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Way of Individuation
English, German (translation)
177 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1965
About the author
Jolande Jacobi
25 books42 followersJolande Jacobi was a Swiss psychologist, best remembered for her work with Carl Jung and her writings on Jungian psychology. She was born in Budapest, Hungary as Jolande Szekacs, but became known as Jolande Jacobi after her marriage at the age of nineteen to Andor Jacobi.She spent part of her life in Budapest, part in Zurich and part in Vienna. Her parents were Jewish, but Jacobi converted to Roman Catholicism later in life. Jacobi met Jung in 1927, and later was influential in the establishment of the C.G. Jung Institute for Analytical Psychology in Zurich in 1948. Her students at the C.G. Jung Institute included Wallace Clift. She died in Zurich.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
September 8, 2024
We spend the first half of our lives developing the part of ourselves that we are conscious of: our ego. We decide how we are going to play various roles: friend, lover, professional, parent. We hone our personality traits and figure out how to get the objects of our desire.
Then, in middle age, we are confronted with thoughts of death. According to this book, we should embrace this change of life, and rather than just searching for happiness, we should seek the inner peace that will make it possible to think of death as a goal, not as an ending.
Individuation can occur naturally or through psychoanalysis, but either way it is made possible by opening up to signs from our unconscious. First, we need to recognize that the ego and persona that make up our conscious selves are only part of our entire Self. In addition to the personality and roles that we are aware of, there are also complexes buried in our unconscious.
One complex is the shadow, our "bad" side, which we tend to project onto others of the same sex. "I can't stand that guy (because he does everything I secretly would like to do)." Another complex is our female side (for men) or male side (for women). We need to fecundate our contrasexual nature.
We cannot become aware of our unconscious simply by making a conscious effort to do so. Rather, we need to tap into our creativity and become open to the archtypes that are all around us in the form of symbols, myths, religion, literature and pretty much anything that seems mysterious and spiritual (non-rational). Our unconscious is also revealed in our dreams.
Some specific archtypes to become aware of are: mandalas (symbols of unity), hero myths in which a person struggles and is swallowed up but then is "born again." Jung was fascinated with alchemy, which tried to figure out how to turn lead into gold. He probably would have enjoyed the current popularity of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
Everything in our personal unconscious can theoretically be made conscious, but we only have access to some of what is in the collective unconscious (which may be local, national or for all of humanity).
The search for wholeness and becoming centered involves embracing something irrational and spiritual: a religious attitude or search for a god-image. But I thought it was interesting to learn all of the things Jung rejected. He thought meditation was withdrawing into fear-ridden passivity. Jung did not believe that Westerners should seek enlightenment through Eastern means, such as Zen Buddhism or yoga. Rather, we should embrace our own cultural archtypes, such as the story of Jonah and the Whale.
He did believe in the concept of grace. When our conscience makes us feel guilty, we need to listen for the vox dei. On the other hand, the conventional mores that comprise society's moral code may well conflict with our personal conscience, and we need to figure out how to follow the "right" conscience and reject the "fake" one. The inner man calls you to your vocation, and you must accept your fate, lest you be plagued by constant, indefinable anxiety (according to the woman who wrote this book).
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. Jung thought good and evil were part of the same whole. Evil ever dwells within us; and we should bear this knowledge instead of erecting a facade against evil. Inner peace is gained by becoming whole, and we should not seek perfection.
We need to develop a weltanschauung: a philosophy of life. To me, the concept seems very similar to Taoism, which is about finding the "Way." I guess the good news is that in order to individuate, I don't have to actually "do" any thing. If I have an open mind, I can constellate archtypal signs as I embrace both my good side and my evil side.
On the other hand, confronting and embracing all of our complexes is supposed to involve suffering as well as happiness and is not the same as just doing nothing and being unaware of our unconscious. "Anyone who takes the safe road is as good as dead."
All of this makes me want to listen to My Hero, by the Foo Fighters -- seems like an appropriate place to look for inspiration regarding the above.
Then, in middle age, we are confronted with thoughts of death. According to this book, we should embrace this change of life, and rather than just searching for happiness, we should seek the inner peace that will make it possible to think of death as a goal, not as an ending.
Individuation can occur naturally or through psychoanalysis, but either way it is made possible by opening up to signs from our unconscious. First, we need to recognize that the ego and persona that make up our conscious selves are only part of our entire Self. In addition to the personality and roles that we are aware of, there are also complexes buried in our unconscious.
One complex is the shadow, our "bad" side, which we tend to project onto others of the same sex. "I can't stand that guy (because he does everything I secretly would like to do)." Another complex is our female side (for men) or male side (for women). We need to fecundate our contrasexual nature.
We cannot become aware of our unconscious simply by making a conscious effort to do so. Rather, we need to tap into our creativity and become open to the archtypes that are all around us in the form of symbols, myths, religion, literature and pretty much anything that seems mysterious and spiritual (non-rational). Our unconscious is also revealed in our dreams.
Some specific archtypes to become aware of are: mandalas (symbols of unity), hero myths in which a person struggles and is swallowed up but then is "born again." Jung was fascinated with alchemy, which tried to figure out how to turn lead into gold. He probably would have enjoyed the current popularity of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
Everything in our personal unconscious can theoretically be made conscious, but we only have access to some of what is in the collective unconscious (which may be local, national or for all of humanity).
The search for wholeness and becoming centered involves embracing something irrational and spiritual: a religious attitude or search for a god-image. But I thought it was interesting to learn all of the things Jung rejected. He thought meditation was withdrawing into fear-ridden passivity. Jung did not believe that Westerners should seek enlightenment through Eastern means, such as Zen Buddhism or yoga. Rather, we should embrace our own cultural archtypes, such as the story of Jonah and the Whale.
He did believe in the concept of grace. When our conscience makes us feel guilty, we need to listen for the vox dei. On the other hand, the conventional mores that comprise society's moral code may well conflict with our personal conscience, and we need to figure out how to follow the "right" conscience and reject the "fake" one. The inner man calls you to your vocation, and you must accept your fate, lest you be plagued by constant, indefinable anxiety (according to the woman who wrote this book).
Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. Jung thought good and evil were part of the same whole. Evil ever dwells within us; and we should bear this knowledge instead of erecting a facade against evil. Inner peace is gained by becoming whole, and we should not seek perfection.
We need to develop a weltanschauung: a philosophy of life. To me, the concept seems very similar to Taoism, which is about finding the "Way." I guess the good news is that in order to individuate, I don't have to actually "do" any thing. If I have an open mind, I can constellate archtypal signs as I embrace both my good side and my evil side.
On the other hand, confronting and embracing all of our complexes is supposed to involve suffering as well as happiness and is not the same as just doing nothing and being unaware of our unconscious. "Anyone who takes the safe road is as good as dead."
All of this makes me want to listen to My Hero, by the Foo Fighters -- seems like an appropriate place to look for inspiration regarding the above.
June 28, 2010
Amazing book. Helped me sort out some mental dilemmas without resorting to corrupt institutions. I especially like the diagnosis of modern man's neurosis being a result of spiritually vacuous materialism spawning from fear of death, lack of meaning, and outdated religious doctrine. The metaphors are all around, all pointing in the same direction, and all unique. Each path, ultimately, must be taken alone.
August 21, 2016
Much of my writings are based on the notion of Jung's Individuation process or personal growth. Our home is filled with literature on Jung by authors such as June Singer, Daryl Sharp, James Hollis and others. Jacobi stands out for her clarity of writing. As relevant today as ever.
June 28, 2026
A beautiful splendid wonderful little book.
Essentially a compiled collection of Jung's thoughts on Individuation through the perspective of one of his best students. Lots of very interesting pieces with wonderful analysis, insight, and commentary. Really just a really great reading experience. I would buy the physical book outright if it wasn't so expensive. Especially in the final third of the book, I was getting blown away. I'm probably not going to have enough space allotted to fit all my notes as they were plentiful, but man. This was a great book. It has left me feeling somewhat warm and happy.
"The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in
our working at it incessantly."
I went into this book simply seeking for more clarification and reading material on Jung's concept of Individuation and left with much more than I could have expected. Highly recommend to anyone.
Notes:
"Conscience may indeed demand that the individual follow his inner voice even at the risk of going astray. If he refuses to obey it, and, for fear of taking the wrong road, adapts to the generally accepted, traditional morality, he will nevertheless feel uneasy because he has been untrue to his real nature. His adaptation will be forced and his "ethical" conscience will continue to plague him until "a creative solution emerges which ... is in accord with the deepest foundations of the personality as well as with its wholeness; it embraces conscious and unconscious and therefore transcends the ego" by producing a "third standpoint" that bridges the opposites 24 It goes without saying that confusion and error cannot be avoided. Yet this must be accepted by anyone who has submitted himself to the pains of the individuation process. For it is not only a "road of endless compromises", the "middle road", but also a quest, a thorny path strewn with mistakes and wrong deeds that also have to be experienced. They too have their function; they help us to insights that broaden and deepen the field of consciousness, and we know that they are the precondition of any further development.
Thus conscience becomes a monitor urging us to a confrontation with the world within and without, the examiner of the genuineness of our deeds and behaviour, the messenger between the "voice of God" and our consciousness. People who declare they have no conscience because they never hear its call are as good as dead, for their psychic life is extinct.
Experience shows that the achievement demanded by the analytically assisted individuation process—the resolute courage to face and endure one's own darkness—is forthcoming only in exceptional cases. The price that has to be paid seems too high for most people. For this reason they remain stuck in a more or less unconscious state and live without reflecting in the mist of participation mystique with the surrounding world. "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? ... It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths . . . Vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape . . . Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called." 25 "What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?" Jung asks. 26 "Unless one accepts one's fate . . . there is no individuation; one remains a mere accident, a mortal nothing." 27 That is why those people who have been most deeply affected by the problems and images of the psychic background cannot but feel, looking back on their lives, that their path of development could not have been otherwise.
Not following one's destiny, or trying to avoid one's fate, is a frequent cause of numerous psychic difficulties. It may even be that the steady increase in the number of neurotics today is due to the fact that more and more individuals are called upon by fate to work for their psychic wholeness, but that fewer and fewer of them are ready to do so. Any obstruction of the natural process of development, any avoidance of the law of life, or getting stuck on a level unsuited to one's age, takes its revenge, if not immediately, then later at the onset of the second half of life, in the form of serious crises, nervous breakdowns, and all manner of physical and psychic sufferings. Mostly they are accompanied by vague feelings of guilt, by tormenting pangs of conscience, often not understood, in face of which the individual is helpless. He knows he is not guilty of any bad deed, he has not given way to any illicit impulse, and yet he is plagued by uncertainty, discontent, despair, and above all by anxiety— a constant, indefinable anxiety. And in truth he must usually be pronounced "guilty". His guilt does not lie in the fact that he has a neurosis, but in the fact that, knowing he has one, he does nothing to set about curing it."
...
"Human imperfection, which clings to every one of us since the expulsion from Paradise, from that unconscious containment in and oneness with God, can presumably be sloughed off only through an act of divine grace."
...
"Jung mournfully admits: "The individual may strive after perfection . . . but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness." 6 This suffering can be a powerful spur to his further striving and hold him to the road of his inner development. One must agree with Jung when he says: "There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent." 6 "When one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one's own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them. There is no guarantee—not for a single moment—that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a safe road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer—at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the safe road is as good as dead."
...
"For each of us would like to live only in a straight line, to have only one meaning, and not to be torn between our own inner contradictions. The fact that these cannot always be overcome, that not all of them can be cancelled out or neutralized, is a lesson which we learn in the course of life only through a long chain of experiences. But this exempts us neither from having to endure them nor from seeking to reconcile them. To be "whole" means, at the same time: to be full of contradictions. We falsify man when we try to sketch a homogeneous picture of him. The picture is true to life only when it is ambiguous and paradoxical. That is why it is so difficult to give an adequate description of him and of his psyche, and to relate oneself to his wholeness. One of the most valuable insights and conclusions conveyed by the individuation process is that paradox is an essential feature of human existence and of the psyche, and that one must learn to accept it and live with it."
..
As mentioned I have a lot of notes and it will take me quite a while to compile them here, so I will leave such a task up to myself in 3 days once I have some time in between working hours.
# FURTHER NOTES
As Schopenhauer says: "The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary; without the commentary we are unable to understand aright the true sense and coherence of the text, together with the moral it contains."
No one can become a medicine man or the wise man of the tribe without going through a hard lifelong discipline, that no saint is spared wrestling with his inner demons, and that no great artist ever accomplished his work without toil and sweat. In view of these high demands it is not surprising that the majority of men follow the line of least resistance and confine themselves to the fulfilment of biological and material needs, and for the rest are intent on gaining the greatest possible number of pleasurable experiences. Most people look unremittingly for "happiness", and it never occurs to them that happiness is not the goal of life set them by the Creator. The true goal is a task that continues right up to life's evening, namely, the most complete and comprehensive development of the personality. It is this which gives life an incomparable value that can never be lost: inner peace, and therewith the highest form of "happiness".
Jung is not of the opinion, however, that alien cults and forms of religion should be taken over unheedingly by Western man. For example, he is against Europeans' practising yoga or indulging in other "mysteries" designed for totally alien psychic structures. They do not correspond to the European's state of consciousness and consequently lead him not to individuation but only into error.
Wait, persevere until a tolerable solution suddenly presents itself, as if it were a third possibility that does justice to both sides.
At bottom one never knows in advance whether one has done the "right" thing. One must therefore be prepared to accept responsibility for everything one does, even if it should later turn out that the "right" thing was the wrong one.
"To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it. And as a matter of fact, it is in many cases a question of the self-same infantile greediness, the same fear, the same defiance and wilfulness, in the one as in the other."
What now? What's all this leading to?
"Seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal."
