J. Glenn Friesen, Jung and Western Mysticism
D. False Individuation
There has not been enough discussion in Jungian psychology of false ways in which we attempt to individuate. Note: Jolande Jacobi’s book The Psychology of C. G. Jung contains two plates (17 and 18) showing false and true conjunctio.
Here are some important distinctions to be kept in mind in determining what is true and what is false individuation:
(1) Individuation is not a descent to the instinctual. To descend to the instinctual merely strengthens the ego, and deals only with matters on the periphery. In his lectures on Kundalini yoga, Jung says that after the descent, and the strengthening of the ego, we start the ascent.
(2) Individuation is not individualism. This is the prevalent view of individuation—that we are all separate individuals, and that Jungian analysis will allow us to separate out from the rest of humanity, the other individuals. This is a view of individuation that either denies the center or gives priority to the periphery, denying the idea of totality.33
Jung says:
Individuation is not that you become an ego — you would then become an individualist. You know, an individualist is a man who did not succeed in individuating. He is a philosophically distilled egotist (Kundalini, 39).
The Self is our life’s goal, for it is the completest expression of that fateful combination we call individuality (“Two Essays on Analytical Psychology,” CW 7, par. 404).
(3) Individuation is not eccentricity, although that is James Hillman’s view:
The goal of my therapy is eccentricity, which grows out of the Jungian notion of individuation. Jung says, “You become what you are.” And nobody is square. We all have, as the Swiss say, “a corner knocked off.” 34
(4) Individuation does not mean separation from others
In Psychological Types, the definition of individuation seems at first to say that individuation is individualistic. Jung says that everything that is not collective is individual and individuation is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology. It is a process of differentiation. (Psychological Types, CW 6, par 757).
And yet the same definition says,
As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation.
In his lectures on Kundalini, Jung comments on a man who sees another couple, and he identifies with the other man.
Yet he has an inkling that he is in a peculiar way identical with him, that man is himself continuing life; he is not cast aside. For his substance is not only his personal self but the substance of that young man, too. (Kundalini, 48).
And on the next page he says,
…this extended consciousness knows not only “That is Thou” but more than that—every tree, every stone, every breath of air, every rat’s tail—all that is yourself; there is nothing that is not yourself.
The ascent towards the center and towards Totality therefore brings us into greater connection with others.
(5) Individuation does not mean the development of some private morality. We must first attain to a minimum of the collective norms:
Under no circumstances can individuation be the sole aim of psychological education. Before it can be taken as a goal, the educational aim of adaptation to the necessary minimum of collective norms must first be attained (Psychological Types, CW 6, para. 760.).
But the attainment of such collective norms is not an unthinking adherence to morality:
The ability to “will otherwise” must, unfortunately, be real if ethics are to make any sense at all. Anyone who submits to the law from the start, or to what is generally expected, acts like the man in the parable who buried his talent in the earth. Individuation is an exceedingly difficult task: it always involves a conflict of duties, whose solution requires us to understand that our “counter will” is also an aspect of God’s will. (“A Psychological Approach to the Dogma of the Trinity,” CW 11, para. 292).
And Jung says we should not attempt to live beyond the opposites.35
(6) Individuation is not to be understood in terms of Hillman’s polytheistic archetypal psychology.
James Hillman misunderstands Jung, or tries to reinterpret him in a way contrary to Jung’s intent. Jung emphasizes the self. Hillman does not use the idea of the self, but rather temporal expressions of the ego. This is looking at the temporal periphery, the conflicting complexes. Hillman’s archetypal psychology assumes that these complexes are ultimate in their diversity. He denies their unity.
Jung’s emphasis is unity in a diversity, a unity that expresses itself in diversity. Hillman’s views do not emphasize Totality, but rather temporal multiplicity. This gives rise to Hillman’s polytheistic use of archetypes. But Jung warns against this. He says that we
…are not to project the one light of highest consciousness into concretized figures and dissolve it into a plurality of autonomous fragmentary systems. (Commentary on Golden Flower, CW 13, para. 50).
In para 55 of that same text, he explains how these fragmentary systems come into being.
[Actual psychic personalities] are “real” when they are not recognized as real and consequently projected; they are relatively real when brought into relationship with consciousness in a cult. Unreal when consciousness detaches itself from its contents. That happens only when life has been lived so exhaustively and with such devotion that no obligations remain unfulfilled and no desires that cannot safely be sacrificed stand in the way of inner detachment from the world.
