archetypal chaos was what Jung called "the regressive restoration of the persona", whereby the protagonist "laboriously tries to patch up his social reputation within the confines of a much more limited personality... pretending that he is as he was before the crucial experience."[11] Similarly in treatment there can be "the persona-restoring phase, which is an effort to maintain superficiality";[12] or even a longer phase designed not to promote individuation but to bring about what Jung caricatured as "the negative restoration of the persona" — that is to say, a reversion to the status quo'.[13]
Absence The alternative is to endure living with the absence of the persona — and for Jung "the man with no persona... is blind to the reality of the world, which for him has merely the value of an amusing or fantastic playground."[14] Inevitably, the result of "the streaming in of the unconscious into the conscious realm, simultaneously with the dissolution of the 'persona' and the reduction of the directive force of consciousness, is a state of disturbed psychic equilibrium."[15] Those trapped at such a stage remain "blind to the world, hopeless dreamers... spectral Cassandras dreaded for their tactlessness, eternally misunderstood."[16]
Restoration Recovery, the aim of individuation, "is not only achieved by work on the inside figures but also, as conditio sine qua non, by a readaptation in outer life"[17]—including the recreation of a new and more viable persona. To "develop a stronger persona... might feel inauthentic, like learning to "play a role"... but if one cannot perform a social role then one will suffer".[18] Thus one goal for individuation is for people to "develop a more realistic, flexible persona that helps them navigate in society but does not collide with nor hide their true self".[19] Eventually, "in the best case, the persona is appropriate and tasteful, a true reflection of our inner individuality and our outward sense of self."[20]
Later developments The persona has become one of the most widely adopted aspects of Jungian terminology, passing into almost common parlance: "a mask or shield which the person places between himself and the people around him, called by some psychiatrists the persona."[21] For Eric Berne, "the persona is formed during the years from six to twelve, when most children first go out on their own... to avoid unwanted entanglements or promote wanted ones."[22] He was interested in "the relationship between ego states and the Jungian persona', and considered that 'as an ad hoc attitude, persona is differentiated also from the more autonomous identity of Erikson."[23] Perhaps more contentiously, in terms of life scripts, he distinguished "the Archetypes (corresponding to the magic figures in a script) and the Persona (which is the style the script is played in)".[24]
Post-Jungians would loosely call the persona "the social archetype of the conformity archetype",[25] though Jung himself was always concerned to distinguish the persona as an external function from those images of the unconscious he called archetypes. Thus whereas Jung recommended conversing with archetypes as a therapeutic technique he himself had employed—"For decades I always turned to the anima when I felt my emotional behavior was disturbed, and I would speak with the anima about the images she communicated to me"[26]—he stressed that "It would indeed be the height of absurdity if a man tried to have a conversation with his persona, which he recognized merely as a psychological means of relationship."[27]
Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions
You see, it is utterly important that one should be in this world, that one really fulfills one’s entelechia, the germ of life which one is.
Otherwise you can never start Kundalini; you can never detach.
You simply are thrown back, and nothing has happened; it is an absolutely valueless experience.
You must believe in this world, make roots, do the best you can, even if you have to believe in the most absurd things—to believe, for instance, that this world is very definite, that it matters absolutely whether such-and-such a treaty is made or not.
It may be completely futile, but you have to believe in it, have to make it almost a religious conviction, merely for the purpose of putting your signature under the treaty, so that trace is left of you.
For you should leave some trace in this world which notifies that you have been here, that something has happened.
If nothing happens of this kind you have not realized yourself; the germ of life has fallen, say, into a thick layer of air that kept it suspended. It never touched the ground, and so never could produce the plant.
But if you touch the reality in which you live, and stay for several decades if you leave your trace, then the impersonal process can begin.
You see, the shoot must come out of the ground, and if the personal spark has never gotten into the ground, nothing will come out of it; no linga or Kundalini will be there, because you are still staying in the infinity that was before.
Now if, as I say, you succeed in completing your entelechia, that shoot will come up from the ground; namely, that possibility of a detachment from this world—from the world of Maya, as the Hindu would say—which is a sort of depersonalization. For in muladhara we are just identical.
We are entangled in the roots, and we ourselves are the roots.
We make roots, we cause roots to be, we are rooted in the soil, and there is no getting away for us, because we must be there as long as we live.
That idea, that we can sublimate ourselves and become entirely spiritual and no hair left, is an inflation.
I am sorry, that is impossible; it makes no sense.
Therefore we must invent a new scheme, and we speak of the impersonal.
Other times may invent other terms for the same thing. ~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Page 29.
