Carl Gustav Jung
The
way in which the famous Swiss psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung, descries
this notion in his work "Dialectics of the Ego and the Unconscious",
published in 1933, shows that it is not something that can be apprehended
mentally, but is indeed only to be grasped through an experience.
"There exists a way, a possibility of going beyond the psychological,
mental and human stages described in the first part of this work, namely,
individuation. Individuation signifies striving towards becoming a truly
individual being, and inasmuch as by individuality we mean the innermost
uniqueness, our ultimate, irrevocable form of unicity, in fact this is to be
interpreted as the Realisation of the Self in its most personal form, defying
all comparison. The word ‘individuation’ could therefore be translated as
‘Realisation of oneself’, ‘Realisation of one’s Self’."
"The sole aim of individuation is to free the Self from the layers of
falsity covering the persona (ego) on the one hand, and from the suggestive
force of unconscious images on the other. This process naturally brings us
back to our self as something existant and alive that is trapped between two
worlds, between the images and the fields of energy coming from two
directions."
"This something, which is ourselves as a whole, is at the same time so
close and so far from us that it remains unknowable, like a virtual centre of
such mysterious disposition that it is entitled to formulate the most
contradictory demands, and may claim to be related to animals or to gods, to
minerals or to stars, without even prompting astonishment or reprobation on
our part."
"This famous ‘something’ makes all these demands and there is no
way we could legitimately justify rejecting them; we even have a lot to gain
from listening to them."
"I have called this famous centre of the personality the Self. From an
intellectual point of view, the Self is nothing but a psychological concept, a
construction which expresses an entity that remains unknowable to us, an
essence that we are unable to grasp because it is beyond our understanding, as
is implied by its definition. The Self could also be called "God within
us". It is from there that our psychic life seems to have sprung, right
from the very beginning, and it is in that direction that all the supreme,
ultimate goals in life seem to strive. Such a paradox is inevitable, as it is
every time that Man endeavours to think up a mental definition for something
that goes beyond his reasoning power."
"Once one has succeeded in perceiving the Self as something
irrational, which Is, while remaining indefinable, which the ego is neither
opposed nor submitted to, but which it is adjoined to and revolves round, as
it were, just as the Earth revolves around the Sun, then the aim of
individuation has been accomplished."
"I can say nothing to convince anyone who has not experienced this for
himself," says Jung, and again, "No-one can really understand this
data until he has experienced this for himself."
*Persona, or ego: In the theatre of Antiquity, the word ‘persona’
denotes the mask worn by the actors. Jung writes: "The persona is a
system of adaptation by means of which we communicate with the world. Each
condition, each profession, for example, is characterised by its own ‘persona’
… But the danger is that we identify with our persona. It can be said,
therefore, that the persona is not what someone really is, but what he, and
other people, think he is."
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