Maureen B. Roberts criticizes Hillman’s views:
Hillman is accordingly, I suggest, setting up a straw Jung when he attempts to pit his ideology of multiple soul against Jung’s focus on wholeness, particularly as it is symbolized in the mandala. The mandala, after all, is not an image of undivided unity but rather one of totality, in which opposing forces at the circumference are reconciled in the still centre. As such, neither circumferential multiplicity nor core unity are privileged; instead they both thrive through creative tension in a compensatory relationship. Such wholism as ‘unity-in-diversity’ is not – as Hillman at times seems to suggest it is – Jung’s pet philosophy, since as Jung (based on his immense experience) takes great pains to stress, mandalas arise in nature and are dreamed, drawn, danced, or enacted spontaneously, particularly by individuals in crisis or conflict situations. (A notable example is mandalas drawn by chronic sufferers of schizophrenia, in which a fragmented central area is counterbalanced by an ordered circumference).
A more feasible opposition, I suggest, is that between integration (i.e. ‘individuation’) as the conscious cooperation, mediated by the central Self, between multiple or opposing soul-parts, and the kind of pathological dissociation which occurs, for example, in Multiple Personality Disorder [MPD], debilitating schizophrenia, and destructive psychoses, all conditions in which splinter personalities are unaware of or hostile.36
(7) Individuation is not just becoming more conscious. For consciousness is related to the ego, to the periphery.
In his Ascona lectures, “The Meaning of Individuation” Jung says that we cannot ever integrate unconscious into consciousness:
Coming now to the problem of individuation, we see that we are confronted with a rather extraordinary task: the psyche consists of two incongruous halves that should properly make “whole” together. One is inclined to think that the ego-consciousness is capable of assimilating and integrating the unconscious; one hopes, at least, that such a solution is possible. But, unfortunately, the unconscious is really unconscious; it is unknown. And how can you assimilate something unknown? Even if one has a pretty complete idea of his anima and of other such figures, he has not yet sounded the depths of the unconscious. One hopes to dominate the unconscious, but the past masters of this art of domination the yogis-wind up with samadhi, an ecstatic condition that seems to be equivalent to an unconscious state. The fact that they call our unconscious the universal consciousness, does not change things in the least: in their case the unconscious has devoured the ego-consciousness. They do not realize that a “universal” consciousness is a contradiction in terms, since exclusiveness, selection, and discrimination are the root and essence of all that can claim the name of consciousness.
The conscious mind does not embrace the totality of a man, for this totality consists only partly of his conscious contents. (CW 11, par. 390).
and
A “universal” consciousness is logically identical with unconsciousness. It is true that an accurate application of the methods of the Pali-canon, or of the Yogasutra, produces a remarkable extension of consciousness. But the contents of consciousness lose in clearness of detail with increasing extension. In the end, consciousness becomes vast but dim, with an infinite multitude of objects merging into an indistinct totality-a state in which the subjective and objective are almost completely identical. This is all very well, but scarcely to be recommended anywhere north of the Tropic of Cancer.
Ray Harris sees confusion here. Jung says individuation involves making ‘unconscious contents’ conscious. In other words, translating the unconscious into a ‘rational’ understanding whereby the ego can ‘control’ the psyche. Spiritual practice on the other hand involves surrendering the ego and rationality to the higher levels of consciousness, allowing the ego and rationality to be transcended and included in a higher order. It involves retranslating rational translations of the archetypes into higher translations yet again, until the archetypes are experienced in their causal purity and finally dissolved into Emptiness.
In Harris’s view, the confusion arises because of an inability to distinguish between the ‘pre’ aspects of the archetypes calling for integration, and the ‘trans’ aspects calling for transformation.
(8) Individuation does not mean “following your bliss.” That idea comes from Joseph Campbell, who takes a very individualistic view of individuation, and who refers to the entitlement, uniqueness and choice that characterize our culture:
This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s.37
But this idea of following one’s bliss ignores Jung’s emphasis on the terribly difficult nature of individuation, and its nature as a cross of conflicting opposites that need to be brought into a unity.
(9) Nor is individuation becoming a well-rounded person. Campbell gives the example of a baseball player making a speech, and being confident. And he compares this person to a professor, too caught up in books, terrible presentation. But individuation is not just becoming an all-American person who can win friends and influence people. It is a spiritual process.
Joseph Campbell is an example of someone who does not distinguish archetypes as to levels of consciousness.
