Lectures on Jungian Psychology given at NRPI by Paul Watsky, Ph.D. Friday Night Lecture I September 20, 2006

  Jung’s Model of the Unconscious

and its Role in Mental Health

Who here thinks we’ve got the human mind pretty well figured out?

That psychotherapy has everything just about under control?

That psychoanalysis finally has it all down to a science?

One sign we have achieved this nirvana would be agreement about what constitutes mental health, and how to manufacture it, say the way western medicine deals with a routine broken arm, or industry produces DVD players. So how stands it with mental health? A recent check of Google using the key words mental health and definition yielded eleven specimens, including:

Mental health, mental hygiene and mental wellness are all terms used to describe the absence of mental illness.

Cool. Seems authoritative. But a different author gives us:

Mental health should not be seen as the absence of illness, but more to do with a form of subjective well being, when individuals feel that they are coping, fairly in control of their lives, able to face challenges, and take on responsibility.

OK. One of these passages says mental health is an affirmative state, that it’s a  something, the other that it’s merely the absence of mental illness. Which sounds reminiscent of medieval debates about the nature of evil: whether it’s an actual force, or merely an extreme case of the lack of good, called in Latin the privatio boni. I’ll  refrain from cheap cracks about how this puts psychological science on the same plane as metaphysics was a thousand years ago,...

But I would like to call your attention to a couple of words from that second passage, where mental health is described as a form of subjective well being, when individuals feel that they are coping, fairly in control—the words feel and fairly, which have no scientific standing whatsoever. Moreover, in one of the other definitions we encounter mental health as a relatively enduring state of being; in another as an appropriate balance between the individual, their social group, and the larger environment; and in a third as a balanced satisfaction of...drives. How can we determine objectively what is appropriate, relatively enduring, and, may God help us, balanced? Furthermore, this sample of definitions term mental health variously a function, a state, and a capacity. Mercifully one (but only one), among these eleven entries acknowledges:

Though the elements of mental health may be identifiable, the term is not easy to define. The meaning of being mentally  healthy is subject to many interpretations rooted in value judgments, which may vary across cultures.

So this is where we find ourselves, after 125 years of psychological science. (And I probably needn’t remind you that Freud and Jung considered themselves scientists.) We have vagueness and disagreement—which strongly imply ignorance. Not surprisingly, Freud and Jung each conceived of mental health differently. Those conflicts about psychological theory are colored by their dissimilar values and personalities.

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The great challenge facing Freud was to establish psychoanalysis as an intellectual domain separate from 19th century psychiatry—a medicalized province of biology—and from religion—whose mainstream version he considered reactionary institutionalized superstition, and whose street modality, spiritualism, he condemned as mass hysteria exploited by con artists. To carve out psychoanalysis required a program of boundary-setting and purification.

The spirit in which Freud developed his ideas was common among liberal intellectuals of the early 20th century: rationalistic, materialistic, poetically progressive, and optimistic regarding mankind’s cognitive potential. The result was a discipline which privileged social determinism—the chalk that inscribes the blank slate of a person’s ego. That was the decisive factor in mental health. Biology played its main role during infancy and early childhood, when an unconscious sexual drive common to all humanity prompted the developmental sequence of oral, anal, and genital phases—and culminated with physical maturity. According to Freud’s model, the unconscious— atavistic, chaotic, pleasure-seeking, impulsive, and disruptive of social order—is suited principally to making trouble. Relative to his famous dictum that mental health consists of the capacity to work and to love, the unconscious acts as an adversary: the ability to defer gratification and the mental organization necessary for productive work are ego attributes, as are the affection and altruism essential for mature love.

Jung’s ideas followed different lines, probably at least in part because he was more conservative socially and politically than Freud. Jung’s goal for the integrated conscious personality derives from the classical Greek doctrine of the golden mean— moderation in all things—by way of 19th century Swiss bourgeois culture: “Extremes should...be avoided as far as possible, because they always arouse suspicion of their opposite.” (CW vol. 7, p. 21) The unconscious, however, represents a wild card. Paradoxically, whereas the unconscious depicted by Freud is conservative in its intractable primitivity, as conceived of by Jung it has a biologically-determined prospective and compensatory orientation, i.e. it promotes psychological growth. His recognition that a misfit between one’s personal makeup and society commonly ordained lasting stress, led him to formulate a lifespan theory of psychological development, characterized by perpetual dialectical tension between states he termed “the opposites.” These deadlocks could be mediated and provisionally resolved by symbols arising from the unconscious.

 Jung disavowed wanting his followers to promulgate a Jungian brand of psychology, and he actually resisted the formation of institutes in his name. His true ambition was far grander: to develop a syncretic, generic psychology that could encompass all valid modes of psychological thought, all effective techniques of psychotherapy, and even subsume related disciplines by subjecting them to a psychological critique. He tried to erect a very big tent indeed, and died considering his life’s project to have failed.