"Being essentially the instrument of his work, he is subordinate to it, and we have no right to expect him to interpret it for us. He has done his utmost by giving it form." "How can we doubt that it is his art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable results of his being an artist, a man upon whom a heavier burden is laid than upon ordinary mortals. A special ability demands a greater expenditure of energy, which must necessarily leave a deficit on some other side of life." "Great gifts are the fairest, and often the most dangerous, fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang on the weakest branches, which easily break." (On the artist)
The longing to idealize the artist as an ordinary person too, to identify him with its "heroes", is deeply ingrained in the public... the real artist is outside all such categories. Geniuses are "monads", unique and unrepeatable phenomena, and every yardstick that is applied to them can easily become questionable.
"True productivity is a spring that can never be stopped up. Is there any trickery on earth which could have prevented Mozart or Beethoven from creating? Creative power is mightier than its possessor. If it is not so, then it is a feeble thing, and given favourable conditions will nourish an endearing talent, but no more . . . No breaking down of repressions can ever destroy true creativeness." Even when an artist had to go through a severe psychic crisis—like Goya, Klee, or van Gogh—the urge to create never let up.
The course of the first half of life has its own form and follows its own laws, which one could describe as an "initiation into adulthood" or an "initiation into outer reality".
Those who become schizophrenics, one might say, are people whose ego is too weak and whose psychic background is too explosive, so that its contents cannot be worked through by the ego.
Like neurosis, psychosis too in its inner course is a process of individuation, but one that is not associated with consciousness and runs on like an ouroboros in the unconscious.
We may, for instance, be reading a book word for word and suddenly notice that we are occupied with quite irrelevant thoughts and no longer remember what we have read.
Besides the "personal shadow" there is in Jung's view also a "collective shadow" in which the general evil is contained (as in the figure of Mephistopheles, for instance). It gives expression not to the contents belonging to the personal life-history of the individual but to everything negative, everything that opposes the spirit of the time, and represented in the Christian Middle Ages, for instance, by witches and sorcerers. Even today, the qualities of the collective shadow are imputed either to capitalism or to communism, according to one's political beliefs.
Nobody likes to admit his own darkness, for which reason most people put up—even in analytical work—the greatest resistance to the realization of their shadow. As Ulrich Zwingli long ago remarked very aptly: "Like an octopus hiding behind its black juice to avoid seizure, a man, so soon as he observes we will be at him, suddenly envelops himself in such a dense hypocritical fog that the sharpest eye cannot perceive him . . . His impudence in lying, his readiness to deny and disown, is so great that, when you think you have laid hold of him, he has already slipped out by the back door."
For example an alcoholic, in order to be cured, must not only be conscious of his tendency or compulsion to drink—which many of them deny—but must also discover the deeper reasons that have induced his craving. These reasons are always shadow qualities which he cannot accept, which he flees from in order to rid himself of the pangs of conscience their recognition would entail.
We find ourselves confronted with the figures of anima and animus either in the outer world (when they are projected on persons) or in dreams and fantasies. In this respect they behave just like the shadow. In addition, they are embodied in mythology and art, in legend and fairytale, by figures known to everyone, and their manifestations include every conceivable quality of man and woman, from the lowest to the highest.
In the first half of life it is natural and logical that these intrapsychic figures should appear in projection, and that we are thus attracted to the men and women who are their carriers, and fall in love with them. The projection produces a mutual attraction, it is the "trap" that embroils us with the other sex and so ensures the continuation of the species.
Conversely, it is the task of the second half of life to withdraw the projections. It belongs to the second phase of the individuation process, when a man must learn to stand by himself, to discover the contrasexual element in himself and to fecundate it, thus rounding out his personality without impairing his faculty for relationship as such.
If the "bodily child" is born of the first form of relationship, the fruit of the second is the "spiritual child". That is why we can observe that creative, spiritually productive people are often congenitally endowed with a relatively large share of contrasexual features, that they are "hermaphroditic" by psychic constitution, so to speak, and, as a result, not infrequently exhibit "narcissistic" tendencies.
Once they are made conscious and are no longer projected, but are experienced as belonging to oneself, as realities and agencies within the psyche, anima and animus become symbols of its power to procreate and to give birth: everything new and creative owes its existence to them. They are the fount from which all artistic productivity flows.
For once a man has reached a certain state of maturity through the individuation process it becomes possible for him to see his apparently insurmountable personal problems in the light of objective problems common to all humanity, and this not infrequently robs them of their urgency and their sting. "What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotion, now looks like a storm in the valley seen from the mountain top. This does not mean that the storm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it one is above it." One is no longer directly affected by it, having gained the necessary detachment.
The confrontation with the shadow and its integration must always be achieved first in the individuation process in order to strengthen the ego for further laps in the journey and for the crucial encounter with the Self. That is why the shadow qualities must first be made conscious, even at the risk of neglecting other aspects and other figures presented by the psychic material. We find the same thing in myths and fairytales, where the hero always needs a friend, his own shadow side, as a companion in order to overcome the dangers of his quest.
Psychology can make no statements about the nature of God. On the other hand, it can very well observe and describe the phenomenology of his "reflection" in the human psyche, and explore it scientifically.
"In physics we can do without a God-image, but in psychology it is a definite fact that has got to be reckoned with, just as we have to reckon with 'affect', 'instinct', 'mother', etc. It is the fault of the everlasting contamination of object and image that people can make no conceptual distinction between 'God' and 'God-image', and therefore think that when one speaks of the 'God-image' one is speaking of God and offering 'theological' explanations. It is not for psychology, as a science, to demand an hypostatization of the God-image. But, the facts being what they are, it does have to reckon with the existence of a God-image." "The idea of God is an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing whatever to do with the question of God's existence. The human intellect can never answer this question, still less give any proof of God. Moreover such proof is superfluous, for the idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype." "'God' is a primordial experience of man, and from the remotest times humanity has taken inconceivable pains either to portray this baffling experience, to assimilate it by means of interpretation, speculation, and dogma, or else to deny it. And again and again it has happened, and still happens, that one hears too much about the 'good' God and knows him too well, so that one confuses him with one's own ideas and regards them as sacred because they can be traced back a couple of thousand years. This is a superstition and an idolatry every bit as bad as the Bolshevist delusion that 'God' can be educated out of existence."
CONTINUED PART 2
Essentially a compiled collection of Jung's thoughts on Individuation through the perspective of one of his best students. Lots of very interesting pieces with wonderful analysis, insight, and commentary. Really just a really great reading experience. I would buy the physical book outright if it wasn't so expensive. Especially in the final third of the book, I was getting blown away. I'm probably not going to have enough space allotted to fit all my notes as they were plentiful, but man. This was a great book. It has left me feeling somewhat warm and happy.
"The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in
our working at it incessantly."
I went into this book simply seeking for more clarification and reading material on Jung's concept of Individuation and left with much more than I could have expected. Highly recommend to anyone.
Notes:
"Conscience may indeed demand that the individual follow his inner voice even at the risk of going astray. If he refuses to obey it, and, for fear of taking the wrong road, adapts to the generally accepted, traditional morality, he will nevertheless feel uneasy because he has been untrue to his real nature. His adaptation will be forced and his "ethical" conscience will continue to plague him until "a creative solution emerges which ... is in accord with the deepest foundations of the personality as well as with its wholeness; it embraces conscious and unconscious and therefore transcends the ego" by producing a "third standpoint" that bridges the opposites 24 It goes without saying that confusion and error cannot be avoided. Yet this must be accepted by anyone who has submitted himself to the pains of the individuation process. For it is not only a "road of endless compromises", the "middle road", but also a quest, a thorny path strewn with mistakes and wrong deeds that also have to be experienced. They too have their function; they help us to insights that broaden and deepen the field of consciousness, and we know that they are the precondition of any further development.
Thus conscience becomes a monitor urging us to a confrontation with the world within and without, the examiner of the genuineness of our deeds and behaviour, the messenger between the "voice of God" and our consciousness. People who declare they have no conscience because they never hear its call are as good as dead, for their psychic life is extinct.
Experience shows that the achievement demanded by the analytically assisted individuation process—the resolute courage to face and endure one's own darkness—is forthcoming only in exceptional cases. The price that has to be paid seems too high for most people. For this reason they remain stuck in a more or less unconscious state and live without reflecting in the mist of participation mystique with the surrounding world. "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? ... It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths . . . Vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape . . . Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called." 25 "What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?" Jung asks. 26 "Unless one accepts one's fate . . . there is no individuation; one remains a mere accident, a mortal nothing." 27 That is why those people who have been most deeply affected by the problems and images of the psychic background cannot but feel, looking back on their lives, that their path of development could not have been otherwise.
Not following one's destiny, or trying to avoid one's fate, is a frequent cause of numerous psychic difficulties. It may even be that the steady increase in the number of neurotics today is due to the fact that more and more individuals are called upon by fate to work for their psychic wholeness, but that fewer and fewer of them are ready to do so. Any obstruction of the natural process of development, any avoidance of the law of life, or getting stuck on a level unsuited to one's age, takes its revenge, if not immediately, then later at the onset of the second half of life, in the form of serious crises, nervous breakdowns, and all manner of physical and psychic sufferings. Mostly they are accompanied by vague feelings of guilt, by tormenting pangs of conscience, often not understood, in face of which the individual is helpless. He knows he is not guilty of any bad deed, he has not given way to any illicit impulse, and yet he is plagued by uncertainty, discontent, despair, and above all by anxiety— a constant, indefinable anxiety. And in truth he must usually be pronounced "guilty". His guilt does not lie in the fact that he has a neurosis, but in the fact that, knowing he has one, he does nothing to set about curing it."
...
"Human imperfection, which clings to every one of us since the expulsion from Paradise, from that unconscious containment in and oneness with God, can presumably be sloughed off only through an act of divine grace."
...
"Jung mournfully admits: "The individual may strive after perfection . . . but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness." 6 This suffering can be a powerful spur to his further striving and hold him to the road of his inner development. One must agree with Jung when he says: "There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent." 6 "When one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one's own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them. There is no guarantee—not for a single moment—that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a safe road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer—at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the safe road is as good as dead."
...
"For each of us would like to live only in a straight line, to have only one meaning, and not to be torn between our own inner contradictions. The fact that these cannot always be overcome, that not all of them can be cancelled out or neutralized, is a lesson which we learn in the course of life only through a long chain of experiences. But this exempts us neither from having to endure them nor from seeking to reconcile them. To be "whole" means, at the same time: to be full of contradictions. We falsify man when we try to sketch a homogeneous picture of him. The picture is true to life only when it is ambiguous and paradoxical. That is why it is so difficult to give an adequate description of him and of his psyche, and to relate oneself to his wholeness. One of the most valuable insights and conclusions conveyed by the individuation process is that paradox is an essential feature of human existence and of the psyche, and that one must learn to accept it and live with it."
..
As mentioned I have a lot of notes and it will take me quite a while to compile them here, so I will leave such a task up to myself in 3 days once I have some time in between working hours.
# FURTHER NOTES
As Schopenhauer says: "The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary; without the commentary we are unable to understand aright the true sense and coherence of the text, together with the moral it contains."
No one can become a medicine man or the wise man of the tribe without going through a hard lifelong discipline, that no saint is spared wrestling with his inner demons, and that no great artist ever accomplished his work without toil and sweat. In view of these high demands it is not surprising that the majority of men follow the line of least resistance and confine themselves to the fulfilment of biological and material needs, and for the rest are intent on gaining the greatest possible number of pleasurable experiences. Most people look unremittingly for "happiness", and it never occurs to them that happiness is not the goal of life set them by the Creator. The true goal is a task that continues right up to life's evening, namely, the most complete and comprehensive development of the personality. It is this which gives life an incomparable value that can never be lost: inner peace, and therewith the highest form of "happiness".
Jung is not of the opinion, however, that alien cults and forms of religion should be taken over unheedingly by Western man. For example, he is against Europeans' practising yoga or indulging in other "mysteries" designed for totally alien psychic structures. They do not correspond to the European's state of consciousness and consequently lead him not to individuation but only into error.
Wait, persevere until a tolerable solution suddenly presents itself, as if it were a third possibility that does justice to both sides.
At bottom one never knows in advance whether one has done the "right" thing. One must therefore be prepared to accept responsibility for everything one does, even if it should later turn out that the "right" thing was the wrong one.
"To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it. And as a matter of fact, it is in many cases a question of the self-same infantile greediness, the same fear, the same defiance and wilfulness, in the one as in the other."
What now? What's all this leading to?
"Seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal."
"Being essentially the instrument of his work, he is subordinate to it, and we have no right to expect him to interpret it for us. He has done his utmost by giving it form." "How can we doubt that it is his art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable results of his being an artist, a man upon whom a heavier burden is laid than upon ordinary mortals. A special ability demands a greater expenditure of energy, which must necessarily leave a deficit on some other side of life." "Great gifts are the fairest, and often the most dangerous, fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang on the weakest branches, which easily break." (On the artist)
The longing to idealize the artist as an ordinary person too, to identify him with its "heroes", is deeply ingrained in the public... the real artist is outside all such categories. Geniuses are "monads", unique and unrepeatable phenomena, and every yardstick that is applied to them can easily become questionable.
"True productivity is a spring that can never be stopped up. Is there any trickery on earth which could have prevented Mozart or Beethoven from creating? Creative power is mightier than its possessor. If it is not so, then it is a feeble thing, and given favourable conditions will nourish an endearing talent, but no more . . . No breaking down of repressions can ever destroy true creativeness." Even when an artist had to go through a severe psychic crisis—like Goya, Klee, or van Gogh—the urge to create never let up.
The course of the first half of life has its own form and follows its own laws, which one could describe as an "initiation into adulthood" or an "initiation into outer reality".
Those who become schizophrenics, one might say, are people whose ego is too weak and whose psychic background is too explosive, so that its contents cannot be worked through by the ego.
Like neurosis, psychosis too in its inner course is a process of individuation, but one that is not associated with consciousness and runs on like an ouroboros in the unconscious.
We may, for instance, be reading a book word for word and suddenly notice that we are occupied with quite irrelevant thoughts and no longer remember what we have read.