What is it, then, that inexorably tips the scales in favour of the extra-ordinary?
It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from it’s well-worn paths.
True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape.
The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing to one who has a vocation. He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths. Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called….
The original meaning of “to have a vocation” is “to be addressed by a voice.” The clearest examples of this are to be found in the avowels of the Old Testament prophets.
That it is not just a quaint old-fashioned way of speaking is proved by the confessions of historical personalities such as Goethe and Napoleon, to mention only two familiar examples, who made no secret of their feeling of vocation. ~Carl Jung; Collected Works 17, The Development of the Personality
The woman with an integrated Animus is actively and creatively enterprising. She can integrate new ideas and new movements and is often at the forefront of the new zeitgeist. She engages life and does not hide from it behind false bravado and intellectual verbosity. She is spiritual and intellectual and confident in her own knowledge and wisdom.
This wise women has a healthy attitude towards disappointment. She risks being hurt in relationships without the bitterness, and with a well-developed sense of humor. She accepts that life consists of both growth and decline and embraces it.
Living fully and embracing life with passion and conviction is the goal of individuation and integrating the Animus is a huge part of this process. Qualities include:
Good rational and logical ability.
Ability for clear non attached thought.
Ability to construct by sustained effort and application.
A strong centre.
Good external strength in the persona.
Bridge to knowledge and creative thought.
Problem solving.
A mature person develops individuality In my naturally limited experience there are, among people of maturer age, very many for whom the development of individuality is an indispensable requirement. Hence I am privately of the opinion that it is just the mature person who, in our times, has the greatest need of some further education in individual culture after his youthful education in school or university has moulded him on exclusively collective lines and thoroughly imbued him with the collective mentality.
"On Psychic Energy" (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 112
Alienation has outside aspects and also takes place within He who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthy ground of his being.
"Mind and Earth" (1927). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P. 103
The outer conflicts and the inner ones tend to be related It even seems as if young people who have had a hard struggle for existence are spared inner problems, while those who for some reason or other have no difficulty with adaptation run into problems of sex or conflicts arising from a sense of inferiority.
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 762
To remain infantile makes one's future regrettable Infantilism, however, is something extremely ambiguous. First, it can be either genuine or purely symptomatic; and second, it can be either residuary or embryonic. There is an enormous difference between something that has remained infantile and something that is in the process of growth. Both can take an infantile or embryonic form, and more often than not it is impossible to tell at first glance whether we are dealing with a regrettably persistent fragment of infantile life or with a vitally important creative beginning. To deride these possibilities is to act like a dullard who does not know that the future is more important than the past.
"The State of Psychotherapy Today" (1934). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P.345
Social responsibility that is devoid of self-reflection, may be all too hypocritical Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing these things upon his neighbours under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power. Individual self-reflection, return of the individual to the ground of human nature, to his own deepest being with its individual and social destiny here is the beginning of a cure for that blindness which reigns at the present hour.
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology P. 5
The creative impulse may not get wholly depleted throughout one's life. It is possible to conduct it wisely and replenish it too A person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire. It is as though each of us was born with a limited store of energy. In the artist, the strongest force in his make-up, that is, his creativeness, will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. The creative impulse can drain him of his humanity to such a degree that the personal ego can exist only on a primitive or inferior level and is driven to develop all sorts of defects-ruthlessness, selfishness ("autoeroticism"), vanity, and other infantile traits. These inferiorities are the only means by which it can maintain its vitality and prevent itself from being wholly depleted.
"Psychology and Literature" (1930). In CW 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. P. 158
Stiffening and clinging is not all there is to develop throughout life - personality may be developed too The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many - far too many - aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 771
It should be worthy of praise to consolidate our former great attainments, as long as it does not make draining inroads into the soul life and make us sinister If we wish to stay on the heights we have reached, we must struggle all the time to consolidate our consciousness and its attitude. But we soon discover that this praiseworthy and apparently unavoidable battle with the years leads to stagnation and desiccation of soul. Our convictions become platitudes ground out on a barrel-organ, our ideals become starchy habits, enthusiasm stiffens into automatic gestures. The source of the water of life seeps away. We ourselves may not notice it, but everybody else does, and that is even more painful. If we should risk a little introspection, coupled perhaps with an energetic attempt to be honest for once with ourselves, we may get a dim idea of all the wants, longings, and fears that have accumulated down there-a repulsive and sinister sight. The mind shies away, but life wants to flow down into the depths. Fate itself seems to preserve us from this, for each of us has a tendency to become an immovable pillar of the past.
