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Jolande Jacobi – The Way of Individuation
So when Jung speaks of an individuation process that characterizes a possibility of development immanent in everyone and that culminates in rounding out the individual into a psychic whole, his conception, though following the same line as the other philosophical definitions, is both broader and deeper, since it takes account not only of the conscious but also of the unconscious components of the psyche in their delicately balanced and creative interaction with the conscious mind.
The beginning and end of psychic life are in his view inseparable, bound together at every moment in the thousand branched stream of psychic energy which pours without cessation through all the reaches of the psyche.
In this psyche the energy is kept in a state of constant dynamic mobility by a subtle mechanism of self-regulation and compensation, balanced between tension and stagnation.
Birth and death are only two poles of a homogeneous chain of being whose individual links—the days and years of life—rise out of the mists of fate and become visible in the foreground.
These links are from the beginning determined by a common meaning, which strives ceaselessly and autonomously for realization, no matter whether they belong to the dark, unconscious side, the shadowland of the past or future, or to the daylight of the conscious present.
The meaning manifests itself as the maturation process of the psyche and has as its aim the completion of the personality through the maximal extension of its field of consciousness.
This presupposes the gradual integration of unconscious contents that are capable of becoming conscious.
The psyche is the theatre of all our struggles for development.
It is the organ of experience pure and simple.
The affirmation of these struggles is “life”; negation of them means isolation, resignation, desiccation. ~Jolande Jacobi, The Way of Individuation, Page 23-24