Besides the "personal shadow" there is in Jung's view also a "collective shadow" in which the general evil is contained (as in the figure of Mephistopheles, for instance). It gives expression not to the contents belonging to the personal life-history of the individual but to everything negative, everything that opposes the spirit of the time, and represented in the Christian Middle Ages, for instance, by witches and sorcerers. Even today, the qualities of the collective shadow are imputed either to capitalism or to communism, according to one's political beliefs.
Nobody likes to admit his own darkness, for which reason most people put up—even in analytical work—the greatest resistance to the realization of their shadow. As Ulrich Zwingli long ago remarked very aptly: "Like an octopus hiding behind its black juice to avoid seizure, a man, so soon as he observes we will be at him, suddenly envelops himself in such a dense hypocritical fog that the sharpest eye cannot perceive him . . . His impudence in lying, his readiness to deny and disown, is so great that, when you think you have laid hold of him, he has already slipped out by the back door."
For example an alcoholic, in order to be cured, must not only be conscious of his tendency or compulsion to drink—which many of them deny—but must also discover the deeper reasons that have induced his craving. These reasons are always shadow qualities which he cannot accept, which he flees from in order to rid himself of the pangs of conscience their recognition would entail.
We find ourselves confronted with the figures of anima and animus either in the outer world (when they are projected on persons) or in dreams and fantasies. In this respect they behave just like the shadow. In addition, they are embodied in mythology and art, in legend and fairytale, by figures known to everyone, and their manifestations include every conceivable quality of man and woman, from the lowest to the highest.
In the first half of life it is natural and logical that these intrapsychic figures should appear in projection, and that we are thus attracted to the men and women who are their carriers, and fall in love with them. The projection produces a mutual attraction, it is the "trap" that embroils us with the other sex and so ensures the continuation of the species.
Conversely, it is the task of the second half of life to withdraw the projections. It belongs to the second phase of the individuation process, when a man must learn to stand by himself, to discover the contrasexual element in himself and to fecundate it, thus rounding out his personality without impairing his faculty for relationship as such.
If the "bodily child" is born of the first form of relationship, the fruit of the second is the "spiritual child". That is why we can observe that creative, spiritually productive people are often congenitally endowed with a relatively large share of contrasexual features, that they are "hermaphroditic" by psychic constitution, so to speak, and, as a result, not infrequently exhibit "narcissistic" tendencies.
Once they are made conscious and are no longer projected, but are experienced as belonging to oneself, as realities and agencies within the psyche, anima and animus become symbols of its power to procreate and to give birth: everything new and creative owes its existence to them. They are the fount from which all artistic productivity flows.
For once a man has reached a certain state of maturity through the individuation process it becomes possible for him to see his apparently insurmountable personal problems in the light of objective problems common to all humanity, and this not infrequently robs them of their urgency and their sting. "What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotion, now looks like a storm in the valley seen from the mountain top. This does not mean that the storm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it one is above it." One is no longer directly affected by it, having gained the necessary detachment.
The confrontation with the shadow and its integration must always be achieved first in the individuation process in order to strengthen the ego for further laps in the journey and for the crucial encounter with the Self. That is why the shadow qualities must first be made conscious, even at the risk of neglecting other aspects and other figures presented by the psychic material. We find the same thing in myths and fairytales, where the hero always needs a friend, his own shadow side, as a companion in order to overcome the dangers of his quest.
Psychology can make no statements about the nature of God. On the other hand, it can very well observe and describe the phenomenology of his "reflection" in the human psyche, and explore it scientifically.
"In physics we can do without a God-image, but in psychology it is a definite fact that has got to be reckoned with, just as we have to reckon with 'affect', 'instinct', 'mother', etc. It is the fault of the everlasting contamination of object and image that people can make no conceptual distinction between 'God' and 'God-image', and therefore think that when one speaks of the 'God-image' one is speaking of God and offering 'theological' explanations. It is not for psychology, as a science, to demand an hypostatization of the God-image. But, the facts being what they are, it does have to reckon with the existence of a God-image." "The idea of God is an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing whatever to do with the question of God's existence. The human intellect can never answer this question, still less give any proof of God. Moreover such proof is superfluous, for the idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype." "'God' is a primordial experience of man, and from the remotest times humanity has taken inconceivable pains either to portray this baffling experience, to assimilate it by means of interpretation, speculation, and dogma, or else to deny it. And again and again it has happened, and still happens, that one hears too much about the 'good' God and knows him too well, so that one confuses him with one's own ideas and regards them as sacred because they can be traced back a couple of thousand years. This is a superstition and an idolatry every bit as bad as the Bolshevist delusion that 'God' can be educated out of existence."
CONTINUED PART 2
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June 24, 2026CONTINUED NOTES PART 2
People do not listen to their inner voice, however; only a few are able to believe that something divine is contained in their soul. "Christian education has done all that is humanly possible, but it has not been enough. Too few have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls." "If the theologian really believes in the almighty power of God on the one hand and in the validity of dogma on the other, why then does he not trust God to speak in the soul? Why this fear of psychology? Or is, in complete contradiction to dogma, the soul itself a hell from which only demons gibber?" Although the Bible says "The kingdom of God is within you," most people seek it only outside.
Whether the divine essence, reflected and manifested in the living soul, continues to exist independently of the individual, timelessly and non-spatially, is again a question of belief and not a matter for scientific investigation.
It is one of the foremost tasks of the individuation process to raise the God images, that is their radiations and effects, to consciousness and thus establish a constant dynamic contact between the ego and the Self.
Wherever we may encounter God, we shall be able to apprehend him only with the help of our human, limited psychic structure, which is our "receiving apparatus". His real essence can, of course, never be grasped within the confines of the psyche, since it transcends them; at most it can be divined when we meet it in the images and symbols of the Self, or when it reveals itself to faith. Always the plenitude of the divine radiance has to pass through the filter of our human nature and reaches us obscured and refracted.
Truth and life can be grasped only in similitudes, and the twofold task of man is to "perceive the unearthly in the earthly, to give it earthly form in work, word . . . and deed; this is the essence of the true symbol."
This reflection, this image indwelling in the human heart from time immemorial, expresses that virtual centre in the psyche which possesses the greatest charge of energy. Every content that is anywhere near this supercharged centre receives from it a numinous power, as though "possessed" by it. Again and again man has experienced that from this centre he could sense God's workings in his psyche at their most overwhelming, that "the voice of transcendence resounds through it". And as often as he put another content in his centre in place of God—whether it were a beloved partner, money, nation, party, or any other "ism"—and made it a surrogate for God, he became its victim to his own destruction.
A man "possessed" is always a religious person in the negative sense, so to speak.
Summing up what people have to say about their experience of wholeness, Jung puts it like this: "They came to themselves, they could accept themselves, they were able to become reconciled to themselves, and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events. This is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: He has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God."
The right relation between ego and Self conveys something of this attitude of humility. For through the Self there speaks an authority which, as God's representative, has the character of fate. That is why the union of the ego with the Self is indistinguishable from a unio mystica with God, and is a shattering and profoundly religious experience.
An encounter with the Self is ecstatic because it gives man the experience of a trans-subjective reality that bursts the bounds of his ego. But therein lies its danger. The union of the ego with a suprapersonal, numinous power like the archetype of the Self means an expansion of personality which, if the ego does not immediately return to its place, leads to inflation, to a loss of the ego, and in the worst case to a psychosis.
The Faustian hybris is already the first step towards madness. To linger in a unio mystica, as it were "egoless", is the supreme goal of Buddhist meditation, equivalent to "entering into nirvana", but, because it means the loss of an ever-renewed dialectical discussion between the ego and Self, it does not, according to Jung, correspond to the way of individuation for Western man.
Writing, painting, sculpting, modelling, dancing, etc.—help to activate the psychic depths, to maintain the vital contact between conscious and unconscious contents, and to express the emerging symbols in plastic form.
"Everything good is costly," says Jung, "and the development of personality is one of the most costly of all things. It is a matter of saying yea to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one's eyes in all its dubious aspects—truly a task that taxes us to the utmost." Patience is its main postulate, for one must learn to "let things happen in the psyche" without the continual interference and correction of consciousness.
From the remotest times man has tried to express it in the imagery of myths and fairytales, in rituals and works of art, to capture the archetypal events in forms that are valid for all men.
Many hero-myths, for instance, are a paradigm not only of the way of individuation of a single individual, but also of the evolution of consciousness in the course of history.
Every rebirth is preceded by a death.
"Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind."
Most of the creation-myths, too, when looked at psychologically, can be understood as symbolical representations of the original coming of consciousness, as its birth, so to speak, which happens for the first time in the psyche of the newborn child. When, for instance, in the Babylonian creation-myth, to name but one of many, the hero Marduk, who stands for the sun, kills and dismembers with his sword, symbolizing the sun's rays, the dragon Tiamat, the embodiment of chaos and the primal darkness, and the world arises from the parts of its body, this is an analogy of the creation of the world and the coming of consciousness. The sword of light is plunged into the darkness of unconsciousness, the darkness is dispelled, and objects take shape. They are "born", so to speak, they can now be seen, discriminated, and named, they are perceived and apprehended by consciousness. This creation of the world as the coming of consciousness is an event that is ceaselessly repeated in the life of man. Every time it happens a little bit of new territory, of new knowledge, a newly won insight, is added to the field of consciousness, which is "reborn" in more comprehensive form both in the natural and in the analytically assisted individuation process.
The creation of the world through the dismemberment of the maternal dragon is therefore the archetypal ground-pattern for the task of the first phase of individuation; being devoured by it, to emerge matured, transformed, and reunited with the Self, is the mark of the second.
They are secluded for months, sometimes for years, in some remote spot, where they are initiated by the medicine-man into the secrets of the tribe, into the world of the ancestor spirits, circumcised, instructed about sex and prepared for marriage... new clothes and often new names (archaic rites).
It can be said with some justification that every act of conscious realization is a plunging into the darkness of the underworld and a re-emergence from it, such as we experience every day in our sleep and dreams, and that the "night sea journey" therefore retains its validity for every kind of "rebirth", i.e., conscious realization, whether it belong to the first or to the second phase of individuation.
The action of the dream took place at first in the bay of a beautiful Baroque castle, in a high room with twelve corners, the walls and ceiling of which were covered with mirrors. The room was completely empty. The dreamer was lying fully dressed on the smooth parquet floor, which, like a trottoir roulant, revolved round a finely chased metal knob to which she held fast with her hands. Seeing herself reflected on all sides as well as from above threw her into the greatest confusion; distorted, chopped into pieces, she could hardly recognize herself. To begin with the floor moved quite slowly, then it got faster and faster until it spun round like mad and made her completely dizzy. Her clothes fell away from her, and she was seized with a terrible fear that she might not be able to hold on to the knob and would be flung by the centrifugal force of the movement into the wall mirrors, where she might be fatally wounded. In vain she tried to slow it down, in vain she tried to hang on. Helpless, naked, and terrified she finally crashed against the wall, which shattered into a thousand pieces and seemed to engulf her. Then the room and castle vanished. Still alive, but bleeding from a thousand wounds, the dreamer now lay out of doors, naked on her back, in a freshly ploughed field. All round was silence. A pallid February sun lit the scene, nearing the zenith. On her left side sat a man, the man she loved, dressed in a long white shirt, weeping. His tears wetted the shirt. With the wet patches he gently wiped the dreamer's wounds until they closed up, healed. Thankfully she looked up at him and up at the sky. Suddenly she felt the earth beginning to move beneath her, as though it were growing together with her back. At the same time she felt that the man was no longer at her side, but was stretched out on top of her, motionless and weighing a ton. The weight pressed her deeper and deeper down, but the earth seemed to go on thrusting and pushed her upwards. As it continued to push, the piled-up mounds of earth began to sprout. Grass shot up in the air, the field became a verdant meadow, and the dreamer became one with it. She herself was the earth, was blossoming nature. But the man who lay on top of her grew lighter and lighter as she grew together with the earth. Soon he seemed to have melted into air, he became the firmament arching above the meadow.
It may seem astonishing that the decision to be oneself should have to be equated with an "ethical act", for it should be the most obvious thing in the world to develop one's personality and stand by one's peculiarities. But that is by no means so. All too many people do not live their own lives, and generally they know next to nothing about their real nature. They make convulsive efforts to "adapt", not to stand out in any way, to do exactly what the opinions, rules, regulations, and habits of the environment demand as being "right". They are slaves of "what people think", "what people do", etc. That this leads to false attitudes and, if the discrepancy between their real nature and their sham nature becomes too great, to neuroses hardly needs stressing.
Schopenhauer rightly says: '. . . the sphere of what we are for other people is their consciousness, not ours; it is the kind of figure we make in their eyes, together with the thoughts which this arouses . . . people in the highest position in life, with all their brilliance, pomp, display, magnificence and general show, may well say: Our happiness lies entirely outside us, it exists only in the heads of others.'
Individuation cannot be anything other than a unique and individual development, and it is questionable whether it allows of the acceptance of any norm.
The fact, nevertheless, that conventions always flourish in some form proves that the overwhelming majority of men do not choose their own way but the way of convention, and develop something that is collectively valid at the cost of their own wholeness. This has its justification and also, no doubt, its good reasons. It is reserved only for the few to tread the thorny path of individuation, as envisaged by Jung, and to carry on the torch which—so we will hope—an increasing number of such individuals will follow.
Not only is the individual placed between the power of consciousness and that of his unconscious psyche, he is also a unique, unrepeatable being and at the same time a member of the collective and has to do justice to both. So far as an analytically assisted individuation process is concerned, no general rules can be laid down for dealing with this relationship. For on the one hand, it is said, man is a herd animal and reaches full health only as a social being, and on the other hand the very next case may invert this proposition and demonstrate that he is fully healthy only when he deviates from the norm and aims only at himself, that is, when he pursues his own individual way. For only as a "healthy" person can he live in accordance with his God-given task.