Symbols of Transformation (1952). CW 5: P. 553
It should help to get well unified and develop realisation Since the aims of the second half of life are different from those of the first, to linger too long in the youthful attitude produces a division of the will. Consciousness still presses forward in obedience, as it were, to its own inertia, but the unconscious lags behind, because the strength and inner resolve needed for further expansion have been sapped. This disunity with oneself begets discontent, and since one is not conscious of the real state of things one generally projects the reasons for it upon one's partner. A critical atmosphere thus develops, the necessary prelude to conscious realization.
"Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925). In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P. 331
Adult life has several stages too; each with its own peculiar challenges and possible outcomes or good or bad - or mixed It is not possible to live too long amid infantile surroundings, or in the bosom of the family, without endangering one's psychic health. Life calls us forth to independence, and anyone who does not heed this call because of childish laziness or timidity is threatened with neurosis. And once this has broken out, it becomes an increasingly valid reason for running away from life and remaining forever in the morally poisonous atmosphere of infancy.
Symbols of Transformation (1952). CW 5: P. 461
The afternoon of human life naturally forms part of the growth of human life A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning. The significance of the morning undoubtedly lies in the development of the individual, our entrenchment in the outer world, the propagation of our kind, and the care of our children. This is the obvious purpose of nature. But when this purpose has been attained - and more than attained - shall the earning of money, the extension of conquests, and the expansion of life go steadily on beyond the bounds of all reason and sense? Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning, or the natural aim, must pay for it with damage to his soul, just as surely as a growing youth who tries to carry over his childish egoism into adult life must pay for this mistake with social failure.
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 787
Suffering tends to isolate you. However, understanding of it may lift you up somewhat In the case of psychological suffering, which always isolates the individual from the herd of so-called normal people, it is of the greatest importance to understand that the conflict is not a personal failure only, but at the same time a suffering common to all and a problem with which the whole epoch is burdened. This general point of view lifts the individual out of himself and connects him with humanity.
Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice: The Tavistock Lectures. (1935). In CW 18 (retitled) "The Tavistock Lectures" P.116
Often-repeated dream-series talk for a developmental process that is needed If, as happens in long and difficult treatments, the analyst observes a series of dreams often running into hundreds, there gradually forces itself upon him a phenomenon which, in an isolated dream, would remain hidden behind the compensation of the moment. This phenomenon is a kind of developmental process in the personality itself. At first it seems that each compensation is a momentary adjustment of one-sidedness or an equalization of disturbed balance. But with deeper insight and experience, these apparently separate acts of compensation arrange themselves into a kind of plan. They seem to hang together and in the deepest sense to be subordinated to a common goal, so that a long dream-series no longer appears as a senseless string of incoherent and isolated happenings, but resembles the successive steps in a planned and orderly process of development. I have called this unconscious process spontaneously expressing itself in the symbolism of a long dream-series the individuation process. ◊
"On the Nature of Dreams" (1945). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.550
Sexuality that is neurotically repressed, means unsuitable sacrifice, and possibly descent from what is truly proper Obviously it is in the youthful period of life that we have most to gain from a thorough recognition of the instinctual side. A timely recognition of sexuality, for instance, can prevent that neurotic suppression of it which keeps a man unduly withdrawn from life, or else forces him into a wretched and unsuitable way of living with which he is bound to come into conflict. Proper recognition and appreciation of normal instincts leads the young person into life and entangles him with fate, thus involving him in life's necessities and the consequent sacrifices and efforts through which his character is developed and his experience matured. For the mature person, however, the continued expansion of life is obviously not the right principle, because the descent towards life's afternoon demands simplification, limitation, and intensification - in other words, individual culture.
"On Psychic Energy" (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 113
The youth phase is far from all there is to life well lived An inexperienced youth thinks one can let the old people go, because not much more can happen to them anyway: they have their lives behind them and are no better than petrified pillars of the past. But it is a great mistake to suppose that the meaning of life is exhausted with the period of youth and expansion; that, for example, a woman who has passed the menopause is "finished." The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different.
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology P. 114
Many slowly find out to indulge less in egoistic, childish cravings through some fit involvement in the world If we try to extract the common and essential factors from the almost inexhaustible variety of individual problems found in the period of youth, we meet in all cases with one particular feature: a more or less patent clinging to the childhood level of consciousness, a resistance to the fateful forces in and around us which would involve us in the world. Something in us wishes to remain a child, to be unconscious or, at most, conscious only of the ego; to reject everything strange, or else subject it to our will; to do nothing, or else indulge our own craving for pleasure or power. In all this there is something of the inertia of matter; it is a persistence in the previous state whose range of consciousness is smaller, narrower, and more egoistic than that of the dualistic phase. For here the individual is faced with the necessity of recognizing and accepting what is different and strange as a part of his own life, as a kind of "also-I."
