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We are like onions — many skins, and the real self waits underneath. This lecture from Academy of Ideas explains Carl Jung’s central idea: individuation, the lifelong process of becoming conscious of the whole personality. Jung held that our inner world is as real as the physical one, and that chasing perfection only inflates the shadow we refuse to see. The goal is not to be perfect, but to be complete. Dreams, symbols, and the slow peeling away of our social masks all point the way — and therapy, at its best, simply helps the process along.
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Far too many of us are oblivious to the dangers that some of our behavioral patterns pose to our long-term well-being.
Instead of facing up to our problems, we either try and convince ourselves that our issues are trivial and so can be ignored,
or we pretend that the problems do not exist at all.
We can only delude ourselves for so long, as eventually what were once manageable problems turn into problems of unmanageable proportions.
For this reason, Carl Jung maintained that a crucial first step towards self-improvement
is simply to become more aware of the reality of one’s situation.
Jung, however, is not unique in this respect as many philosophers and psychologists,
both past and present, share in this view.
Where he is more unique is in his belief that not only do we have to overcome our ignorance
regarding the reality of our external situation, but just as importantly,
we need to become more aware of what he called the reality of our psyche.
What most people overlook or seem unable to understand, wrote Jung,
is the fact that I regard the psyche as real.
The psyche, in Jung’s view, is not merely a byproduct of a certain configuration of matter.
Rather, the psyche is an irreducible, a priori fact of nature
that should be considered as real as the physical world
and just as impactful to our overall well-being.
Most people, however, know little of this world within.
One reason for this lack of knowledge can be attributed to our Christian heritage
and the associated belief in an omniscient God
who not only knew if we were committing bad deeds,
but also if we were thinking blasphemous thoughts.
While belief in such a God has dwindled,
there remains a tendency to repress elements of our personality
which run counter to the moral system of our day
and thus to strive for a type of moral perfectionism.
Jung was no proponent of this ideal.
Striving after perfection is like chasing after wind.
And far from making us better people, it in fact greatly hinders our development.
The more we strive for perfection, the further we fuel our dark side
and lose control over how it manifests itself in our day-to-day actions.
In addition, if we constantly repress thoughts which run counter to the dominant moral system of our society,
we will never reach the deeper layers of the psyche,
Unawareness of which can often substantially improve our lives.
One should never think that man can reach perfection, wrote Jung.
He can only aim at completion.
Not to be perfect, but to be complete.
That would be the necessity and the indispensable condition if there were any question of perfection at all.
For how can you perfect a thing if it is not complete?
Make it complete first and see what it is then.
But to make it complete is already a mountain of a task.
And by the time you arrive at absolute completion, you find that you are already dead.
And so you never reach that preliminary condition for perfecting yourself.
The task of striving toward completeness, or what is also referred to as wholeness of the personality,
was of such great importance that most of Jung’s career was dedicated to exploring this process,
a process he would eventually call individuation.
Jung did not use the term individuation until 1921.
however, the seeds of this idea reach back to his doctoral dissertation. In this dissertation titled
On the Psychology and Pathology of so-called Occult Phenomena, Jung attempted to explain his observations of a medium
who claimed to interact with spirits during seances. To account for this, Jung
hypothesized that the manifestation of these spirits was the result of splinter personalities,
which lay dormant in the unconscious mind of the medium,
but which were somehow brought to her conscious awareness by the act of the seance.
Rather than accepting that these splinter personalities emerged from within,
from the reality of her psyche,
the medium believed they were spirits manifesting themselves from a realm independent of her.
As Jung’s study of the psyche progressed,
he came to believe that the experience of this medium
was but one example of a more general phenomenon.
All of us have unconscious components which reside dormant in our psyche.
And as Yolanda Jacobi explains in her book, The Way of Individuation,
It remained Jung’s untiring scientific and psychotherapeutic endeavor to work out a methodological procedure for bringing these components to consciousness
and associating them with the ego in order to realize the greater personality which is potentially present in every individual.
It is important to note that the individuation process, according to Jung, is something that occurs naturally
and does not require any initiation by the individual.
As we age, the depth and complexity of our consciousness increases, whether we are intentionally striving for this outcome or not.
The natural individuation process, however, does not advance in a smooth and uninterrupted manner.