"Virtually everything depends on the human psyche and its functions. It should be worthy of all the attention we can give it, especially today, when everyone admits that the weal and woe of the future will be decided neither by the threat of wild animals, nor by natural catastrophes, nor by the danger of worldwide epidemics, but simply and solely by the psychic changes in man."
"We are all fascinated and overawed by statistical truths and large numbers and are daily apprised of the nullity and futility of the individual personality, since it is not represented and personified by any mass organization."
Naturally it seems—provisionally at least—not everyone's choice, but rather a quite special fate, and to require a special summons or an inescapable inner impulse in order to undertake an analytically assisted individuation and persevere with it.
Nevertheless the growing longing of man for a better understanding of himself and the world allows one to hope that he will one day manage to cope more effectively with all the evil and destructiveness that rise up out of the abysses of his soul.
Those who are not seized by this longing, but find safety and security in the masses, will never be ready to follow consciously the way of individuation, since to begin with it spells isolation for the individual. It is as though he were a mountain whose peak is the more isolated the higher it reaches; yet at its deeper levels it shares the same earth with all other mountains. How unpopular the individual way must be today, in an age of conformism, of fitting into the collective, and of psychotherapeutic endeavours for "interpersonal relationship", will be clear to everyone. Especially in our automated Western world, where there is less and less room for genuine feelings, man seeks all the more desperately for security and hopes to find it in the lap of the collective. He fears solitude, as it might force him to think about himself.
Even the person we think we know best is fundamentally a stranger to us, however much he may affirm that he feels completely understood.
"Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself."
"Companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify with others."
This holding one's own involves a series of unending but quite conscious compromises and decisions, because the inner and outer demands are often sharply opposed and throw the ego into conflicts which can be overcome only by "growing beyond" them.
Wholeness as the ultimate goal of man's development.
Again and again we can observe that as soon as an individual is threatened with the danger of isolation, there is a compensatory increase in the production of collective, archetypal symbols.
Nevertheless Jung's view differs from that of other schools in that it is grounded on the experience that the psyche, unless it is blocked by special circumstances, will spontaneously produce everything that is needed for the fulfilment of individual development. We know that in dreams, for instance, powerful archetypal images will appear when consciousness has become too onesided and run into a blind alley or "got stuck".
These images speak with the voice of nature that has always guided man. They have not been falsified by intellectual speculations or opinions, but are a source of age-old knowledge that is lacking in our impoverished present-day consciousness.
It is not an advantage, however, to have "big dreams" every night, for this is a sign that the psychic balance between the conscious and the unconscious realm is disturbed and that there is a danger of loss of relation to reality.
The ego is as it were "devoured" by the archetypal images, it identifies with them, can no longer distinguish itself from them. Then the individual fancies himself a religious or godlike figure, or a famous historical personality, or else something quite tiny—at all events a phenomenon deviating from normal human proportions.
The more he perceives his unconscious qualities, qualities which either appear personified in the material of his dreams and fantasies or manifest themselves in projection on definite persons, the greater is his chance of gaining self-knowledge and accepting these projections as part of himself, withdrawing them and thus extending the scope of his field of consciousness.
Jung goes so far as to say that, if the process comes to a standstill and gets stuck, the analyst must seek the cause of the disturbance first of all in his own state of mind, in his own attitude. He used to quote a story about a Chinese rainmaker, who at a time of great drought was called to a village to make rain. For this purpose he withdrew to a lonely little hut for three days, asking only for some bread and water. On the fourth day a heavy rain fell. When they asked in astonishment how he did it, he replied: "I withdrew into myself and put myself in order; and when I am in order the world around me must naturally come into order too, and then the drought must be followed by rain."
Moreover a very far-reaching consciousness can become a burden, and for this reason too it is feared and avoided. As the capacity for judgment grows in proportion to the scope of consciousness, it burdens a man with a growing sense of responsibility.
It is therefore understandable that the growth of consciousness is resisted almost automatically, by the very inertia of nature. An illustration of this is the Oriental fairytale of the blind king who promised his kingdom and his treasure to the man who could make him see. And in fact a wonder-working doctor came along and gave him his sight back. But a year later the king was already in deep despair. As he now possessed nothing but his beautiful daughter, his only child, he promised her to the man who could help to make him blind again.
CONTINUED IN PART 3
People do not listen to their inner voice, however; only a few are able to believe that something divine is contained in their soul. "Christian education has done all that is humanly possible, but it has not been enough. Too few have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls." "If the theologian really believes in the almighty power of God on the one hand and in the validity of dogma on the other, why then does he not trust God to speak in the soul? Why this fear of psychology? Or is, in complete contradiction to dogma, the soul itself a hell from which only demons gibber?" Although the Bible says "The kingdom of God is within you," most people seek it only outside.
Whether the divine essence, reflected and manifested in the living soul, continues to exist independently of the individual, timelessly and non-spatially, is again a question of belief and not a matter for scientific investigation.
It is one of the foremost tasks of the individuation process to raise the God images, that is their radiations and effects, to consciousness and thus establish a constant dynamic contact between the ego and the Self.
Wherever we may encounter God, we shall be able to apprehend him only with the help of our human, limited psychic structure, which is our "receiving apparatus". His real essence can, of course, never be grasped within the confines of the psyche, since it transcends them; at most it can be divined when we meet it in the images and symbols of the Self, or when it reveals itself to faith. Always the plenitude of the divine radiance has to pass through the filter of our human nature and reaches us obscured and refracted.
Truth and life can be grasped only in similitudes, and the twofold task of man is to "perceive the unearthly in the earthly, to give it earthly form in work, word . . . and deed; this is the essence of the true symbol."
This reflection, this image indwelling in the human heart from time immemorial, expresses that virtual centre in the psyche which possesses the greatest charge of energy. Every content that is anywhere near this supercharged centre receives from it a numinous power, as though "possessed" by it. Again and again man has experienced that from this centre he could sense God's workings in his psyche at their most overwhelming, that "the voice of transcendence resounds through it". And as often as he put another content in his centre in place of God—whether it were a beloved partner, money, nation, party, or any other "ism"—and made it a surrogate for God, he became its victim to his own destruction.
A man "possessed" is always a religious person in the negative sense, so to speak.
Summing up what people have to say about their experience of wholeness, Jung puts it like this: "They came to themselves, they could accept themselves, they were able to become reconciled to themselves, and thus were reconciled to adverse circumstances and events. This is almost like what used to be expressed by saying: He has made his peace with God, he has sacrificed his own will, he has submitted himself to the will of God."
The right relation between ego and Self conveys something of this attitude of humility. For through the Self there speaks an authority which, as God's representative, has the character of fate. That is why the union of the ego with the Self is indistinguishable from a unio mystica with God, and is a shattering and profoundly religious experience.
An encounter with the Self is ecstatic because it gives man the experience of a trans-subjective reality that bursts the bounds of his ego. But therein lies its danger. The union of the ego with a suprapersonal, numinous power like the archetype of the Self means an expansion of personality which, if the ego does not immediately return to its place, leads to inflation, to a loss of the ego, and in the worst case to a psychosis.
The Faustian hybris is already the first step towards madness. To linger in a unio mystica, as it were "egoless", is the supreme goal of Buddhist meditation, equivalent to "entering into nirvana", but, because it means the loss of an ever-renewed dialectical discussion between the ego and Self, it does not, according to Jung, correspond to the way of individuation for Western man.
Writing, painting, sculpting, modelling, dancing, etc.—help to activate the psychic depths, to maintain the vital contact between conscious and unconscious contents, and to express the emerging symbols in plastic form.
"Everything good is costly," says Jung, "and the development of personality is one of the most costly of all things. It is a matter of saying yea to oneself, of taking oneself as the most serious of tasks, of being conscious of everything one does, and keeping it constantly before one's eyes in all its dubious aspects—truly a task that taxes us to the utmost." Patience is its main postulate, for one must learn to "let things happen in the psyche" without the continual interference and correction of consciousness.
From the remotest times man has tried to express it in the imagery of myths and fairytales, in rituals and works of art, to capture the archetypal events in forms that are valid for all men.
Many hero-myths, for instance, are a paradigm not only of the way of individuation of a single individual, but also of the evolution of consciousness in the course of history.
Every rebirth is preceded by a death.
"Rebirth is an affirmation that must be counted among the primordial affirmations of mankind."
Most of the creation-myths, too, when looked at psychologically, can be understood as symbolical representations of the original coming of consciousness, as its birth, so to speak, which happens for the first time in the psyche of the newborn child. When, for instance, in the Babylonian creation-myth, to name but one of many, the hero Marduk, who stands for the sun, kills and dismembers with his sword, symbolizing the sun's rays, the dragon Tiamat, the embodiment of chaos and the primal darkness, and the world arises from the parts of its body, this is an analogy of the creation of the world and the coming of consciousness. The sword of light is plunged into the darkness of unconsciousness, the darkness is dispelled, and objects take shape. They are "born", so to speak, they can now be seen, discriminated, and named, they are perceived and apprehended by consciousness. This creation of the world as the coming of consciousness is an event that is ceaselessly repeated in the life of man. Every time it happens a little bit of new territory, of new knowledge, a newly won insight, is added to the field of consciousness, which is "reborn" in more comprehensive form both in the natural and in the analytically assisted individuation process.
The creation of the world through the dismemberment of the maternal dragon is therefore the archetypal ground-pattern for the task of the first phase of individuation; being devoured by it, to emerge matured, transformed, and reunited with the Self, is the mark of the second.
They are secluded for months, sometimes for years, in some remote spot, where they are initiated by the medicine-man into the secrets of the tribe, into the world of the ancestor spirits, circumcised, instructed about sex and prepared for marriage... new clothes and often new names (archaic rites).
It can be said with some justification that every act of conscious realization is a plunging into the darkness of the underworld and a re-emergence from it, such as we experience every day in our sleep and dreams, and that the "night sea journey" therefore retains its validity for every kind of "rebirth", i.e., conscious realization, whether it belong to the first or to the second phase of individuation.
The action of the dream took place at first in the bay of a beautiful Baroque castle, in a high room with twelve corners, the walls and ceiling of which were covered with mirrors. The room was completely empty. The dreamer was lying fully dressed on the smooth parquet floor, which, like a trottoir roulant, revolved round a finely chased metal knob to which she held fast with her hands. Seeing herself reflected on all sides as well as from above threw her into the greatest confusion; distorted, chopped into pieces, she could hardly recognize herself. To begin with the floor moved quite slowly, then it got faster and faster until it spun round like mad and made her completely dizzy. Her clothes fell away from her, and she was seized with a terrible fear that she might not be able to hold on to the knob and would be flung by the centrifugal force of the movement into the wall mirrors, where she might be fatally wounded. In vain she tried to slow it down, in vain she tried to hang on. Helpless, naked, and terrified she finally crashed against the wall, which shattered into a thousand pieces and seemed to engulf her. Then the room and castle vanished. Still alive, but bleeding from a thousand wounds, the dreamer now lay out of doors, naked on her back, in a freshly ploughed field. All round was silence. A pallid February sun lit the scene, nearing the zenith. On her left side sat a man, the man she loved, dressed in a long white shirt, weeping. His tears wetted the shirt. With the wet patches he gently wiped the dreamer's wounds until they closed up, healed. Thankfully she looked up at him and up at the sky. Suddenly she felt the earth beginning to move beneath her, as though it were growing together with her back. At the same time she felt that the man was no longer at her side, but was stretched out on top of her, motionless and weighing a ton. The weight pressed her deeper and deeper down, but the earth seemed to go on thrusting and pushed her upwards. As it continued to push, the piled-up mounds of earth began to sprout. Grass shot up in the air, the field became a verdant meadow, and the dreamer became one with it. She herself was the earth, was blossoming nature. But the man who lay on top of her grew lighter and lighter as she grew together with the earth. Soon he seemed to have melted into air, he became the firmament arching above the meadow.
It may seem astonishing that the decision to be oneself should have to be equated with an "ethical act", for it should be the most obvious thing in the world to develop one's personality and stand by one's peculiarities. But that is by no means so. All too many people do not live their own lives, and generally they know next to nothing about their real nature. They make convulsive efforts to "adapt", not to stand out in any way, to do exactly what the opinions, rules, regulations, and habits of the environment demand as being "right". They are slaves of "what people think", "what people do", etc. That this leads to false attitudes and, if the discrepancy between their real nature and their sham nature becomes too great, to neuroses hardly needs stressing.
Schopenhauer rightly says: '. . . the sphere of what we are for other people is their consciousness, not ours; it is the kind of figure we make in their eyes, together with the thoughts which this arouses . . . people in the highest position in life, with all their brilliance, pomp, display, magnificence and general show, may well say: Our happiness lies entirely outside us, it exists only in the heads of others.'
Individuation cannot be anything other than a unique and individual development, and it is questionable whether it allows of the acceptance of any norm.
The fact, nevertheless, that conventions always flourish in some form proves that the overwhelming majority of men do not choose their own way but the way of convention, and develop something that is collectively valid at the cost of their own wholeness. This has its justification and also, no doubt, its good reasons. It is reserved only for the few to tread the thorny path of individuation, as envisaged by Jung, and to carry on the torch which—so we will hope—an increasing number of such individuals will follow.
Not only is the individual placed between the power of consciousness and that of his unconscious psyche, he is also a unique, unrepeatable being and at the same time a member of the collective and has to do justice to both. So far as an analytically assisted individuation process is concerned, no general rules can be laid down for dealing with this relationship. For on the one hand, it is said, man is a herd animal and reaches full health only as a social being, and on the other hand the very next case may invert this proposition and demonstrate that he is fully healthy only when he deviates from the norm and aims only at himself, that is, when he pursues his own individual way. For only as a "healthy" person can he live in accordance with his God-given task.