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 764
The young neurotic cowardly shrinks back from some cultural values The discovery of the value of human personality is reserved for a riper age. For young people the search for personality values is very often a pretext for evading their biological duty. Conversely, the exaggerated longing of an older person for the sexual values of youth is a short-sighted and often cowardly evasion of a duty which demands recognition of the value of personality and submission to the hierarchy of cultural values. The young neurotic shrinks back in terror from the expansion of life's duties, the old one from the dwindling of the treasures he has attained.
CW 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis. P. 664
At whatever cost assert yourself well, says Jung There would appear to be a sort of conscience in mankind which severely punishes every one who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his virtuous pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human. Until he can do this, an impenetrable wall shuts him off from the vital feeling that he is a man among other men.
"Problems of Modern Psychotherapy" (1929). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy. P.132
Reflect and carry what is within yourself, and the future may get better or worse for it. Choose the former upon reflection After attaining the greatest possible height, a descent may begin Take for comparison the daily course of the sun - but a sun that is endowed with human feeling and man's limited consciousness. In the morning it rises from the nocturnal sea of unconsciousness and looks upon the wide, bright world which lies before it in an expanse that steadily widens the higher it climbs in the firmament. In this extension of its field of action caused by its own rising, the sun will discover its significance; it will see the attainment of the greatest possible height, and the widest possible dissemination of its blessings, as its goal. In this conviction the sun pursues its course to the unforeseen zenith-unforeseen, because its career is unique and individual, and the culminating point could not be calculated in advance. At the stroke of noon the descent begins. And the descent means the reversal of all the ideals and values that were cherished in the morning.
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 778
One is to reflect well to find out what is individual To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality in fact is.
"The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" (1928). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P. 242
What good and evil folks carry within themselves! Our personality develops in the course of our life from germs that are hard or impossible to discern, and it is only our deeds that reveal who we are. We are like the sun, which nourishes the life of the earth and brings forth every kind of strange, wonderful, and evil thing; we are like the mothers who bear in their wombs untold happiness and suffering. At first we do not know what deeds or misdeeds, what destiny, what good and evil we have in us, and only the autumn can show what the spring has engendered, only in the evening will it be seen what the morning began.
"The Development of the Personality" (1934). In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P.290
Individual sides to us should not be all overshadowed by so-called individual psychology, but instead nourished well by such as attention On closer examination one is always astonished to see how much of our so-called individual psychology is really collective. So much, indeed, that the individual traits are completely overshadowed by it. Since, however, individuation is an ineluctable psychological necessity, we can see from the ascendancy of the collective what very special attention must be paid to this delicate plant "individuality" if it is not to be completely smothered.
"The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" (1928). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P. 241
Future generations may benefit a whole lot from attentive individuals of yesterday and today It is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery, be it cooling water for the thirsty or the sandy wastes of unfruitful error. The one helps, the other warns. Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of his discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers. ◊
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology P. 201
Personal power is far from ideal, but may assist social achievements all the same You may adapt to the larger world as your internalised smaller world dictate. Eric Berne's life scripts serve as examples The small world of the child, the family milieu, is the model for the big world. The more intensely the family sets its stamp on the child, the more he will be emotionally inclined, as an adult, to see in the great world his former small world. Of course this must not be taken as a conscious intellectual process. On the contrary, the patient feels and sees the difference between now and then, and tries as well as he can to adapt himself. Perhaps he will even believe himself perfectly adapted, since he may be able to grasp the situation intellectually, but that does not prevent his emotions from lagging far behind his intellectual insight.
"The Theory of Psychoanalysis" (1913). In CW 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis. P. 312
Outer concerns may grow and multiply and overcrowd personal power and propriety till they become intolerable burdens The middle period of life is a time of enormous psychological importance. The child begins its psychological life within very narrow limits, inside the magic circle of the mother and the family. With progressive maturation it widens its horizon and its own sphere of influence; its hopes and intentions are directed to extending the scope of personal power and possessions; desire reaches out to the world in ever-widening range; the will of the individual becomes more and more identical with the natural goals pursued by unconscious motivations. Thus man breathes his own life into things, until finally they begin to live of themselves and to multiply; and imperceptibly he is overgrown by them. Mothers are overtaken by their children, men by their own creations, and what was originally brought into being only with labour and the greatest effort can no longer be held in check. First it was passion, then it became duty, and finally an intolerable burden, a vampire that fattens on the life of its creator.
"Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925). In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P. 331
You had better solve a problem before it ties you down somehow or fragments you too Neurosis is intimately bound up with the problem of our time and really represents an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the individual to solve the general problem in his own person. Neurosis is self-division.
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology P. 18
The bed of Procrustes is not ideal for rest and recuperation To be "normal" is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. But for people of more than average ability, people who never found it difficult to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world's work - for them the moral compulsion to be nothing but normal signifies the bed of Procrustes - deadly and insupportable boredom, a hell of sterility and hopelessness.
"The Principles of Practical Psychology" (1935). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy. P.161
Much unprepared, most people embark on the afternoon of life Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 784
Handling of persons is of course age-related Our life is like the course of the sun. In the morning it gains continually in strength until it reaches the zenith heat of high noon. Then comes the enantiodromia: the steady forward movement no longer denotes an increase, but a decrease, in strength. Thus our task in handling a young person is different from the task of handling an older person. In the former case, it is enough to clear away all the obstacles that hinder expansion and ascent; in the latter, we must nurture everything that assists the descent. ◊
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology P. 114
Progress of culture begins with individuals and their attainments, including individuation Every advance in culture is, psychologically, an extension of consciousness, a coming to consciousness that can take place only through discrimination. Therefore an advance always begins with individuation, that is to say with the individual, conscious of his isolation, cutting a new path through hitherto untrodden territory. To do this he must first return to the fundamental facts of his own being, irrespective of all authority and tradition, and allow himself to become conscious of his distinctiveness. If he succeeds in giving collective validity to his widened consciousness, he creates a tension of opposites that provides the stimulation which culture needs for its further progress. ◊◊
"On Psychic Energy" (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 111
Individuation is not had by massive, unsound and wicked suppression We do not sufficiently distinguish between Individualism and individuation. Individualism means deliberately stressing and giving prominence to some supposed peculiarity, rather than to collective considerations and obligations. But individuation means precisely the better and more complete fulfilment of the collective qualities of the human being, since adequate consideration of the peculiarity of the individual is more conducive to better social achievement than when the peculiarity is neglected or suppressed.
"The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" (1928). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P. 267
Gist
This wise women has a healthy attitude towards disappointment. She risks being hurt in relationships without the bitterness, and with a well-developed sense of humor. She accepts that life consists of both growth and decline and embraces it.
Living fully and embracing life with passion and conviction is the goal of individuation and integrating the Animus is a huge part of this process. Qualities include:
Good rational and logical ability.
Ability for clear non attached thought.
Ability to construct by sustained effort and application.
A strong centre.
Good external strength in the persona.
Bridge to knowledge and creative thought.
Problem solving.
A mature person develops individuality In my naturally limited experience there are, among people of maturer age, very many for whom the development of individuality is an indispensable requirement. Hence I am privately of the opinion that it is just the mature person who, in our times, has the greatest need of some further education in individual culture after his youthful education in school or university has moulded him on exclusively collective lines and thoroughly imbued him with the collective mentality.
"On Psychic Energy" (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 112
Alienation has outside aspects and also takes place within He who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthy ground of his being.
"Mind and Earth" (1927). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P. 103
The outer conflicts and the inner ones tend to be related It even seems as if young people who have had a hard struggle for existence are spared inner problems, while those who for some reason or other have no difficulty with adaptation run into problems of sex or conflicts arising from a sense of inferiority.
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 762
To remain infantile makes one's future regrettable Infantilism, however, is something extremely ambiguous. First, it can be either genuine or purely symptomatic; and second, it can be either residuary or embryonic. There is an enormous difference between something that has remained infantile and something that is in the process of growth. Both can take an infantile or embryonic form, and more often than not it is impossible to tell at first glance whether we are dealing with a regrettably persistent fragment of infantile life or with a vitally important creative beginning. To deride these possibilities is to act like a dullard who does not know that the future is more important than the past.
"The State of Psychotherapy Today" (1934). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P.345
Social responsibility that is devoid of self-reflection, may be all too hypocritical Every individual needs revolution, inner division, overthrow of the existing order, and renewal, but not by forcing these things upon his neighbours under the hypocritical cloak of Christian love or the sense of social responsibility or any of the other beautiful euphemisms for unconscious urges to personal power. Individual self-reflection, return of the individual to the ground of human nature, to his own deepest being with its individual and social destiny here is the beginning of a cure for that blindness which reigns at the present hour.