He relates stories of a hero dying in order for life to appear. In the PBS series by Bill Moyers, Campbell refers to a ritual in New Guinea, where he says they really enact the myth of death and resurrection.38 In the initiation of young boys into manhood, there is a five-day ritual of drumming and chanting. The rituals are boring, and wear you out until you break through into something else.
Then he says comes the great moment. They build a great shed of enormous logs, supported by two uprights. Then a young woman, ornamented as a deity, is brought in and made to lie down. With drumming and chanting, six boys were permitted their first public intercourse. The last boy comes in, and with her in full embrace, the supports are withdrawn, the logs drop, and the couple are killed. He says this is the union of male and female as they were in the beginning, begetting and death. The pair are pulled out, roasted and eaten that evening. Campbell then says, “You can’t beat that. That’s the sacrifice of the Mass.” When I first heard Campbell say this, I lost my respect for his ideas.
To be fair to Campbell, he also says,
The bliss of pure Self can unfold only to an Imagination that has been clarified and made steady, as the result of constantly practiced meditation. He who has experienced in himself this bliss, is “Redeemed in this life”39
But because Campbell does not distinguish between the pre-personal and the transpersonal archetypes, he cannot give direction here.
I agree that in some sense, the stages of individuation can be seen as a hero’s journey. But the stages are not to be understood as a temporal heroics. There is a relation to and from the supratemporal. And that is supported by what Jung says about the hero:
. . . if a man is a hero, he is a hero because, in the final reckoning, he did not let the monster devour him, but subdued it, not once but many times. Victory over the collective psyche alone yields the true value—the capture of the hoard, the invincible weapon, the magic talisman, or whatever it be that the myth deems most desirable. Anyone who identifies with the collective psyche—or, in mythological terms, lets himself be devoured by the monster—and vanishes in it, attains the treasure that the dragon guards, but he does so in spite of himself and to his own greatest harm. (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, CW 7, para. 261).
But we can ask whether the hero or warrior is really an archetype? Certainly the hero is a symbol, and used in myth. But are all myths, all symbols, really archetypes?
With the birth of the symbol, the regression of libido into the unconscious ceases. Regression is converted into progression, the blockage starts to flow again, and the lure of the maternal abyss is broken. (Psychological Types, CW 6, para. 445).
Jung says of the hero,
The myth of the hero… is first and foremost a self-representation of the longing of the unconscious, of its unquenched and unquenchable desire for the light of consciousness. But consciousness, continually in a danger of being led astray by its own light and of becoming a rootless will o’ the wisp, longs for the healing power of nature, for the deep wells of being and for unconscious communion with life in all its countless forms. (“The Origin of the Hero,” Symbols of Transformation, CW 8, para. 29).
Similarly, with all the other popular presentations of so-called archetypes: the warrior within us, the king, the wise old man, the trickster, the magician, etc. If these are understood in a purely temporal way, they will lead not to individuation, but to individualization.
I am not sure who is most to blame for this. But we find it in many people who claim to be following Jung. People like Joseph Campbell. Or Hillman’s polytheistic archetypal psychology. Or Thomas Moore, who follows Hillman in his influential book Care of the Soul. Or the feminist use of the idea in Women Who Run with the Wolves. In all of these cases, Jung’s words are used in a totally temporal way, ignoring the relation to a supratemporal selfhood and Totality.
(10) Individuation is not Identification with the Self
We should not suppose that self-realization means being lost in or swallowed up by some greater reality (which might be suggested by the Indian image of a drop of water rejoining the ocean). Nor does self-realization mean being swamped by the unconscious. That would be a state of psychosis, a state of ‘possession.’ Rather, it means that a person is now fully conscious, but now realizes that ‘his’ consciousness is also the consciousness that is everywhere, in all things (what in mystic-meditative traditions is sometimes referred to as ‘cosmic consciousness’).
Identification with the Self (the idea that I am God, I am Brahman), leads to inflation. Jung distinguishes between the God-image and God. He says that we should not identify with the Self or God; rather, we should hold to the idea that “Christ lives within us.”
And he says,
But again and again I note that the individuation process is confused with the coming of the ego into consciousness and that the ego is in consequence identified with the self, which naturally produces a hopeless conceptual muddle. (Glossary, Memories, Dreams, Reflections).
This will be discussed in more detail in Lecture 3.