"Virtually everything depends on the human psyche and its functions. It should be worthy of all the attention we can give it, especially today, when everyone admits that the weal and woe of the future will be decided neither by the threat of wild animals, nor by natural catastrophes, nor by the danger of worldwide epidemics, but simply and solely by the psychic changes in man."
"We are all fascinated and overawed by statistical truths and large numbers and are daily apprised of the nullity and futility of the individual personality, since it is not represented and personified by any mass organization."
Naturally it seems—provisionally at least—not everyone's choice, but rather a quite special fate, and to require a special summons or an inescapable inner impulse in order to undertake an analytically assisted individuation and persevere with it.
Nevertheless the growing longing of man for a better understanding of himself and the world allows one to hope that he will one day manage to cope more effectively with all the evil and destructiveness that rise up out of the abysses of his soul.
Those who are not seized by this longing, but find safety and security in the masses, will never be ready to follow consciously the way of individuation, since to begin with it spells isolation for the individual. It is as though he were a mountain whose peak is the more isolated the higher it reaches; yet at its deeper levels it shares the same earth with all other mountains. How unpopular the individual way must be today, in an age of conformism, of fitting into the collective, and of psychotherapeutic endeavours for "interpersonal relationship", will be clear to everyone. Especially in our automated Western world, where there is less and less room for genuine feelings, man seeks all the more desperately for security and hopes to find it in the lap of the collective. He fears solitude, as it might force him to think about himself.
Even the person we think we know best is fundamentally a stranger to us, however much he may affirm that he feels completely understood.
"Individuation does not shut one out from the world, but gathers the world to oneself."
"Companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify with others."
This holding one's own involves a series of unending but quite conscious compromises and decisions, because the inner and outer demands are often sharply opposed and throw the ego into conflicts which can be overcome only by "growing beyond" them.
Wholeness as the ultimate goal of man's development.
Again and again we can observe that as soon as an individual is threatened with the danger of isolation, there is a compensatory increase in the production of collective, archetypal symbols.
Nevertheless Jung's view differs from that of other schools in that it is grounded on the experience that the psyche, unless it is blocked by special circumstances, will spontaneously produce everything that is needed for the fulfilment of individual development. We know that in dreams, for instance, powerful archetypal images will appear when consciousness has become too onesided and run into a blind alley or "got stuck".
These images speak with the voice of nature that has always guided man. They have not been falsified by intellectual speculations or opinions, but are a source of age-old knowledge that is lacking in our impoverished present-day consciousness.
It is not an advantage, however, to have "big dreams" every night, for this is a sign that the psychic balance between the conscious and the unconscious realm is disturbed and that there is a danger of loss of relation to reality.
The ego is as it were "devoured" by the archetypal images, it identifies with them, can no longer distinguish itself from them. Then the individual fancies himself a religious or godlike figure, or a famous historical personality, or else something quite tiny—at all events a phenomenon deviating from normal human proportions.
The more he perceives his unconscious qualities, qualities which either appear personified in the material of his dreams and fantasies or manifest themselves in projection on definite persons, the greater is his chance of gaining self-knowledge and accepting these projections as part of himself, withdrawing them and thus extending the scope of his field of consciousness.
Jung goes so far as to say that, if the process comes to a standstill and gets stuck, the analyst must seek the cause of the disturbance first of all in his own state of mind, in his own attitude. He used to quote a story about a Chinese rainmaker, who at a time of great drought was called to a village to make rain. For this purpose he withdrew to a lonely little hut for three days, asking only for some bread and water. On the fourth day a heavy rain fell. When they asked in astonishment how he did it, he replied: "I withdrew into myself and put myself in order; and when I am in order the world around me must naturally come into order too, and then the drought must be followed by rain."
Moreover a very far-reaching consciousness can become a burden, and for this reason too it is feared and avoided. As the capacity for judgment grows in proportion to the scope of consciousness, it burdens a man with a growing sense of responsibility.
It is therefore understandable that the growth of consciousness is resisted almost automatically, by the very inertia of nature. An illustration of this is the Oriental fairytale of the blind king who promised his kingdom and his treasure to the man who could make him see. And in fact a wonder-working doctor came along and gave him his sight back. But a year later the king was already in deep despair. As he now possessed nothing but his beautiful daughter, his only child, he promised her to the man who could help to make him blind again.
CONTINUED IN PART 3
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June 24, 2026CONTINUED NOTES PART 3
He must first reflect on the basic facts of his life—regardless of all authority and tradition—and become conscious of his distinctiveness. This is an extremely hard demand, especially for Western man, who early has inculcated into him the hybris of the will and is accustomed to judge everything by prefabricated standards consisting mostly of prejudices, preconceived opinions, and collective regulations. Everything is labelled "good", "bad", "right", "wrong", etc., before one has a chance to reflect on its true nature, its purpose and value, and form a judgment of one's own.
"The needful thing is not to 'know' the truth but to experience it. Not to have an intellectual conception of things, but to find our way to the inner, perhaps wordless, irrational experiences—that is the heart of the problem," says Jung.
For individuation is a spontaneous process of development independent of conscious volition, a process in which the ego has not only to experience and understand the contents of the non-ego but also to suffer them with open eyes. Pain and suffering are an organic part of it. They are inexorable necessities, symbolically represented by the mortificatio in alchemy, the "night sea journey" in the belly of the whale-monster, the self-incineration of the phoenix, or the journey through the underworld in Dante's Divine Comedy.
In the individuation process it is always a matter of something obsolete that must be left behind to die in order that the new may be born.
The throne must be won, victory hard fought for; every step forward demands its sacrifice.
"Western man seems predominantly extraverted, Eastern man predominantly introverted. The former projects the meaning and considers that it exists in objects; the latter feels the meaning in himself. But the meaning is both without and within."
All this demands patience and preparedness. Not, to be sure, "passive" patience, but a forbearance from the presumption of the will that dominates so many people—a modesty and willingness, rather, to let things happen and ripen instead of arguing and passing value judgments. Another important quality is courage—courage to live, to experience, to dare. It is one thing to read a passionate romance, quite another to fall head over heels in love; one thing to study a scientific paper on pneumonia, quite another to have it and endure it. Unfortunately it is characteristic of the neurotic to "think" life in all its details, but not to experience it in his own body. He shuns all the imponderables of existence whenever he can and seeks security against dangers, even surprises being felt as "dangerous".
Thus, for want of the psychic strength won in the battle of life, he is usually oppressed and beset by fear, and not infrequently hopes to raise himself to a higher level of existence by "meditation". He does not notice, or refuses to notice, that in so doing he has only withdrawn into a fear-ridden passivity. Nor does he notice how much he avoids anything unaccustomed, for which reason he is even afraid of the as yet untried state of being cured of his neurosis. "Whoever protects himself against what is new and strange and regresses to the past falls into the same neurotic condition as the man who identifies himself with the new and runs away from the past. The only difference is that the one has estranged himself from the past and the other from the future. In principle both are doing the same thing: they are reinforcing their narrow range of consciousness instead of shattering it in the tension of opposites and building up a state of wider and higher consciousness."
The individuation process thus has a double sign: active endeavour and a consciously endured "come what may" are connected in a dialectical relationship.
"Letting things happen", listening to the inner voice, is something that the neurotic above all has to learn, as an un-adapted person who wants to compel fate with his will. He seems to be still under the spell of magical ideas, ascribing to his thoughts almighty powers as a consequence of which he is plagued by corresponding feelings of anxiety.
The freedom of the will extends only as far as the limits of consciousness; as soon as these limits are overstepped, we cease to discriminate, to be capable of conscious choice and judgment, and are delivered over to the uncontrolled impulses and tendencies of the unconscious.
"The true art of living is the middle way between yieldingness and rigidity."
Without consciousness we would not even know whether this world existed or not; and without the unconscious portion of the psyche the source of all good and evil, of all that is old and all that is new, of all beauty and ugliness, would be lost.
Conscious realization really begins with the dawn of man's history. At first there was an undivided harmony of plant, animal, man, and God, which pervaded everything and has been handed down to us in the symbol of Paradise. Man lived then in the blissful state of unconsciousness, of spacelessness and timelessness, as though in the lap of God, at one with him, in him. With the eating of the forbidden fruit, by which he "knew" good and evil, i.e., became conscious, man's earthly life as we understand it began. From then on, expelled from Paradise, torn between his conscious, individual ego and the unconscious depths of his soul still reposing in God, he had to make his way back with toil and suffering to the original unity, in order to reach it, perhaps, at the end of time—but this time in the full light of his consciousness. Not for nothing does the Bible story of the creation represent that first coming of human consciousness as the infringement of a taboo, as though with the winning of knowledge a sacrosanct, inviolable bound had been overstepped.
For that step towards conscious realization was a sort of Promethean guilt: "Through knowledge, the gods are as it were robbed of their fire, that is, something that was the property of the unconscious powers is torn out of its natural context and subordinated to the whims of the conscious mind. The man who has usurped the new knowledge suffers, however, a transformation or enlargement of consciousness, which no longer resembles that of his fellow men. He has raised himself above the human level of his age ('ye shall become like unto God, knowing good and evil'), but in doing so has alienated himself from humanity."
It was sin, arrogance, to know himself apart from God, to confront him face to face, and thus break the law of the unity of all things in primal night. "And yet the attainment of consciousness was the most precious fruit of the tree of knowledge, the magical weapon which gave man victory over the earth, and which we hope will give him a still greater victory over himself."
"Life that just happens in and for itself is not real life: it is real only when it is known. Only a unified personality can experience life, not that personality which is split up into partial aspects, that bundle of odds and ends which also calls itself 'man'."
There are still many people today who are only partially conscious. A relatively large number are almost completely unconscious and spend their lives mostly in an unconscious condition. They suffer what happens to them, but are not conscious of what they do and say, they do not know the significance of their deeds and words and can give no account of it.
"The world comes into being when man discovers it. He discovers it when he sacrifices the 'mother', that is, when he comes out of the mists of his unconscious containment in the mother."
Jung himself calls it a "confession of faith" when he says: "I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a low hill in the Athi plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in the soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial . . . The entire world around me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being . . . All Nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man, but only in the most highly developed and most fully conscious man." Thus the wantonness which Adam and Eve committed became the source of all spiritual growth and drives us forward on the way to an ever higher development of the psyche and our world, to a consciousness of our relation to God and his workings in the soul through the symbols of the Self.
The ability to believe is a function given to man at birth. His special directedness to God is, in Jung's view, an autochthonous religious urge, an inborn need of the soul, which cannot be neglected or violated without grave injury to psychic health.
"Religious experience is absolute," says Jung, "it cannot be disputed. You can only say that you have never had such an experience, whereupon your opponent will reply: 'Sorry, I have.' And there your discussion will come to an end."
"Theology does not help those who are looking for the key, because theology demands faith, and faith cannot be made: it is in the truest sense a gift of grace. We moderns are faced with the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit; we must experience it anew for ourselves." For Jung, then, the experience of God in the form of an encounter or unio mystica is the only possible and authentic way to a genuine belief in God for modern man.
One might say that in the course of the individuation process a man arrives at the entrance to the house of God. Whether he opens the door and penetrates to the inner sanctuary where the divine images are, this last step is left to him alone. He may, after having encountered on his journey the reality of the religious numina and experienced their shattering effect in his personal life or in dreams, turn aside from them in resistance and deny them, or else make them his innermost possession.
Jung has, in general, regarded neurotic and psychotic disturbances as symptoms of deviation from the natural maturation demanded by the psyche, which is, as it were, its religious destiny.
Jung speaks of a genuine "conflict of duty", when one's duty to the social or even professional norm is incompatible with one's duty to one's own personality.
"The decision is drawn from dark and deep waters."
Most people know conscience only in its first form; only a few experience genuine conflicts of duty which set them against collective morality.
A special problem is presented by the fact that one cannot make out in advance whether the voice of conscience is "right" or "wrong". For evil, disguised in the admonitions of conscience, can prompt us from within to deeds and reactions unworthy of man.
"The primitive form of conscience is paradoxical," says Jung. "Both forms of conscience, the right and the false, stem from the same source, and both therefore have approximately the same power of conviction." This "source" is the archetype of the God-image, the Self, which dwells in the depths of the soul and is by nature polaristic, containing light and shadow in equal degree.
Conscience may indeed demand that the individual follow his inner voice even at the risk of going astray. If he refuses to obey it, and, for fear of taking the wrong road, adapts to the generally accepted, traditional morality, he will nevertheless feel uneasy because he has been untrue to his real nature. His adaptation will be forced and his "ethical" conscience will continue to plague him until "a creative solution emerges which . . . is in accord with the deepest foundations of the personality as well as with its wholeness; it embraces conscious and unconscious and therefore transcends the ego" by producing a "third standpoint" that bridges the opposites. It goes without saying that confusion and error cannot be avoided. Yet this must be accepted by anyone who has submitted himself to the pains of the individuation process. For it is not only a "road of endless compromises", the "middle road", but also a quest, a thorny path strewn with mistakes and wrong deeds that also have to be experienced. They too have their function; they help us to insights that broaden and deepen the field of consciousness, and we know that they are the precondition of any further development.
People who declare they have no conscience because they never hear its call are as good as dead, for their psychic life is extinct.
The resolute courage to face and endure one's own darkness—is forthcoming only in exceptional cases. The price that has to be paid seems too high for most people.
"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? . . . It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths . . . Vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape . . . Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called." "What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?" Jung asks. "Unless one accepts one's fate . . . there is no individuation; one remains a mere accident, a mortal nothing." That is why those people who have been most deeply affected by the problems and images of the psychic background cannot but feel, looking back on their lives, that their path of development could not have been otherwise.
Not following one's destiny, or trying to avoid one's fate, is a frequent cause of numerous psychic difficulties.