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology P. 5
The creative impulse may not get wholly depleted throughout one's life. It is possible to conduct it wisely and replenish it too A person must pay dearly for the divine gift of creative fire. It is as though each of us was born with a limited store of energy. In the artist, the strongest force in his make-up, that is, his creativeness, will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. The creative impulse can drain him of his humanity to such a degree that the personal ego can exist only on a primitive or inferior level and is driven to develop all sorts of defects-ruthlessness, selfishness ("autoeroticism"), vanity, and other infantile traits. These inferiorities are the only means by which it can maintain its vitality and prevent itself from being wholly depleted.
"Psychology and Literature" (1930). In CW 15: The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature. P. 158
Stiffening and clinging is not all there is to develop throughout life - personality may be developed too The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many - far too many - aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 771
It should be worthy of praise to consolidate our former great attainments, as long as it does not make draining inroads into the soul life and make us sinister If we wish to stay on the heights we have reached, we must struggle all the time to consolidate our consciousness and its attitude. But we soon discover that this praiseworthy and apparently unavoidable battle with the years leads to stagnation and desiccation of soul. Our convictions become platitudes ground out on a barrel-organ, our ideals become starchy habits, enthusiasm stiffens into automatic gestures. The source of the water of life seeps away. We ourselves may not notice it, but everybody else does, and that is even more painful. If we should risk a little introspection, coupled perhaps with an energetic attempt to be honest for once with ourselves, we may get a dim idea of all the wants, longings, and fears that have accumulated down there-a repulsive and sinister sight. The mind shies away, but life wants to flow down into the depths. Fate itself seems to preserve us from this, for each of us has a tendency to become an immovable pillar of the past.
Symbols of Transformation (1952). CW 5: P. 553
It should help to get well unified and develop realisation Since the aims of the second half of life are different from those of the first, to linger too long in the youthful attitude produces a division of the will. Consciousness still presses forward in obedience, as it were, to its own inertia, but the unconscious lags behind, because the strength and inner resolve needed for further expansion have been sapped. This disunity with oneself begets discontent, and since one is not conscious of the real state of things one generally projects the reasons for it upon one's partner. A critical atmosphere thus develops, the necessary prelude to conscious realization.
"Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925). In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P. 331
Adult life has several stages too; each with its own peculiar challenges and possible outcomes or good or bad - or mixed It is not possible to live too long amid infantile surroundings, or in the bosom of the family, without endangering one's psychic health. Life calls us forth to independence, and anyone who does not heed this call because of childish laziness or timidity is threatened with neurosis. And once this has broken out, it becomes an increasingly valid reason for running away from life and remaining forever in the morally poisonous atmosphere of infancy.
Symbols of Transformation (1952). CW 5: P. 461
The afternoon of human life naturally forms part of the growth of human life A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning. The significance of the morning undoubtedly lies in the development of the individual, our entrenchment in the outer world, the propagation of our kind, and the care of our children. This is the obvious purpose of nature. But when this purpose has been attained - and more than attained - shall the earning of money, the extension of conquests, and the expansion of life go steadily on beyond the bounds of all reason and sense? Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning, or the natural aim, must pay for it with damage to his soul, just as surely as a growing youth who tries to carry over his childish egoism into adult life must pay for this mistake with social failure.
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 787
Suffering tends to isolate you. However, understanding of it may lift you up somewhat In the case of psychological suffering, which always isolates the individual from the herd of so-called normal people, it is of the greatest importance to understand that the conflict is not a personal failure only, but at the same time a suffering common to all and a problem with which the whole epoch is burdened. This general point of view lifts the individual out of himself and connects him with humanity.
Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice: The Tavistock Lectures. (1935). In CW 18 (retitled) "The Tavistock Lectures" P.116
Often-repeated dream-series talk for a developmental process that is needed If, as happens in long and difficult treatments, the analyst observes a series of dreams often running into hundreds, there gradually forces itself upon him a phenomenon which, in an isolated dream, would remain hidden behind the compensation of the moment. This phenomenon is a kind of developmental process in the personality itself. At first it seems that each compensation is a momentary adjustment of one-sidedness or an equalization of disturbed balance. But with deeper insight and experience, these apparently separate acts of compensation arrange themselves into a kind of plan. They seem to hang together and in the deepest sense to be subordinated to a common goal, so that a long dream-series no longer appears as a senseless string of incoherent and isolated happenings, but resembles the successive steps in a planned and orderly process of development. I have called this unconscious process spontaneously expressing itself in the symbolism of a long dream-series the individuation process. ◊
"On the Nature of Dreams" (1945). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.550
Sexuality that is neurotically repressed, means unsuitable sacrifice, and possibly descent from what is truly proper Obviously it is in the youthful period of life that we have most to gain from a thorough recognition of the instinctual side. A timely recognition of sexuality, for instance, can prevent that neurotic suppression of it which keeps a man unduly withdrawn from life, or else forces him into a wretched and unsuitable way of living with which he is bound to come into conflict. Proper recognition and appreciation of normal instincts leads the young person into life and entangles him with fate, thus involving him in life's necessities and the consequent sacrifices and efforts through which his character is developed and his experience matured. For the mature person, however, the continued expansion of life is obviously not the right principle, because the descent towards life's afternoon demands simplification, limitation, and intensification - in other words, individual culture.