E. True Individuation
(1) True individuation involves going beyond ego
We have seen how Jung distinguishes between Self and ego. The temporal ego is not our psyche or Self. Jung says that the only criterion of individuation is that it must be a transformation where one goes beyond one’s ego:
The goal [of psychotherapy] is transformation–not one that is predetermined, but rather an indeterminable change, the only criterion of which is the disappearance of egohood. (Foreword to Zen Buddhism, CW 11, para. 904).
But he goes on to say in the same paragraph:
…it frequently happens with us also that a conscious ego and a cultivated understanding must first be produced through analysis before one can even think about abolishing egohood or rationalism.
Our ego is subordinate to the Self. Or, said the other way, the Self is superordinate to the ego.40
And so this further stage of individuation involves “articulating one’s ego-consciousness with a supraordinate totality.” (CW 11, para. 276). In this, we experience a non-ego that has the conscious mind as its object. Another subject appears in place of our ego. Jung refers to St. Paul’s words in Gal. 2:20, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” (Foreword to “Introduction to Zen Buddhism,” CW 11, para. 892).
If you function in your self you are not yourself; as if you were a stranger; buy as if you did not buy. St. Paul: But it is not I that lives, it is Christ that liveth in me.
There is a breakthrough to a “knowledge of the knower.” “Such a passion is practically indistinguishable from the driving force of religion; consequently this whole problem belongs to the religious transformation process, which is incommensurable with intellect.” (“Introduction to Zen Buddhism,” CW 11, para. 892).
There is a new centre of gravity of the total personality:
It is then no longer in the ego, which is merely the centre of consciousness, but in the hypothetical point between conscious and unconscious. This new centre might be called the self. (Commentary on Golden Flower, CW 13, para. 67).
Individuation is becoming that thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange.
Therefore nobody understands what the self is, because the self is just the thing which you are not, which is not the ego. The ego discovers itself as being a mere appendix of the self in a sort of loose connection. (Kundalini, 39).
Toni Wolff has been quoted as saying:
The recognition and careful observation of non-personal psychical factors entails and leads to a sacrifice of the ego—not in the form of an abolition, but in the form of a renunciation of its supremacy. It is no longer possible always to say: I want, I decide, I do, and so on, because it is evident that things happen to me, which are decided for me, and that factors other than the conscious “I” do or think in me. The ego is the vehicle for these other factors and it is responsible for them; but their roots are not in it but in the larger psyche. This is an attitude comparable to that of St. Paul when he says (Gal., ii, 20): “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me”; and it is certainly an attitude which can be called religious. It is, in a way, a kind of death of the ego and is often represented in dreams. This entails a deliberate renunciation of the hitherto dominating position of the ego, the conscious person as I know myself to be.41
(2) In true individuation, we see differently
It is not that something different is seen, but that one sees differently. It is as though the spatial act of seeing were changed by a new dimension. (“Introduction to Zen Buddhism,” CW 11, para. 891).
(3) Individuation is an experience of the awakening of the gods
Jung says that the situation of modern European consciousness is where man seems to be the only active power, and the gods, the impersonal, non-ego powers are doing practically nothing. But in the awakening experience, one starts a world which is a world of eternity, totally different from our world. We could not possibly judge this world if we had not also a standpoint outside, and that is given by the symbolism of religious experiences. (Kundalini, 23, 26, 27).
(4) Individuation begins in our heart center
Individuation begins in the heart, or what Kundalini yoga refers to as anahata. This is the first notion of the self, of the absolute center, the substance to which life is related (Kundalini, 39, 85). We become aware of something that is not ourself. Jung refers to this by the Hindu term purusha, by which he means a small figure that is the divine self, not identical with mere causality; our essence thought and value.
This is the beginning of individuation:
That is the first inkling of a being within your psychological or psychical existence that is not yourself—a being in which you are contained, which is greater and more important than you but which has an entirely psychical existence (Kundalini, 45).
This is the mystical union, unio mystica, with the power of God, meaning that absolute reality where one is nothing but psychic reality, yet confronted with the psychic reality that one is not. And that is God. God is the eternal psychical object. God is simply a word for the non-ego. (Kundalini, 56).
And this fact, that the psychic reality is what one is not, is why Jung calls this ‘psychic objectivity.’ “My term for the process which tantric yoga calls the awakening of Kundalini is psychic objectivity.” (Kundalini, 93).