Any obstruction of the natural process of development, any avoidance of the law of life, or getting stuck on a level unsuited to one's age, takes its revenge, if not immediately, then later at the onset of the second half of life, in the form of serious crises, nervous breakdowns, and all manner of physical and psychic sufferings. Mostly they are accompanied by vague feelings of guilt, by tormenting pangs of conscience, often not understood, in face of which the individual is helpless. He knows he is not guilty of any bad deed, he has not given way to any illicit impulse, and yet he is plagued by uncertainty, discontent, despair, and above all by anxiety—a constant, indefinable anxiety. And in truth he must usually be pronounced "guilty". His guilt does not lie in the fact that he has a neurosis, but in the fact that, knowing he has one, he does nothing to set about curing it.
This also explains why many practising Catholics do not feel freed by confession and absolution, but go on being oppressed and persecuted by fears. And indeed they cannot confess anything except what lies consciously on their conscience, while they are not conscious of their real guilt at all; it is not anything they have done or thought, essentially it is ungraspable and can hardly be put into words. For it relates to their whole previous life, to which they did not pay its due tribute; it relates to the "destiny" that was laid upon them but was not lived, to the psychic development they missed, which their nature would yet have made possible. The fact that they remained infantile, their one-sidedness and the neglect of their other qualities, their fear of taking the plunge into life, their constant prevarication and criticism—all this and a lot more besides are the cause of guilt feelings and pangs of conscience which never let them go.
Human imperfection, which clings to every one of us since the expulsion from Paradise, from that unconscious containment in and oneness with God, can presumably be sloughed off only through an act of divine grace.
That is why the Catholic Church wisely instituted the practice of confession and absolution, for in this way even the most unconscious man can be made to realize his fallibility, thus giving him an impetus towards transformation and rebirth.
"The individual may strive after perfection . . . but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness."
"There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent." "When one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one's own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them. There is no guarantee—not for a single moment—that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a safe road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer—at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the safe road is as good as dead."
Since the psyche is built on polar opposites which complement each other, but also stand in glaring contradiction to each other, it must of its very nature exist in a state of tension and suffer this. For this reason the suspension on the cross is such an excellent symbol for the authentic being of man. Hence the Christian summons to an imitatio of the crucified Christ touches on the deepest chord in our human nature.
Usually, however, the imitatio Christi is understood and aspired to exclusively as an imitation of his divine perfection, but not of his tragic human fate, of his suffering and sacrifice. The four beams of the cross stretching in different directions point to a fundamental conflict and a corresponding state of torment, but their point of intersection, the centre of the cross, symbolizes the possibility of a union of opposites, to strive for which is likewise man's task.
CONTINUED IN PART 4
He must first reflect on the basic facts of his life—regardless of all authority and tradition—and become conscious of his distinctiveness. This is an extremely hard demand, especially for Western man, who early has inculcated into him the hybris of the will and is accustomed to judge everything by prefabricated standards consisting mostly of prejudices, preconceived opinions, and collective regulations. Everything is labelled "good", "bad", "right", "wrong", etc., before one has a chance to reflect on its true nature, its purpose and value, and form a judgment of one's own.
"The needful thing is not to 'know' the truth but to experience it. Not to have an intellectual conception of things, but to find our way to the inner, perhaps wordless, irrational experiences—that is the heart of the problem," says Jung.
For individuation is a spontaneous process of development independent of conscious volition, a process in which the ego has not only to experience and understand the contents of the non-ego but also to suffer them with open eyes. Pain and suffering are an organic part of it. They are inexorable necessities, symbolically represented by the mortificatio in alchemy, the "night sea journey" in the belly of the whale-monster, the self-incineration of the phoenix, or the journey through the underworld in Dante's Divine Comedy.
In the individuation process it is always a matter of something obsolete that must be left behind to die in order that the new may be born.
The throne must be won, victory hard fought for; every step forward demands its sacrifice.
"Western man seems predominantly extraverted, Eastern man predominantly introverted. The former projects the meaning and considers that it exists in objects; the latter feels the meaning in himself. But the meaning is both without and within."
All this demands patience and preparedness. Not, to be sure, "passive" patience, but a forbearance from the presumption of the will that dominates so many people—a modesty and willingness, rather, to let things happen and ripen instead of arguing and passing value judgments. Another important quality is courage—courage to live, to experience, to dare. It is one thing to read a passionate romance, quite another to fall head over heels in love; one thing to study a scientific paper on pneumonia, quite another to have it and endure it. Unfortunately it is characteristic of the neurotic to "think" life in all its details, but not to experience it in his own body. He shuns all the imponderables of existence whenever he can and seeks security against dangers, even surprises being felt as "dangerous".
Thus, for want of the psychic strength won in the battle of life, he is usually oppressed and beset by fear, and not infrequently hopes to raise himself to a higher level of existence by "meditation". He does not notice, or refuses to notice, that in so doing he has only withdrawn into a fear-ridden passivity. Nor does he notice how much he avoids anything unaccustomed, for which reason he is even afraid of the as yet untried state of being cured of his neurosis. "Whoever protects himself against what is new and strange and regresses to the past falls into the same neurotic condition as the man who identifies himself with the new and runs away from the past. The only difference is that the one has estranged himself from the past and the other from the future. In principle both are doing the same thing: they are reinforcing their narrow range of consciousness instead of shattering it in the tension of opposites and building up a state of wider and higher consciousness."
The individuation process thus has a double sign: active endeavour and a consciously endured "come what may" are connected in a dialectical relationship.
"Letting things happen", listening to the inner voice, is something that the neurotic above all has to learn, as an un-adapted person who wants to compel fate with his will. He seems to be still under the spell of magical ideas, ascribing to his thoughts almighty powers as a consequence of which he is plagued by corresponding feelings of anxiety.
The freedom of the will extends only as far as the limits of consciousness; as soon as these limits are overstepped, we cease to discriminate, to be capable of conscious choice and judgment, and are delivered over to the uncontrolled impulses and tendencies of the unconscious.
"The true art of living is the middle way between yieldingness and rigidity."
Without consciousness we would not even know whether this world existed or not; and without the unconscious portion of the psyche the source of all good and evil, of all that is old and all that is new, of all beauty and ugliness, would be lost.
Conscious realization really begins with the dawn of man's history. At first there was an undivided harmony of plant, animal, man, and God, which pervaded everything and has been handed down to us in the symbol of Paradise. Man lived then in the blissful state of unconsciousness, of spacelessness and timelessness, as though in the lap of God, at one with him, in him. With the eating of the forbidden fruit, by which he "knew" good and evil, i.e., became conscious, man's earthly life as we understand it began. From then on, expelled from Paradise, torn between his conscious, individual ego and the unconscious depths of his soul still reposing in God, he had to make his way back with toil and suffering to the original unity, in order to reach it, perhaps, at the end of time—but this time in the full light of his consciousness. Not for nothing does the Bible story of the creation represent that first coming of human consciousness as the infringement of a taboo, as though with the winning of knowledge a sacrosanct, inviolable bound had been overstepped.
For that step towards conscious realization was a sort of Promethean guilt: "Through knowledge, the gods are as it were robbed of their fire, that is, something that was the property of the unconscious powers is torn out of its natural context and subordinated to the whims of the conscious mind. The man who has usurped the new knowledge suffers, however, a transformation or enlargement of consciousness, which no longer resembles that of his fellow men. He has raised himself above the human level of his age ('ye shall become like unto God, knowing good and evil'), but in doing so has alienated himself from humanity."
It was sin, arrogance, to know himself apart from God, to confront him face to face, and thus break the law of the unity of all things in primal night. "And yet the attainment of consciousness was the most precious fruit of the tree of knowledge, the magical weapon which gave man victory over the earth, and which we hope will give him a still greater victory over himself."
"Life that just happens in and for itself is not real life: it is real only when it is known. Only a unified personality can experience life, not that personality which is split up into partial aspects, that bundle of odds and ends which also calls itself 'man'."
There are still many people today who are only partially conscious. A relatively large number are almost completely unconscious and spend their lives mostly in an unconscious condition. They suffer what happens to them, but are not conscious of what they do and say, they do not know the significance of their deeds and words and can give no account of it.
"The world comes into being when man discovers it. He discovers it when he sacrifices the 'mother', that is, when he comes out of the mists of his unconscious containment in the mother."
Jung himself calls it a "confession of faith" when he says: "I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had to realize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns and moons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a low hill in the Athi plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds of wild animals grazing in the soundless stillness, as they had done from time immemorial . . . The entire world around me was still in its primeval state; it did not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which I came to know, the world sprang into being . . . All Nature seeks this goal and finds it fulfilled in man, but only in the most highly developed and most fully conscious man." Thus the wantonness which Adam and Eve committed became the source of all spiritual growth and drives us forward on the way to an ever higher development of the psyche and our world, to a consciousness of our relation to God and his workings in the soul through the symbols of the Self.
The ability to believe is a function given to man at birth. His special directedness to God is, in Jung's view, an autochthonous religious urge, an inborn need of the soul, which cannot be neglected or violated without grave injury to psychic health.
"Religious experience is absolute," says Jung, "it cannot be disputed. You can only say that you have never had such an experience, whereupon your opponent will reply: 'Sorry, I have.' And there your discussion will come to an end."
"Theology does not help those who are looking for the key, because theology demands faith, and faith cannot be made: it is in the truest sense a gift of grace. We moderns are faced with the necessity of rediscovering the life of the spirit; we must experience it anew for ourselves." For Jung, then, the experience of God in the form of an encounter or unio mystica is the only possible and authentic way to a genuine belief in God for modern man.
One might say that in the course of the individuation process a man arrives at the entrance to the house of God. Whether he opens the door and penetrates to the inner sanctuary where the divine images are, this last step is left to him alone. He may, after having encountered on his journey the reality of the religious numina and experienced their shattering effect in his personal life or in dreams, turn aside from them in resistance and deny them, or else make them his innermost possession.
Jung has, in general, regarded neurotic and psychotic disturbances as symptoms of deviation from the natural maturation demanded by the psyche, which is, as it were, its religious destiny.
Jung speaks of a genuine "conflict of duty", when one's duty to the social or even professional norm is incompatible with one's duty to one's own personality.
"The decision is drawn from dark and deep waters."
Most people know conscience only in its first form; only a few experience genuine conflicts of duty which set them against collective morality.
A special problem is presented by the fact that one cannot make out in advance whether the voice of conscience is "right" or "wrong". For evil, disguised in the admonitions of conscience, can prompt us from within to deeds and reactions unworthy of man.
"The primitive form of conscience is paradoxical," says Jung. "Both forms of conscience, the right and the false, stem from the same source, and both therefore have approximately the same power of conviction." This "source" is the archetype of the God-image, the Self, which dwells in the depths of the soul and is by nature polaristic, containing light and shadow in equal degree.
Conscience may indeed demand that the individual follow his inner voice even at the risk of going astray. If he refuses to obey it, and, for fear of taking the wrong road, adapts to the generally accepted, traditional morality, he will nevertheless feel uneasy because he has been untrue to his real nature. His adaptation will be forced and his "ethical" conscience will continue to plague him until "a creative solution emerges which . . . is in accord with the deepest foundations of the personality as well as with its wholeness; it embraces conscious and unconscious and therefore transcends the ego" by producing a "third standpoint" that bridges the opposites. It goes without saying that confusion and error cannot be avoided. Yet this must be accepted by anyone who has submitted himself to the pains of the individuation process. For it is not only a "road of endless compromises", the "middle road", but also a quest, a thorny path strewn with mistakes and wrong deeds that also have to be experienced. They too have their function; they help us to insights that broaden and deepen the field of consciousness, and we know that they are the precondition of any further development.
People who declare they have no conscience because they never hear its call are as good as dead, for their psychic life is extinct.
The resolute courage to face and endure one's own darkness—is forthcoming only in exceptional cases. The price that has to be paid seems too high for most people.
"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? . . . It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths . . . Vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape . . . Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called." "What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?" Jung asks. "Unless one accepts one's fate . . . there is no individuation; one remains a mere accident, a mortal nothing." That is why those people who have been most deeply affected by the problems and images of the psychic background cannot but feel, looking back on their lives, that their path of development could not have been otherwise.
Not following one's destiny, or trying to avoid one's fate, is a frequent cause of numerous psychic difficulties.
Any obstruction of the natural process of development, any avoidance of the law of life, or getting stuck on a level unsuited to one's age, takes its revenge, if not immediately, then later at the onset of the second half of life, in the form of serious crises, nervous breakdowns, and all manner of physical and psychic sufferings. Mostly they are accompanied by vague feelings of guilt, by tormenting pangs of conscience, often not understood, in face of which the individual is helpless. He knows he is not guilty of any bad deed, he has not given way to any illicit impulse, and yet he is plagued by uncertainty, discontent, despair, and above all by anxiety—a constant, indefinable anxiety. And in truth he must usually be pronounced "guilty". His guilt does not lie in the fact that he has a neurosis, but in the fact that, knowing he has one, he does nothing to set about curing it.
This also explains why many practising Catholics do not feel freed by confession and absolution, but go on being oppressed and persecuted by fears. And indeed they cannot confess anything except what lies consciously on their conscience, while they are not conscious of their real guilt at all; it is not anything they have done or thought, essentially it is ungraspable and can hardly be put into words. For it relates to their whole previous life, to which they did not pay its due tribute; it relates to the "destiny" that was laid upon them but was not lived, to the psychic development they missed, which their nature would yet have made possible. The fact that they remained infantile, their one-sidedness and the neglect of their other qualities, their fear of taking the plunge into life, their constant prevarication and criticism—all this and a lot more besides are the cause of guilt feelings and pangs of conscience which never let them go.
Human imperfection, which clings to every one of us since the expulsion from Paradise, from that unconscious containment in and oneness with God, can presumably be sloughed off only through an act of divine grace.
That is why the Catholic Church wisely instituted the practice of confession and absolution, for in this way even the most unconscious man can be made to realize his fallibility, thus giving him an impetus towards transformation and rebirth.
"The individual may strive after perfection . . . but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness."
"There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent." "When one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one's own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them. There is no guarantee—not for a single moment—that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a safe road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer—at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the safe road is as good as dead."
