What is individuation?
Individuation is the process by which a person becomes distinct from the collective and, at the same time, more genuinely themselves.
Jung meant something specific and slightly counterintuitive by it. Not self-improvement, and not the achievement of some finished, superior version of yourself. Individuation is the gradual integration of the parts of the psyche that have been left out: what was disowned to make you acceptable, what was never developed because there was no room for it, and what has been quietly living in the shadow while the persona did the work of getting on in the world.
The aim is not to become someone else. It is to stop being only the part of yourself that was permitted.
What individuation means, more precisely
The word comes from the Latin individuus: undivided, indivisible.
That is the clue to the whole idea. Individuation does not mean becoming an individual in the sense of standing apart from other people, though it is often misread that way. It means becoming undivided: the parts of a person that have been split off, denied or projected onto others gradually brought back into one working whole.
Jung’s term for the organising centre of that whole was the Self, which he distinguished carefully from the ego. The ego is what you take yourself to be. The Self is the larger totality, most of which is unconscious. Individuation is the ego’s long and often unwilling negotiation with it.
He was clear that this is never completed. There is no point at which a person becomes individuated and stops. It is a direction of travel, not a destination, and anyone claiming to have arrived has almost certainly stopped.
Why it usually begins with a crisis
Individuation rarely starts because someone decides to begin it.
Jung’s observation, and it has held up in practice, was that the first half of life has a different task from the second. The first half is about building: a competence, a position, a family, an identity that works. That work requires leaving things out. Anything that did not fit the project was set aside, and setting it aside was appropriate.
The second half presents the bill.
Typically it arrives as something going wrong: a midlife crisis, a depression that has no obvious cause, a marriage that has emptied out, a career reaching its ceiling and revealing nothing behind it. The symptom is not the problem. The symptom is the announcement that the arrangement has stopped supplying meaning, and that what was left out is now asking for something.
This is why individuation and crisis are so often confused. The crisis is not individuation. It is the door.
What the process actually involves
There is no fixed sequence, and any account that presents one is tidier than the reality. But certain encounters recur.
The persona is recognised as a persona. The professional self, the capable self, the person other people describe, is seen as something worn rather than something you are. This is disorienting rather than liberating at first.
The shadow is met. The qualities you cannot stand in other people turn out to be the ones you have refused in yourself. This is the least comfortable part and the one most often abandoned.
The anima or animus is engaged. The contrasexual element in the psyche, which has usually been living entirely in projection onto partners, is gradually withdrawn and related to internally.
The Self begins to organise. Not as an experience of arrival, but as a change in what the person is oriented by. Decisions start to be taken on a different basis, and often a less comfortable one.
Alongside all of it: dreams become material rather than noise, symbols start to carry weight, and synchronicities tend to cluster around the periods of greatest movement.
What individuation is not
It is not individualism. The undivided person is more capable of genuine relationship, not less. Jung was explicit that individuation makes a person more able to be in a collective, because they are no longer unconsciously merged with it.
It is not self-actualisation in the popular sense. There is nothing optimistic about the shadow. A great deal of individuation consists of accepting things about yourself that you would rather not have found.
It is not achieved by insight. Understanding the concept changes nothing. Jung was scathing about people who could describe their complexes fluently and had been altered by none of it.
It is not a young person’s project. Attempting it before the first half’s work is done tends to produce someone who has skipped a stage rather than completed one.
Individuation in analysis
This is the process Jungian analysis is organised around, and it is what distinguishes it from therapies aimed at symptom relief.
The work is slow, usually long, and typically conducted at a frequency that allows the unconscious to become part of the conversation rather than an occasional visitor. Dreams are taken seriously. So is what happens between analyst and analysand, since the relationship is where the material becomes visible in the present tense.
It is not the right approach for everyone, and it is not the right approach for every problem. Where someone needs a specific difficulty resolved, something more focused will serve them better and faster.
Where it is the right approach is the situation Jung described: a person who has managed their life competently and has arrived at the point where competence is no longer enough.
The Jungian Confrerie is the practice of Dr Philippe Jacquet, analyst, supervising analyst and training analyst of the Association of Jungian Analysts, offering Jungian analysis in central London and online worldwide.