Individuation is becoming that thing which is not the ego, and that is very strange. Therefore nobody understands what the self is, because the self is just the thing which you are not, which is not the ego. The ego discovers itself as being a mere appendix of the self in a sort of loose connection. For the ego is always far down in muladhara and suddenly becomes aware of something up above in the fourth story, in anahata, and that is the self. …The purusha is a symbol that expresses impersonal processes. The self is something exceedingly impersonal, exceedingly objective. If you function in your self you are not the ego — that is what you feel. …As St. Paul expresses it, “It is not I that live, it is Christ that liveth in me,” meaning that his life had become an objective life, not his own life but the life of a greater one, the purusha (Kundalini, 40).
In individuation, our consciousness separates from objects and ego to another center:
Individuation begins with the self severing itself as unique from the objects and the ego. As if consciousness separated from the objects and from the ego and emigrated to the non-ego to the other center, to the foreign yet originally own. (Kundalini, 83).
(5) Individuation is not for everyone.
Although Jung calls individuation an “ineluctable (not to be avoided) psychological necessity” he also says that its nature is aristocratic, and that it is available only to individuals who are predisposed to attain a higher degree of consciousness and who are called to it from the beginning.
(6) Individuation is a preparation for death.
Aniela Jaffé once said, “The psychological path of individuation is ultimately a preparation for death.”42
But why does the ego need to approach the Self, if it is to all end in death? Jung says “The psyche itself, in relation to consciousness, is pre-existent and transcendent,” while the ego is born, grows, and dies, in the same way as the body. (Development of personality, CW 17, para. 170). Jung’s supratemporal archetypal Self is probably the chief subject of disagreement with other psychologists, and one reason why mainstream materialistic psychologists fail to take him seriously. He is, however, taken seriously by today’s transpersonal psychologists.
(7) Transcendent function
The self as the centre that guides the individuation process can be referred to as the realized self, or what Jung calls the transcendent function. Why does he call it the transcendent function? I believe because it relates to the self, which really is transcendent to all our temporal functions and correlative oppositions. The transcendent function is the third that unites two opposites. It is a third viewpoint which takes into account the way things appear from both the conscious and the unconscious perspectives without being limited to either one.
Again, we must distinguish between the regressive journey downwards and the spiritual journey upwards. Jung says,
I will only say, for clarity’s sake, that there are two methods of treatment: 1. the reductive, and 2. the synthetic. The former traces everything back to primitive instincts, the latter develops the material into the process for differentiating the personal two methods are complementary, for reduction to instinct leads back to reality, indeed to an over-valuation of reality and hence to the necessity of sacrifice. The synthetic method elaborates the symbolic fantasies resulting from the introversion of libido through sacrifice.
This produces a new attitude to the world whose very difference offers a new potential. I have termed this transition to a new attitude the transcendent function. In the regenerated attitude the libido that was formerly sunk in the unconscious emerges in the form of some positive achievement it is equivalent to the renewal of life, which Eckhart symbolizes by God’s birth conversely, when the libido is withdrawn from external objects and sinks into the unconscious, the soul is born again in God.
This state, as he rightly observes, is not a blissful one, because it is a negative act, a turning away from life and a descent to the deus absconditus, who possesses qualities very different from those of the God who shines by day. (Psychological Types, CW 6, para. 427).
(8) Individuation means letting Christ live in me
This is a phrase that Jung repeats many times.
If you function in your self you are not yourself–that is what you feel. You have to do it as if you were a stranger; you will buy as if you did not buy; you will sell as if you did not sell. Or, as St. Paul expresses it, “But it is not I that lives, it is Christ that liveth in me,” meaning that his life had become an objective life, not his own life but the life of a greater one, the purusha (Kundalini, 40).
He quotes St. Paul: “Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.” (Commentary of the Golden Flower, CW 13, para. 77). And
The Self or Christ is present in everybody a priori, but as a rule in an unconscious condition to begin with. But it is a definite experience of later life, when this fact becomes conscious. It is only real when it happens, and it can happen only when you withdraw your projections from an outward historical or metaphysical Christ and thus wake up Christ within. (CW 18, para. 1638).
We have looked at the idea of individuation in relation to the philosophy of Totality, the relation of the periphery to the Center. As I mentioned, the philosophy of Totality was related to a renewed interest in the German Christian philosopher Franz von Baader. In Lecture 2 we will look at how these key ideas of Jung were anticipated by Baader. And we will make some contrasts between Baader’s theosophy and Gnosticism. ~J. Glenn Friesen, Jung and Western Mysticism, Pages 27-36
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