Since the psyche is built on polar opposites which complement each other, but also stand in glaring contradiction to each other, it must of its very nature exist in a state of tension and suffer this. For this reason the suspension on the cross is such an excellent symbol for the authentic being of man. Hence the Christian summons to an imitatio of the crucified Christ touches on the deepest chord in our human nature.
Usually, however, the imitatio Christi is understood and aspired to exclusively as an imitation of his divine perfection, but not of his tragic human fate, of his suffering and sacrifice. The four beams of the cross stretching in different directions point to a fundamental conflict and a corresponding state of torment, but their point of intersection, the centre of the cross, symbolizes the possibility of a union of opposites, to strive for which is likewise man's task.
CONTINUED IN PART 4
March 2, 2020
Very good and systematic review of Jung's work. This book is good literature for people who want to learn more about analytical psychology or understand Jung's teachings. Also, it can be perceived as a good introduction to the whole topic.
June 24, 2026
A beautiful splendid wonderful little book.
Essentially a compiled collection of Jung's thoughts on Individuation through the perspective of one of his best students. Lots of very interesting pieces with wonderful analysis, insight, and commentary. Really just a really great reading experience. I would buy the physical book outright if it wasn't so expensive. Especially in the final third of the book, I was getting blown away. I'm probably not going to have enough space allotted to fit all my notes as they were plentiful, but man. This was a great book. It has left me feeling somewhat warm and happy.
"The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in
our working at it incessantly."
I went into this book simply seeking for more clarification and reading material on Jung's concept of Individuation and left with much more than I could have expected. Highly recommend to anyone.
Notes:
"Conscience may indeed demand that the individual follow his inner voice even at the risk of going astray. If he refuses to obey it, and, for fear of taking the wrong road, adapts to the generally accepted, traditional morality, he will nevertheless feel uneasy because he has been untrue to his real nature. His adaptation will be forced and his "ethical" conscience will continue to plague him until "a creative solution emerges which ... is in accord with the deepest foundations of the personality as well as with its wholeness; it embraces conscious and unconscious and therefore transcends the ego" by producing a "third standpoint" that bridges the opposites 24 It goes without saying that confusion and error cannot be avoided. Yet this must be accepted by anyone who has submitted himself to the pains of the individuation process. For it is not only a "road of endless compromises", the "middle road", but also a quest, a thorny path strewn with mistakes and wrong deeds that also have to be experienced. They too have their function; they help us to insights that broaden and deepen the field of consciousness, and we know that they are the precondition of any further development.
Thus conscience becomes a monitor urging us to a confrontation with the world within and without, the examiner of the genuineness of our deeds and behaviour, the messenger between the "voice of God" and our consciousness. People who declare they have no conscience because they never hear its call are as good as dead, for their psychic life is extinct.
Experience shows that the achievement demanded by the analytically assisted individuation process—the resolute courage to face and endure one's own darkness—is forthcoming only in exceptional cases. The price that has to be paid seems too high for most people. For this reason they remain stuck in a more or less unconscious state and live without reflecting in the mist of participation mystique with the surrounding world. "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? ... It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths . . . Vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape . . . Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called." 25 "What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?" Jung asks. 26 "Unless one accepts one's fate . . . there is no individuation; one remains a mere accident, a mortal nothing." 27 That is why those people who have been most deeply affected by the problems and images of the psychic background cannot but feel, looking back on their lives, that their path of development could not have been otherwise.
Not following one's destiny, or trying to avoid one's fate, is a frequent cause of numerous psychic difficulties. It may even be that the steady increase in the number of neurotics today is due to the fact that more and more individuals are called upon by fate to work for their psychic wholeness, but that fewer and fewer of them are ready to do so. Any obstruction of the natural process of development, any avoidance of the law of life, or getting stuck on a level unsuited to one's age, takes its revenge, if not immediately, then later at the onset of the second half of life, in the form of serious crises, nervous breakdowns, and all manner of physical and psychic sufferings. Mostly they are accompanied by vague feelings of guilt, by tormenting pangs of conscience, often not understood, in face of which the individual is helpless. He knows he is not guilty of any bad deed, he has not given way to any illicit impulse, and yet he is plagued by uncertainty, discontent, despair, and above all by anxiety— a constant, indefinable anxiety. And in truth he must usually be pronounced "guilty". His guilt does not lie in the fact that he has a neurosis, but in the fact that, knowing he has one, he does nothing to set about curing it."
...
"Human imperfection, which clings to every one of us since the expulsion from Paradise, from that unconscious containment in and oneness with God, can presumably be sloughed off only through an act of divine grace."
...
"Jung mournfully admits: "The individual may strive after perfection . . . but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness." 6 This suffering can be a powerful spur to his further striving and hold him to the road of his inner development. One must agree with Jung when he says: "There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent." 6 "When one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one's own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them. There is no guarantee—not for a single moment—that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a safe road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer—at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the safe road is as good as dead."
...
"For each of us would like to live only in a straight line, to have only one meaning, and not to be torn between our own inner contradictions. The fact that these cannot always be overcome, that not all of them can be cancelled out or neutralized, is a lesson which we learn in the course of life only through a long chain of experiences. But this exempts us neither from having to endure them nor from seeking to reconcile them. To be "whole" means, at the same time: to be full of contradictions. We falsify man when we try to sketch a homogeneous picture of him. The picture is true to life only when it is ambiguous and paradoxical. That is why it is so difficult to give an adequate description of him and of his psyche, and to relate oneself to his wholeness. One of the most valuable insights and conclusions conveyed by the individuation process is that paradox is an essential feature of human existence and of the psyche, and that one must learn to accept it and live with it."
..
As mentioned I have a lot of notes and it will take me quite a while to compile them here, so I will leave such a task up to myself in 3 days once I have some time in between working hours.
# FURTHER NOTES
As Schopenhauer says: "The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary; without the commentary we are unable to understand aright the true sense and coherence of the text, together with the moral it contains."
No one can become a medicine man or the wise man of the tribe without going through a hard lifelong discipline, that no saint is spared wrestling with his inner demons, and that no great artist ever accomplished his work without toil and sweat. In view of these high demands it is not surprising that the majority of men follow the line of least resistance and confine themselves to the fulfilment of biological and material needs, and for the rest are intent on gaining the greatest possible number of pleasurable experiences. Most people look unremittingly for "happiness", and it never occurs to them that happiness is not the goal of life set them by the Creator. The true goal is a task that continues right up to life's evening, namely, the most complete and comprehensive development of the personality. It is this which gives life an incomparable value that can never be lost: inner peace, and therewith the highest form of "happiness".
Jung is not of the opinion, however, that alien cults and forms of religion should be taken over unheedingly by Western man. For example, he is against Europeans' practising yoga or indulging in other "mysteries" designed for totally alien psychic structures. They do not correspond to the European's state of consciousness and consequently lead him not to individuation but only into error.
Wait, persevere until a tolerable solution suddenly presents itself, as if it were a third possibility that does justice to both sides.
At bottom one never knows in advance whether one has done the "right" thing. One must therefore be prepared to accept responsibility for everything one does, even if it should later turn out that the "right" thing was the wrong one.
"To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it. And as a matter of fact, it is in many cases a question of the self-same infantile greediness, the same fear, the same defiance and wilfulness, in the one as in the other."
What now? What's all this leading to?
"Seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal."
"Being essentially the instrument of his work, he is subordinate to it, and we have no right to expect him to interpret it for us. He has done his utmost by giving it form." "How can we doubt that it is his art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable results of his being an artist, a man upon whom a heavier burden is laid than upon ordinary mortals. A special ability demands a greater expenditure of energy, which must necessarily leave a deficit on some other side of life." "Great gifts are the fairest, and often the most dangerous, fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang on the weakest branches, which easily break." (On the artist)
The longing to idealize the artist as an ordinary person too, to identify him with its "heroes", is deeply ingrained in the public... the real artist is outside all such categories. Geniuses are "monads", unique and unrepeatable phenomena, and every yardstick that is applied to them can easily become questionable.
"True productivity is a spring that can never be stopped up. Is there any trickery on earth which could have prevented Mozart or Beethoven from creating? Creative power is mightier than its possessor. If it is not so, then it is a feeble thing, and given favourable conditions will nourish an endearing talent, but no more . . . No breaking down of repressions can ever destroy true creativeness." Even when an artist had to go through a severe psychic crisis—like Goya, Klee, or van Gogh—the urge to create never let up.
The course of the first half of life has its own form and follows its own laws, which one could describe as an "initiation into adulthood" or an "initiation into outer reality".
Those who become schizophrenics, one might say, are people whose ego is too weak and whose psychic background is too explosive, so that its contents cannot be worked through by the ego.
Like neurosis, psychosis too in its inner course is a process of individuation, but one that is not associated with consciousness and runs on like an ouroboros in the unconscious.
We may, for instance, be reading a book word for word and suddenly notice that we are occupied with quite irrelevant thoughts and no longer remember what we have read.
Besides the "personal shadow" there is in Jung's view also a "collective shadow" in which the general evil is contained (as in the figure of Mephistopheles, for instance). It gives expression not to the contents belonging to the personal life-history of the individual but to everything negative, everything that opposes the spirit of the time, and represented in the Christian Middle Ages, for instance, by witches and sorcerers. Even today, the qualities of the collective shadow are imputed either to capitalism or to communism, according to one's political beliefs.
Nobody likes to admit his own darkness, for which reason most people put up—even in analytical work—the greatest resistance to the realization of their shadow. As Ulrich Zwingli long ago remarked very aptly: "Like an octopus hiding behind its black juice to avoid seizure, a man, so soon as he observes we will be at him, suddenly envelops himself in such a dense hypocritical fog that the sharpest eye cannot perceive him . . . His impudence in lying, his readiness to deny and disown, is so great that, when you think you have laid hold of him, he has already slipped out by the back door."
For example an alcoholic, in order to be cured, must not only be conscious of his tendency or compulsion to drink—which many of them deny—but must also discover the deeper reasons that have induced his craving. These reasons are always shadow qualities which he cannot accept, which he flees from in order to rid himself of the pangs of conscience their recognition would entail.
We find ourselves confronted with the figures of anima and animus either in the outer world (when they are projected on persons) or in dreams and fantasies. In this respect they behave just like the shadow. In addition, they are embodied in mythology and art, in legend and fairytale, by figures known to everyone, and their manifestations include every conceivable quality of man and woman, from the lowest to the highest.
In the first half of life it is natural and logical that these intrapsychic figures should appear in projection, and that we are thus attracted to the men and women who are their carriers, and fall in love with them. The projection produces a mutual attraction, it is the "trap" that embroils us with the other sex and so ensures the continuation of the species.
Conversely, it is the task of the second half of life to withdraw the projections. It belongs to the second phase of the individuation process, when a man must learn to stand by himself, to discover the contrasexual element in himself and to fecundate it, thus rounding out his personality without impairing his faculty for relationship as such.
If the "bodily child" is born of the first form of relationship, the fruit of the second is the "spiritual child". That is why we can observe that creative, spiritually productive people are often congenitally endowed with a relatively large share of contrasexual features, that they are "hermaphroditic" by psychic constitution, so to speak, and, as a result, not infrequently exhibit "narcissistic" tendencies.
Once they are made conscious and are no longer projected, but are experienced as belonging to oneself, as realities and agencies within the psyche, anima and animus become symbols of its power to procreate and to give birth: everything new and creative owes its existence to them. They are the fount from which all artistic productivity flows.
For once a man has reached a certain state of maturity through the individuation process it becomes possible for him to see his apparently insurmountable personal problems in the light of objective problems common to all humanity, and this not infrequently robs them of their urgency and their sting. "What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotion, now looks like a storm in the valley seen from the mountain top. This does not mean that the storm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it one is above it." One is no longer directly affected by it, having gained the necessary detachment.
The confrontation with the shadow and its integration must always be achieved first in the individuation process in order to strengthen the ego for further laps in the journey and for the crucial encounter with the Self. That is why the shadow qualities must first be made conscious, even at the risk of neglecting other aspects and other figures presented by the psychic material. We find the same thing in myths and fairytales, where the hero always needs a friend, his own shadow side, as a companion in order to overcome the dangers of his quest.
Psychology can make no statements about the nature of God. On the other hand, it can very well observe and describe the phenomenology of his "reflection" in the human psyche, and explore it scientifically.
"In physics we can do without a God-image, but in psychology it is a definite fact that has got to be reckoned with, just as we have to reckon with 'affect', 'instinct', 'mother', etc. It is the fault of the everlasting contamination of object and image that people can make no conceptual distinction between 'God' and 'God-image', and therefore think that when one speaks of the 'God-image' one is speaking of God and offering 'theological' explanations. It is not for psychology, as a science, to demand an hypostatization of the God-image. But, the facts being what they are, it does have to reckon with the existence of a God-image." "The idea of God is an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing whatever to do with the question of God's existence. The human intellect can never answer this question, still less give any proof of God. Moreover such proof is superfluous, for the idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype." "'God' is a primordial experience of man, and from the remotest times humanity has taken inconceivable pains either to portray this baffling experience, to assimilate it by means of interpretation, speculation, and dogma, or else to deny it. And again and again it has happened, and still happens, that one hears too much about the 'good' God and knows him too well, so that one confuses him with one's own ideas and regards them as sacred because they can be traced back a couple of thousand years. This is a superstition and an idolatry every bit as bad as the Bolshevist delusion that 'God' can be educated out of existence."
CONTINUED PART 2
Essentially a compiled collection of Jung's thoughts on Individuation through the perspective of one of his best students. Lots of very interesting pieces with wonderful analysis, insight, and commentary. Really just a really great reading experience. I would buy the physical book outright if it wasn't so expensive. Especially in the final third of the book, I was getting blown away. I'm probably not going to have enough space allotted to fit all my notes as they were plentiful, but man. This was a great book. It has left me feeling somewhat warm and happy.
"The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in
our working at it incessantly."
