grumpyIndividuation - Part One
January 6th 2008 02:42
A certain amount of confusion often arises with the attempt to understand the process Jung termed "individuation". Upon reading him it would first appear that Jung had differing notions regarding this process, some which point toward a naturally occurring and unconsciously directed adjustment of the ego to the contents of the unconscious, some which assert the process is essentially "unnatural" in as much as it flows from a deliberate intervention into the relationships between unconscious and conscious positions, and some where the process can be easily confused with - or seen as an essentially psychological description of - the progress of the mystic in his search for unity or "oneness with God."
And whilst it is possible to view individuation in all these ways, perhaps it is best to try and describe the fundamentals of the process so that we might recognise how, under differing circumstances, each and every one of these interpretations can be seen to have its own validity.
Jung describes the idea of individuation as the process of the person becoming and "in-dividual", not only becoming essentially "what he is", but also recognising and understanding "what he is" - at least as far as he differs in his make up and needs from every other individual on the planet, and also in as much as he recognises that this essentiality is something he cannot refute, that it is his and ultimately he must be responsible to the demands it makes upon his conscious life - and that he must become at some level "undivided" in his approach to life.
But this deep recognition is a far cry from the initial position of the ordinary person, who for the most part scarcely recognises any need or drive to "individuate" in the first place. This in itself tends to negate the idea that it is in any way "natural" in the sense that it is simply the outcome of some internally regulated psycho/biological process of growth. The "acorn which becomes a tree", for example.
Nevertheless such distinctive comparisons tend to distort the underlying reality, for one might reasonably assume that if people were acorns and they became oak trees, then it would, in one sense, be true to say they had "individuated", albeit unconsciously. But this requires a distortion of the meaning of the term, for the real difficulty is that people, whether seen initially as "acorns" or not, do not have the ability to become oak trees, because they are conscious beings, living within a cultural and social milieu which requires not just an unfolding of the inherent laws of biological nature, but also an adaptation to, and development within, a subjective social and personal world dominated by images arising from the inherent structure of the mind itself.
At this point that we recognise that the process of individuation as Jung described it is not an objective, purely "natural" or unconsciously driven process of development, but an inherently subjective process which has its roots in the relationship between conscious and unconscious dominants within the individual psyche.
Jung notes that the average or ordinary person has a fairly unconscious and easygoing relationship with these dominants. He never becomes "lost within" or "gripped by" them to the degree that his life is made uncomfortable, or totally controlled by forces or ideas over which he has no power and which "take him out of himself", nor does he fall so much under the spell of the collective dominants within society that he creates for himself such a rigid persona that his nature becomes badly compromised or lost altogether to consciousness.
So, if we were to generalise without looking more closely, we might assume that the ordinary person, whilst perhaps discovering within the world beyond himself something of the power of these images, allows them to be as they appear, and does not question the way in which they satisfy the demands of his nature, and usually believes that his ideas and beliefs about them are both consciously made and suitable - even "right" - and so even while living in the midst of a shifting morass of images and collective drives, any one of which might drive him to the edge of the world, he manages to float easily and satisfy without too much trauma both the drives of nature within him and the varying demands of the culture in which he lives. Even if it might be seen that much of his life was an essentially neurotic adaptation to nature, he merely reflects his culture, in which his behaviour is acceptable and considered "normal", and so his comfort level is never low enough to inspire any need for greater self awareness.
But of course, this is not the true case - as every situation within life offers both polarities and conflicts into which the person projects his unconscious biases. Conflicts which at almost every moment seek a resolution which would come from greater self awareness, if only the person was able to recognise and understand that the "problem" he is confronting "in the world" was a reflection of something within himself. And there are many times through life where such self awareness does grow out of this endless round of conflict and resolution of conflict through relationship - which is typified by Jung as an alchemical process - a good description of which can be seen in his "Psychology of the Transference."
So it is at these times when we come to recognise something not only as "my problem", but also come to see the underlying natural and adaptive tendencies within us which give rise to it, that we add another small piece to the jigsaw puzzle of "Self". Thus, whilst it might be said that without a culture in which such conflicts might arise there would be no "natural" tendency or "need" to individuate, it is virtually impossible to isolate a situation in which human beings could live where such a condition could exist. Survival demands adaptation to both the world and others of ones kind, thus the conditions for a slowly evolving "Self" creation process are virtually guaranteed, even if this leads to little more than a conscious recognition of ones own personal needs and affects and how these are likely to affect life situations.
Whilst there is no reason to assume any unconscious teleological drive exists towards self awareness, the essential and continuing conflict between the subjective data of consciousness and the projected world of the unconscious virtually guarantees this process will begin and continue throughout a person's life. And even if it fails nine times out of ten to produce effective self knowledge, at those times when it does, the "individuation" of the person advances another small step.
This then might be seen as understanding individuation at its "nearest to natural" level, and is the first of our discriminations from Jung's descriptions of the process.
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