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Concept

Individuation

Jung’s term for the lifelong process by which a person becomes a distinct, undivided whole, differentiated from collective norms and from the unconscious alike. Defined in 1921, developed from 1928, and the frame within which every archetype is said to be met.

One point sets out at the rim and circles inward, never straight at the centre. Its wandering is mirrored as it goes, and a mandala assembles out of a single path.

What was written

Definition

Individuation is the process Jung proposed as the goal of psychological development: becoming the particular person one is, as a whole that includes the unconscious, rather than an ego identified with its conscious contents or a copy of the group. He derived the word from the idea of the indivisible. In 1939 he put it as simply as he ever did: by individuation he meant the psychological process that makes a human being an individual, a unique, indivisible unit or whole.

The term is the frame for the rest of his vocabulary. The persona is what must be seen through, the shadow what must be acknowledged, the anima or animus what must be withdrawn from projection, and the Self the centre that the process circles. Entries on this site that describe those figures describe them as stages or figures within individuation, which is how Jung presented them. Whether such a process exists, in the sense that could be studied, is not something any of the literature has tested; it is a clinical and interpretive frame.

History

The definition appears in the glossary of Psychological Types (1921). There individuation is the process of forming and specialising the individual nature, the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology (CW 6 ¶757). A second sentence in the same entry ties it to the growth of consciousness out of an original state of identity, the non-differentiation of subject and object (CW 6 ¶762).

Jung’s most quoted statement comes from the second of the Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928):

Individuation means becoming a single, homogeneous being, and, in so far as “individuality” embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self. We could therefore translate individuation as “coming to selfhood” or “self-realization”. — C. G. Jung, “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” (1928), CW 7 ¶266, as quoted in Stevens (2003)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The 1930s Eranos lectures, published in English in 1939 as The Integration of the Personality, open with a chapter called “The Meaning of Individuation” and set out the shift that drives it: the ego, once taken for the whole of the personality, is dethroned and left as the centre of consciousness only, while the whole must now include the unconscious. The two lectures on dream symbols and on alchemy from the same volume were expanded into Psychology and Alchemy (1944), where a long dream series is read as a record of the process.

Post-Jungian schools differ on when individuation happens. The classical Zürich reading places it in the second half of life. Michael Fordham, in London, argued that the differentiation from collective psychology that Jung’s 1921 definition describes begins in infancy, with the primary self deintegrating and reintegrating from birth, so that individuation is lifelong and its first stages are concluded by about the age of two (Samuels, 1985). Mario Jacoby (1990) set the concept against Kohut’s self psychology. Whether individuation is a universal developmental task or a culturally specific ideal of the autonomous person is an open question in the literature, and critics from within analytical psychology have raised it.

Sources

  • Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychological Types. CW 6 ¶757–762 (Definitions, “Individuation”).
  • Jung, C. G. (1928). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7 ¶266, as quoted in Stevens (2003).
  • Jung, C. G. (1939). The Integration of the Personality (S. Dell, Trans.). Farrar & Rinehart. Chapter 1, “The Meaning of Individuation”. Chapters 3–5 were revised into CW 9i ¶1–86 and CW 12.
  • Jung, C. G. (1944). Psychology and Alchemy. CW 12. Editorial note on the Eranos lectures of 1935 and 1936.
  • Samuels, A. (1985). Jung and the Post-Jungians. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-05904-6. Chapter 4 on Fordham and the Developmental School.
  • Stevens, A. (2003). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9. Glossary, “Individuation”.
  • Jacoby, M. (1990). Individuation and Narcissism: The Psychology of Self in Jung and Kohut. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-06464-4.