Individuation means that the entire personality is able to grow and express its own uniqueness. The first goal in therapy, as in life, is to get to know these aspects of the personality.
As a person becomes more aware of his or her unique differences a greater self-awareness is born. This, in turns, leads to greater appreciation and tolerance of differences in others.
Self-Growth and the Ego
Each aspect of the personality — ego, self, persona, shadow, archetype — has a necessary task. But it is only as the personality becomes fully conscious of its various parts that it performs sufficiently. Take the ego, for example.
For the ego not to remain in a more primitive state, it must become fully individuated. Young children move from the undifferentiated state of wholeness to one in which the ego begins to stake out its claim. This primitive state of ego development begins the necessary "terrible twos" that parents are so in the habit of disparaging.
For the ego to develop and become more civilized, a child must be educated and given a full exposure of ideas. To achieve this best, the child is exposed to a sufficient variety of ideas, cultures, and ways of viewing the world through the arts and sciences.
The more experiences a growing child is exposed to, the more likely it is that this child will develop an ego that can be supple yet strong, creating an individual yet cooperative person that can easily live within the larger society.
The Shadow and Individual Traits
Likewise, the shadow or shadows in the personality must be allowed to be individuated.
If the shadow material is not acknowledged but is instead repressed, a part of the personality is also repressed. This makes the shadow material that much more potentially hazardess when it bursts through as it always will.
No aspect of the personality can be shut down forever. Whatever in the personality is not consciously recognized will always burst through and mostly in negative ways.
This is illustrated by the child brought up to only express the conventions of his or her society, religion, and culture. This child will grow into an adult that has not found out who it is outside the boundaries of this closed society. Thus, the child becomes a person that's out of touch with even his or her own basic tendencies, dreams, wishes. There has been no individuation.
Social Personality and the Persona
Instead there will be an overly developed persona, called an inflated persona. A person with an inflated persona operates with all the social niceties and strategies for success within that culture (however success is defined) but will lack a certain spontaneity, an ability to let go the controls. Their behavior will seem unnaturally rigid and lacking in zest or authenticity.
Individuation is never truly finished; it can take a lifetime. One is always being asked by one's own self, that guiding light of the personality, to know itself more clearly. Only as the personality begins to know itself, to recognize its own behaviors as expressions of distinct aspect of the personality, can it become fully mature.
Until the persona has reached a mature state, grown adults can behave in a manner that's more in line with infants and children than they themselves could ever realize. Many people can be taken in by this lack of development or individuation just because in a societal way their behavior can appear so together. But beneath the surface of this personal veneer there exists a very underdeveloped ego, shadow, and all the rest that makes up a personality.
Source:
- Hall, Calvin S. & Nordby, Vernon J. (1973). A Primer of Jungian Psychology. New York: Penguin.
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