I went into this book simply seeking for more clarification and reading material on Jung's concept of Individuation and left with much more than I could have expected. Highly recommend to anyone.
Notes:
"Conscience may indeed demand that the individual follow his inner voice even at the risk of going astray. If he refuses to obey it, and, for fear of taking the wrong road, adapts to the generally accepted, traditional morality, he will nevertheless feel uneasy because he has been untrue to his real nature. His adaptation will be forced and his "ethical" conscience will continue to plague him until "a creative solution emerges which ... is in accord with the deepest foundations of the personality as well as with its wholeness; it embraces conscious and unconscious and therefore transcends the ego" by producing a "third standpoint" that bridges the opposites 24 It goes without saying that confusion and error cannot be avoided. Yet this must be accepted by anyone who has submitted himself to the pains of the individuation process. For it is not only a "road of endless compromises", the "middle road", but also a quest, a thorny path strewn with mistakes and wrong deeds that also have to be experienced. They too have their function; they help us to insights that broaden and deepen the field of consciousness, and we know that they are the precondition of any further development.
Thus conscience becomes a monitor urging us to a confrontation with the world within and without, the examiner of the genuineness of our deeds and behaviour, the messenger between the "voice of God" and our consciousness. People who declare they have no conscience because they never hear its call are as good as dead, for their psychic life is extinct.
Experience shows that the achievement demanded by the analytically assisted individuation process—the resolute courage to face and endure one's own darkness—is forthcoming only in exceptional cases. The price that has to be paid seems too high for most people. For this reason they remain stuck in a more or less unconscious state and live without reflecting in the mist of participation mystique with the surrounding world. "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? ... It is what is commonly called vocation: an irrational factor that destines a man to emancipate himself from the herd and from its well-worn paths . . . Vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape . . . Anyone with a vocation hears the voice of the inner man: he is called." 25 "What would have happened if Paul had allowed himself to be talked out of his journey to Damascus?" Jung asks. 26 "Unless one accepts one's fate . . . there is no individuation; one remains a mere accident, a mortal nothing." 27 That is why those people who have been most deeply affected by the problems and images of the psychic background cannot but feel, looking back on their lives, that their path of development could not have been otherwise.
Not following one's destiny, or trying to avoid one's fate, is a frequent cause of numerous psychic difficulties. It may even be that the steady increase in the number of neurotics today is due to the fact that more and more individuals are called upon by fate to work for their psychic wholeness, but that fewer and fewer of them are ready to do so. Any obstruction of the natural process of development, any avoidance of the law of life, or getting stuck on a level unsuited to one's age, takes its revenge, if not immediately, then later at the onset of the second half of life, in the form of serious crises, nervous breakdowns, and all manner of physical and psychic sufferings. Mostly they are accompanied by vague feelings of guilt, by tormenting pangs of conscience, often not understood, in face of which the individual is helpless. He knows he is not guilty of any bad deed, he has not given way to any illicit impulse, and yet he is plagued by uncertainty, discontent, despair, and above all by anxiety— a constant, indefinable anxiety. And in truth he must usually be pronounced "guilty". His guilt does not lie in the fact that he has a neurosis, but in the fact that, knowing he has one, he does nothing to set about curing it."
...
"Human imperfection, which clings to every one of us since the expulsion from Paradise, from that unconscious containment in and oneness with God, can presumably be sloughed off only through an act of divine grace."
...
"Jung mournfully admits: "The individual may strive after perfection . . . but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness." 6 This suffering can be a powerful spur to his further striving and hold him to the road of his inner development. One must agree with Jung when he says: "There is no light without shadow and no psychic wholeness without imperfection. To round itself out, life calls not for perfection but for completeness; and for this the 'thorn in the flesh' is needed, the suffering of defects without which there is no progress and no ascent." 6 "When one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one's own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them. There is no guarantee—not for a single moment—that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a safe road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer—at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the safe road is as good as dead."
...
"For each of us would like to live only in a straight line, to have only one meaning, and not to be torn between our own inner contradictions. The fact that these cannot always be overcome, that not all of them can be cancelled out or neutralized, is a lesson which we learn in the course of life only through a long chain of experiences. But this exempts us neither from having to endure them nor from seeking to reconcile them. To be "whole" means, at the same time: to be full of contradictions. We falsify man when we try to sketch a homogeneous picture of him. The picture is true to life only when it is ambiguous and paradoxical. That is why it is so difficult to give an adequate description of him and of his psyche, and to relate oneself to his wholeness. One of the most valuable insights and conclusions conveyed by the individuation process is that paradox is an essential feature of human existence and of the psyche, and that one must learn to accept it and live with it."
..
As mentioned I have a lot of notes and it will take me quite a while to compile them here, so I will leave such a task up to myself in 3 days once I have some time in between working hours.
# FURTHER NOTES
As Schopenhauer says: "The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary; without the commentary we are unable to understand aright the true sense and coherence of the text, together with the moral it contains."
No one can become a medicine man or the wise man of the tribe without going through a hard lifelong discipline, that no saint is spared wrestling with his inner demons, and that no great artist ever accomplished his work without toil and sweat. In view of these high demands it is not surprising that the majority of men follow the line of least resistance and confine themselves to the fulfilment of biological and material needs, and for the rest are intent on gaining the greatest possible number of pleasurable experiences. Most people look unremittingly for "happiness", and it never occurs to them that happiness is not the goal of life set them by the Creator. The true goal is a task that continues right up to life's evening, namely, the most complete and comprehensive development of the personality. It is this which gives life an incomparable value that can never be lost: inner peace, and therewith the highest form of "happiness".
Jung is not of the opinion, however, that alien cults and forms of religion should be taken over unheedingly by Western man. For example, he is against Europeans' practising yoga or indulging in other "mysteries" designed for totally alien psychic structures. They do not correspond to the European's state of consciousness and consequently lead him not to individuation but only into error.
Wait, persevere until a tolerable solution suddenly presents itself, as if it were a third possibility that does justice to both sides.
At bottom one never knows in advance whether one has done the "right" thing. One must therefore be prepared to accept responsibility for everything one does, even if it should later turn out that the "right" thing was the wrong one.
"To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it. And as a matter of fact, it is in many cases a question of the self-same infantile greediness, the same fear, the same defiance and wilfulness, in the one as in the other."
What now? What's all this leading to?
"Seen in correct psychological perspective, death is not an end but a goal."
"Being essentially the instrument of his work, he is subordinate to it, and we have no right to expect him to interpret it for us. He has done his utmost by giving it form." "How can we doubt that it is his art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable results of his being an artist, a man upon whom a heavier burden is laid than upon ordinary mortals. A special ability demands a greater expenditure of energy, which must necessarily leave a deficit on some other side of life." "Great gifts are the fairest, and often the most dangerous, fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang on the weakest branches, which easily break." (On the artist)
The longing to idealize the artist as an ordinary person too, to identify him with its "heroes", is deeply ingrained in the public... the real artist is outside all such categories. Geniuses are "monads", unique and unrepeatable phenomena, and every yardstick that is applied to them can easily become questionable.
"True productivity is a spring that can never be stopped up. Is there any trickery on earth which could have prevented Mozart or Beethoven from creating? Creative power is mightier than its possessor. If it is not so, then it is a feeble thing, and given favourable conditions will nourish an endearing talent, but no more . . . No breaking down of repressions can ever destroy true creativeness." Even when an artist had to go through a severe psychic crisis—like Goya, Klee, or van Gogh—the urge to create never let up.
The course of the first half of life has its own form and follows its own laws, which one could describe as an "initiation into adulthood" or an "initiation into outer reality".
Those who become schizophrenics, one might say, are people whose ego is too weak and whose psychic background is too explosive, so that its contents cannot be worked through by the ego.
Like neurosis, psychosis too in its inner course is a process of individuation, but one that is not associated with consciousness and runs on like an ouroboros in the unconscious.
We may, for instance, be reading a book word for word and suddenly notice that we are occupied with quite irrelevant thoughts and no longer remember what we have read.
Besides the "personal shadow" there is in Jung's view also a "collective shadow" in which the general evil is contained (as in the figure of Mephistopheles, for instance). It gives expression not to the contents belonging to the personal life-history of the individual but to everything negative, everything that opposes the spirit of the time, and represented in the Christian Middle Ages, for instance, by witches and sorcerers. Even today, the qualities of the collective shadow are imputed either to capitalism or to communism, according to one's political beliefs.
Nobody likes to admit his own darkness, for which reason most people put up—even in analytical work—the greatest resistance to the realization of their shadow. As Ulrich Zwingli long ago remarked very aptly: "Like an octopus hiding behind its black juice to avoid seizure, a man, so soon as he observes we will be at him, suddenly envelops himself in such a dense hypocritical fog that the sharpest eye cannot perceive him . . . His impudence in lying, his readiness to deny and disown, is so great that, when you think you have laid hold of him, he has already slipped out by the back door."
For example an alcoholic, in order to be cured, must not only be conscious of his tendency or compulsion to drink—which many of them deny—but must also discover the deeper reasons that have induced his craving. These reasons are always shadow qualities which he cannot accept, which he flees from in order to rid himself of the pangs of conscience their recognition would entail.
We find ourselves confronted with the figures of anima and animus either in the outer world (when they are projected on persons) or in dreams and fantasies. In this respect they behave just like the shadow. In addition, they are embodied in mythology and art, in legend and fairytale, by figures known to everyone, and their manifestations include every conceivable quality of man and woman, from the lowest to the highest.
In the first half of life it is natural and logical that these intrapsychic figures should appear in projection, and that we are thus attracted to the men and women who are their carriers, and fall in love with them. The projection produces a mutual attraction, it is the "trap" that embroils us with the other sex and so ensures the continuation of the species.
Conversely, it is the task of the second half of life to withdraw the projections. It belongs to the second phase of the individuation process, when a man must learn to stand by himself, to discover the contrasexual element in himself and to fecundate it, thus rounding out his personality without impairing his faculty for relationship as such.
If the "bodily child" is born of the first form of relationship, the fruit of the second is the "spiritual child". That is why we can observe that creative, spiritually productive people are often congenitally endowed with a relatively large share of contrasexual features, that they are "hermaphroditic" by psychic constitution, so to speak, and, as a result, not infrequently exhibit "narcissistic" tendencies.
Once they are made conscious and are no longer projected, but are experienced as belonging to oneself, as realities and agencies within the psyche, anima and animus become symbols of its power to procreate and to give birth: everything new and creative owes its existence to them. They are the fount from which all artistic productivity flows.
For once a man has reached a certain state of maturity through the individuation process it becomes possible for him to see his apparently insurmountable personal problems in the light of objective problems common to all humanity, and this not infrequently robs them of their urgency and their sting. "What, on a lower level, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts of emotion, now looks like a storm in the valley seen from the mountain top. This does not mean that the storm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it one is above it." One is no longer directly affected by it, having gained the necessary detachment.
The confrontation with the shadow and its integration must always be achieved first in the individuation process in order to strengthen the ego for further laps in the journey and for the crucial encounter with the Self. That is why the shadow qualities must first be made conscious, even at the risk of neglecting other aspects and other figures presented by the psychic material. We find the same thing in myths and fairytales, where the hero always needs a friend, his own shadow side, as a companion in order to overcome the dangers of his quest.
Psychology can make no statements about the nature of God. On the other hand, it can very well observe and describe the phenomenology of his "reflection" in the human psyche, and explore it scientifically.
"In physics we can do without a God-image, but in psychology it is a definite fact that has got to be reckoned with, just as we have to reckon with 'affect', 'instinct', 'mother', etc. It is the fault of the everlasting contamination of object and image that people can make no conceptual distinction between 'God' and 'God-image', and therefore think that when one speaks of the 'God-image' one is speaking of God and offering 'theological' explanations. It is not for psychology, as a science, to demand an hypostatization of the God-image. But, the facts being what they are, it does have to reckon with the existence of a God-image." "The idea of God is an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing whatever to do with the question of God's existence. The human intellect can never answer this question, still less give any proof of God. Moreover such proof is superfluous, for the idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype." "'God' is a primordial experience of man, and from the remotest times humanity has taken inconceivable pains either to portray this baffling experience, to assimilate it by means of interpretation, speculation, and dogma, or else to deny it. And again and again it has happened, and still happens, that one hears too much about the 'good' God and knows him too well, so that one confuses him with one's own ideas and regards them as sacred because they can be traced back a couple of thousand years. This is a superstition and an idolatry every bit as bad as the Bolshevist delusion that 'God' can be educated out of existence."
CONTINUED PART 2
March 8, 2025
Accessible to understand the Individuation. Not much about the 1st phase of the process, a lot about the 2nd. Although I think the essence of Jung‘s work is the intensive study of the 2nd half, it would be nice, especially for leaners not in their 2nd, to learn more about the processes for the 1st. Overall very readable and insightful.
August 13, 2025
Enormously helpful and well-written overview of Jung's main topic, which, as a child of its time, does not deconstruct Jung's problematic concepts enough and dwells in almost charmingly unfazed eurocentrism.
January 1, 2024
Helpful book in understanding Jung’s complicated idea of individuation. Well written and concise. A good summary of life’s meaning and some of the complications faced during its attempt.
April 15, 2011
Dieses Buch ist von einer von C.G.Jungs treuen Nachfolgerinnen geschrieben. Es setzt sich als Ziel zu erklären, wie man den Individuationsprozess verstehen soll und wie er in der Beziehung zur Religion, zum Gewissen, Archetypen, Gesellschaft etc. steht. Persönlich bin ich froh, dass ich dieses Buch gelesen habe, weil ich explizit ein Buch über Individuation suchte und nun Jungs Theorie besser nachvollziehen kann. An vielen Stellen könnte man sich wegen des Stils der Autorin aufregen. Z.B. findet man immer wieder kaum fundierte Sätze wie "Es ist allgemein bekannt, dass viele Leute...", was heutzutage in einem quasi-wissenschaftlichen Buch unangebracht aussieht.
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