What is individuation?

Carl Jung, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Carl Jung answers

Individuation is the process by which a human being becomes what he most deeply is — not a specimen of a type, not a reflection of collective expectation, but the particular, unrepeatable form that his nature was always tending toward.1 I have called it, equivalently, coming to selfhood or self-realization, and the name matters: it is not the inflation of the ego but the fulfilment of the whole person, including those depths that the ego neither owns nor governs.

The confusion that most persistently dogs the concept is its equation with individualism, and I want to be precise about why that equation is wrong.2 Individualism is a deliberate emphasis on one's own peculiarities against collective life — a posture, often a pose. Individuation is something altogether different: it is the fuller realization of those universal human factors that happen, in each person, to be combined in a unique way.3

Every human face has a nose and two eyes; the universality of the elements does not prevent the infinite variability of the face. It is the same with the psyche. The individual is not opposed to the collective because he is, at his foundations, built from collective material; what individuation achieves is not separation but a peculiar and irreplaceable combination of what is already universal.4

There is a further precision, equally important. Individuation cannot be the first goal of psychological education, and I have been explicit on this point.5 Before the individual path can be walked, the person must have achieved the minimum adaptation to collective standards that makes any life in the world possible — a plant must be able to grow in the soil before it can unfold its particular character.

The individual way is never a norm, and when someone attempts to raise it into one, that is not individuation but pathology, the extreme individualism that is opposed to life itself.6 What individuation does produce, paradoxically, is a deeper solidarity with the collective, not a retreat from it.7 A society of individuals who have been levelled to a collective standard at the cost of their particular nature is not a healthy society; the mutilation of individuality injures the whole.8

The person who has genuinely individuated comes to a natural appreciation of the collective norm, whereas the person whose life is entirely moulded by that norm grows increasingly indifferent to it — and there, I have written plainly, real morality goes to pieces.9 The process is bound up with what I call the transcendent function — the capacity of the psyche to hold opposites in tension and produce from that tension a new orientation that neither pole alone could have reached.10

Without it, the individual line of development that individuation requires would be unattainable by any road the collective norm could provide.

Sources

  1. Individuation means to become a single, discrete being, and, inasmuch as the concept individuality embraces that innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness of our being, it also includes the idea of becoming one's own real self.
    Chapter I
  2. This misunderstanding is quite general, and it arises from the fact that not enough distinction is made between individualism and individuation.
    Chapter I
  3. Individualism is a purposeful attempt to stress and make conspicuous some ostensible peculiarity, in opposition to collective considerations and obligations. But individuation means precisely a better and more complete fulfilment of the collective dispositions of mankind.
    Chapter I
  4. the uniqueness of an individual must not be understood as a mere strangeness, or singularity of his substance or components, but rather as a peculiar combination of elements, or as a gradual differentiation of functions and capacities which in themselves are universal.
    Chapter I
  5. Under no circumstances can individuation be the unique goal of psychological education. Before individuation can be taken for a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective standards must first be attained.
    Psychological Types
  6. An actual conflict with the collective norm takes place only when an individual way is raised to a norm, which, moreover, is the fundamental aim of extreme individualism. Such a purpose is, of course, pathological and entirely opposed to life.
    Psychological Types
  7. Since the individual is not only a single, separate being, but, by his very existence, also presupposes a collective relationship, the process of individuation must clearly lead to a more intensive and universal collective solidarity, and not to mere isolation.
    Chapter II
  8. a social group consisting of deformed individuals cannot for long be a healthy and prosperous institution; since only that society which can preserve its internal union and its collective values, while at the same time granting the greatest possible freedom to the individual, has any prospect of enduring vitality.
    Psychological Types
  9. individuation leads to a natural appreciation of the collective norm, whereas to an exclusively collective orientation of life the norm becomes increasingly superfluous: whereupon real morality goes to pieces. The more completely a man's life is moulded and shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality.
    Psychological Types
  10. The psychological process of individuation is clearly bound up with the so-called transcendent function, since it alone can provide that individual line of development which would be quite unattainable upon the ways dictated by the collective norm.
    Psychological Types