Rather, it often comes to a halt or develops in a way unconducive to mental health.
When this happens, it is imperative for our well-being that we reignite the process and return it to a healthy course of development.
And this, the assistance or promotion of the natural individuation process, is the main goal of Jungian psychotherapy.
A good way to understand the natural individuation process, which just happens,
and the more conscious way of individuation which Jungian psychotherapy promotes,
is to consider the analogy of the human body.
Our physical bodies grow and develop on their own, without requiring our conscious awareness.
We can, however, take a more proactive conscious stance towards our physical development.
by exercising and eating properly.
In the same manner, we can be more proactive in terms of the development of our psyche
by taking certain measures which help to accelerate the natural process of individuation.
The difference between the natural individuation process, wrote Jung,
which runs its course unconsciously, and the one which is consciously realized, is tremendous.
In the first case, consciousness nowhere intervenes.
The end remains as dark as the beginning.
In the second case, so much darkness comes to light that the personality is permeated
with light, and consciousness necessarily gains in scope and insight.
The best method to accelerate individuation is to record and analyze our dreams over an
extended period of time.
Jung was greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud’s work on dreams, but his views evolved and
eventually came to differ in fundamental ways from those of Freud.
Both Jung and Freud agreed that dreams were a product of the unconscious.
Where they were to differ, however, was in their conception of what the unconscious was
expressing through our dreams.
For Freud, wrote Robert Hauptge, the dream was a psychological mechanism that functioned
to preserve sleep, by expressing and thereby discharging unacceptable unconscious wishes
in disguised form.
It was Freud’s claim that dreams are disguised expressions of the unconscious, which Jung
found untenable.
Dreams according to Jung are not hiding anything, rather they are undisguised and spontaneous
symbolic representations of the unconscious or as he wrote our dreams are like windows
that allow us to look in or to listen in to that psychological process which is continually going
on in our unconscious the reason many people have trouble making sense of their dreams is because
they do not understand the language of the unconscious mind which is purely symbolic
in his attempt to decipher the symbolic language jung noticed a remarkable similarity between the
symbols expressed in the dreams of many of his patients and those found in the mythologies
of cultures past and present.
To account for such similarities, Jung proposed that the unconscious mind contains transpersonal
or universal elements which are heritable and the product of one’s biology, not their
personal experience.
The commonality in symbols found in dreams of different people and in myths of cultures
past and present, can be attributed to the fact that they are manifestations of these
identical psychic structures common to all, which Jung would call archetypes.
The word archetype in Greek means prime imprinter, and as a colleague of Jung’s Aniela Halfa
explained,
With respect to manuscripts, the word archetype denotes the original, the basic form for later
copies.
In psychology, archetypes represent the patterns of human life, the specificity of man.
therefore, is the process whereby one becomes increasingly conscious of the symbolic manifestations
of the archetypes, thus gaining knowledge of the timeless patterns of human life. This
knowledge is of great value, for it provides us with an awareness that many of our problems
are not unique to us, but common to all of humanity. Simply knowing that we are not alone
in our suffering can often have a therapeutic effect, as it provides us with a new perspective.
What on a lower level, wrote Jung, had led to the wildest conflicts and to panicky outbursts
of emotion now looks like a storm in the valley seen from the mountaintop.
This does not mean that the storm is robbed of its reality, but instead of being in it,
one is above it.
For those who wish to begin on the conscious path of individuation, the first step is always
the same.
We must, as Jung put it, divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona.
The persona is the social mask we wear to fit into society.
This formation begins early in life as the pull of conformity causes us to identify most
strongly with elements of our personality which are in harmony with the social values
of our day, while rejecting those that clash with social norms.
The problem, however, is that many people reach a point where they believe they are
the social mask they wear, and in so doing they cut themselves off from the deeper realms
of the psyche.
It is imperative, therefore, for anyone who wishes to take the conscious path of individuation
to accept that their social mask represents but a sliver of their total personality, for as Jung explains,
functions as an influence against true individuation. It is a most painful procedure to tear off those veils.
But each step forward in psychological development means just that, the tearing off of a new veil.
We are like onions with many skins and we have to peel ourselves again and again in order to get at the real core.
Source: Academy of Ideas