"On Psychic Energy" (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 113
The youth phase is far from all there is to life well lived An inexperienced youth thinks one can let the old people go, because not much more can happen to them anyway: they have their lives behind them and are no better than petrified pillars of the past. But it is a great mistake to suppose that the meaning of life is exhausted with the period of youth and expansion; that, for example, a woman who has passed the menopause is "finished." The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different.
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology P. 114
Many slowly find out to indulge less in egoistic, childish cravings through some fit involvement in the world If we try to extract the common and essential factors from the almost inexhaustible variety of individual problems found in the period of youth, we meet in all cases with one particular feature: a more or less patent clinging to the childhood level of consciousness, a resistance to the fateful forces in and around us which would involve us in the world. Something in us wishes to remain a child, to be unconscious or, at most, conscious only of the ego; to reject everything strange, or else subject it to our will; to do nothing, or else indulge our own craving for pleasure or power. In all this there is something of the inertia of matter; it is a persistence in the previous state whose range of consciousness is smaller, narrower, and more egoistic than that of the dualistic phase. For here the individual is faced with the necessity of recognizing and accepting what is different and strange as a part of his own life, as a kind of "also-I."
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 764
The young neurotic cowardly shrinks back from some cultural values The discovery of the value of human personality is reserved for a riper age. For young people the search for personality values is very often a pretext for evading their biological duty. Conversely, the exaggerated longing of an older person for the sexual values of youth is a short-sighted and often cowardly evasion of a duty which demands recognition of the value of personality and submission to the hierarchy of cultural values. The young neurotic shrinks back in terror from the expansion of life's duties, the old one from the dwindling of the treasures he has attained.
CW 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis. P. 664
At whatever cost assert yourself well, says Jung There would appear to be a sort of conscience in mankind which severely punishes every one who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his virtuous pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human. Until he can do this, an impenetrable wall shuts him off from the vital feeling that he is a man among other men.
"Problems of Modern Psychotherapy" (1929). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy. P.132
Reflect and carry what is within yourself, and the future may get better or worse for it. Choose the former upon reflection After attaining the greatest possible height, a descent may begin Take for comparison the daily course of the sun - but a sun that is endowed with human feeling and man's limited consciousness. In the morning it rises from the nocturnal sea of unconsciousness and looks upon the wide, bright world which lies before it in an expanse that steadily widens the higher it climbs in the firmament. In this extension of its field of action caused by its own rising, the sun will discover its significance; it will see the attainment of the greatest possible height, and the widest possible dissemination of its blessings, as its goal. In this conviction the sun pursues its course to the unforeseen zenith-unforeseen, because its career is unique and individual, and the culminating point could not be calculated in advance. At the stroke of noon the descent begins. And the descent means the reversal of all the ideals and values that were cherished in the morning.
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 778
One is to reflect well to find out what is individual To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed; and suddenly we realize how uncommonly difficult the discovery of individuality in fact is.
"The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" (1928). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P. 242
What good and evil folks carry within themselves! Our personality develops in the course of our life from germs that are hard or impossible to discern, and it is only our deeds that reveal who we are. We are like the sun, which nourishes the life of the earth and brings forth every kind of strange, wonderful, and evil thing; we are like the mothers who bear in their wombs untold happiness and suffering. At first we do not know what deeds or misdeeds, what destiny, what good and evil we have in us, and only the autumn can show what the spring has engendered, only in the evening will it be seen what the morning began.
"The Development of the Personality" (1934). In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P.290
Individual sides to us should not be all overshadowed by so-called individual psychology, but instead nourished well by such as attention On closer examination one is always astonished to see how much of our so-called individual psychology is really collective. So much, indeed, that the individual traits are completely overshadowed by it. Since, however, individuation is an ineluctable psychological necessity, we can see from the ascendancy of the collective what very special attention must be paid to this delicate plant "individuality" if it is not to be completely smothered.
"The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" (1928). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P. 241
Future generations may benefit a whole lot from attentive individuals of yesterday and today It is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery, be it cooling water for the thirsty or the sandy wastes of unfruitful error. The one helps, the other warns. Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of his discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers. ◊
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology P. 201
Personal power is far from ideal, but may assist social achievements all the same You may adapt to the larger world as your internalised smaller world dictate. Eric Berne's life scripts serve as examples The small world of the child, the family milieu, is the model for the big world. The more intensely the family sets its stamp on the child, the more he will be emotionally inclined, as an adult, to see in the great world his former small world. Of course this must not be taken as a conscious intellectual process. On the contrary, the patient feels and sees the difference between now and then, and tries as well as he can to adapt himself. Perhaps he will even believe himself perfectly adapted, since he may be able to grasp the situation intellectually, but that does not prevent his emotions from lagging far behind his intellectual insight.
"The Theory of Psychoanalysis" (1913). In CW 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis. P. 312
Outer concerns may grow and multiply and overcrowd personal power and propriety till they become intolerable burdens The middle period of life is a time of enormous psychological importance. The child begins its psychological life within very narrow limits, inside the magic circle of the mother and the family. With progressive maturation it widens its horizon and its own sphere of influence; its hopes and intentions are directed to extending the scope of personal power and possessions; desire reaches out to the world in ever-widening range; the will of the individual becomes more and more identical with the natural goals pursued by unconscious motivations. Thus man breathes his own life into things, until finally they begin to live of themselves and to multiply; and imperceptibly he is overgrown by them. Mothers are overtaken by their children, men by their own creations, and what was originally brought into being only with labour and the greatest effort can no longer be held in check. First it was passion, then it became duty, and finally an intolerable burden, a vampire that fattens on the life of its creator.
"Marriage as a Psychological Relationship" (1925). In CW 17: The Development of the Personality. P. 331
You had better solve a problem before it ties you down somehow or fragments you too Neurosis is intimately bound up with the problem of our time and really represents an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the individual to solve the general problem in his own person. Neurosis is self-division.
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology P. 18
The bed of Procrustes is not ideal for rest and recuperation To be "normal" is the ideal aim for the unsuccessful, for all those who are still below the general level of adaptation. But for people of more than average ability, people who never found it difficult to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world's work - for them the moral compulsion to be nothing but normal signifies the bed of Procrustes - deadly and insupportable boredom, a hell of sterility and hopelessness.
"The Principles of Practical Psychology" (1935). In CW 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy. P.161
Much unprepared, most people embark on the afternoon of life Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.
"The Stages of Life" (1930). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 784
Handling of persons is of course age-related Our life is like the course of the sun. In the morning it gains continually in strength until it reaches the zenith heat of high noon. Then comes the enantiodromia: the steady forward movement no longer denotes an increase, but a decrease, in strength. Thus our task in handling a young person is different from the task of handling an older person. In the former case, it is enough to clear away all the obstacles that hinder expansion and ascent; in the latter, we must nurture everything that assists the descent. ◊
"On the Psychology of the Unconscious" (1912). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology P. 114
Progress of culture begins with individuals and their attainments, including individuation Every advance in culture is, psychologically, an extension of consciousness, a coming to consciousness that can take place only through discrimination. Therefore an advance always begins with individuation, that is to say with the individual, conscious of his isolation, cutting a new path through hitherto untrodden territory. To do this he must first return to the fundamental facts of his own being, irrespective of all authority and tradition, and allow himself to become conscious of his distinctiveness. If he succeeds in giving collective validity to his widened consciousness, he creates a tension of opposites that provides the stimulation which culture needs for its further progress. ◊◊
"On Psychic Energy" (1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P. 111
Individuation is not had by massive, unsound and wicked suppression We do not sufficiently distinguish between Individualism and individuation. Individualism means deliberately stressing and giving prominence to some supposed peculiarity, rather than to collective considerations and obligations. But individuation means precisely the better and more complete fulfilment of the collective qualities of the human being, since adequate consideration of the peculiarity of the individual is more conducive to better social achievement than when the peculiarity is neglected or suppressed.
"The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" (1928). In CW 7: Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. P. 267
Gist
- Develop, self-reflect, consolidate former attainments, assert yourself amiably, and much may go well.
- Reflect and carry what is within yourself, and the future may get better or worse for it. Choose the former upon reflection.
- Personal power may assist social achievements, but should not limit further development personally or individually.
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.