A useful book published by Cambridge in 2003, Sonu Shamdasani’s Jung and the Making of Modern Psychotherapy, traces how Jung, quite understandably, suffered a sense of defeat. By the time Jung, who was born in 1875, had settled upon psychiatry as his medical specialty, psychology, struggling to establish itself as a discipline separate from psychiatry and philosophy, already had fragmented into conflicting theories, vocabularies, and therapy modalities, a situation, Shamdasani points out, that has only worsened up to our present day. Even before he met Freud, Jung aspired to create a metapsychology broad and flexible enough to include and reconcile partial and/or opposing systems. At a minimum, the task required he resolve scientifically four yet-to-be-conquered major conceptual problems: 1. To adapt scientific methodology so that science, fundamentally engineered to traffic in generalizations, could deal procedurally with the unique cases endemic in psychology; 2. To establish a theory of dreams which holds “universal validity”(p. 160); 3. To clarify the nature of the relationship between the body and the psyche; and 4. To provide for psychology what Shamdasani calls “the cross-cultural and trans-historical universality deemed necessary for a science.” (p. 272)

Unfortunately for Jung, when he sought to ground his psychological ideas in late 19th and early 20th century biology, anthropology, and ethnology, his philosophical and cultural conservatism inclined him to back the wrong horses—hypotheses thoroughly discredited by 1961, the year of his death: vitalism, organic memory, Ernst Haeckel’s biogenic law with its Lamarckian overtones—that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—the culture-bound Eurocentric equation of “primitive” with archaic and childlike, Levy-Bruhl’s concept of “participation mystique,” the postulate of an inherited racial fixed mental constitution. Far from reconciling disagreements, Jung unintentionally fathered yet another psychological denomination, and was sorely disappointed by that outcome.

Jung made his greatest headway with the first of the four problems, that involving unique cases. In laboratory psychology, phenomena of individual differences, such as varying reaction times, would confound scientific research. These distortions of experimental design, data collection, and interpretation were referred to as the personal equation. In truth, we can not function as if we were ideally detached uniform observers, but instead perceive and evaluate according to our varying natures. Consequently our findings reflect our idiosyncrasies and expectations. The personal equation markedly affects psychotherapy via the countertransference. Jung developed his theory of psychological types to address this dilemma.

He posited an inborn unconscious predisposition for persons to rely more on certain modes of processing their experience than on others, and organized his designated modes in three reciprocal pairs. The first dyad, introversion/extraversion, he termed attitudes, the other two axes, intuition/sensation, and thinking/feeling, he termed functions. These are the main categories of his typology. During infancy, he argued, the ego begins to differentiate out of the unconscious, from whence it acquires a preference for one or the other of the attitudes, and one of the four functions, perhaps eventually developing an auxiliary function from the other pair. As a consequence of these ego preferences, the other attitude and the reciprocals of the dominant function grow powerful in the unconscious and color its behavior. Once past early childhood we encounter our largely unconscious inferior attitude and functions through their projection onto external objects, objects to which we react with strong emotion, perhaps infatuation or hatred, usually, too, with misunderstanding.

How does this relate to the personal equation? Science abhors the individual, the unique case, because it defies generalization. Jung’s system of typology attempts to reconcile the unique specimen with the collective, the idiographic with the nomothetic. Not that in 1921, the year Jung published Psychological Types (CW vol. 6), there weren’t already various typologies and characterologies. They were proliferating, just like instinct theories, but, similarly, nobody could agree as to the actual number of types and instincts. A significant advance reflected by Jung’s system was that it was conceptually closed-ended, limited, but still flexible regarding variations, and also addressed the role of unconscious processes. The structure Jung designed reflects his conservatism, in so far as more of one attitude or function mandates less of its counterpart: if there is more differentiated, conscious feeling at the ego’s disposal, the less will there be access to conscious thinking, and the  greater the influence of thinking in the unconscious.

Jung’s typology is humbling, because it emphasizes that we cannot become perfect in every dimension, hence godlike. When thinking becomes exquisitely differentiated, feeling remains correspondingly gross. In order to improve feeling, thinking must come down a peg or two, due to their reciprocal nature, as well as to the limitations of human attention and energy. The more focussed and penetrating the intellect’s beam of light the denser and more extensive the surrounding darkness.

The final section of Psychological Types consists of definitions by Jung, some for terms already current. No doubt he hoped his definitions would contribute to a common vocabulary among psychologists, but they had the opposite effect: they demarcated  “analytical psychology as a distinct dialect, and tended to encourage either wholesale adoption or rejection.” (Shamdasani, p. 80)  Shamdasani sums up as follows:

Jung’s typology, as an epistemological attempt to halt the infinite regress threatened by the personal equation, through the establishment of a psychology of psychologies, did not meet with any general acceptance. The reasons for this are not hard to find. Psychologists were reluctant to view the theories which they had claimed had universal validity as merely the expression of their type, and correspondingly relativized. (p. 83)   

Joseph Wheelwright, who with Horace Gray devised the first widely used type inventory, observed that later in Jung’s career he “left types behind,” perhaps in disappointment at how his original purpose, to stitch up the torn coat of psychology, had been disregarded. (Shamdasani, p. 86)

Nevertheless, type theory can be useful empirically, not only to clarify communication problems of the sort encountered in couples, family, or group therapy, or in vocational counseling, but also to address the dilemmas of introverts in our extraverted culture. From the standpoint of mental health, Jung posited we need a well-adapted ego to mediate our relations with the external world. Due to the prevalence of extraverted sensation among U.S. males, a boy with dominant introverted feeling or intuition well may experience himself as out of step with his social surround; likewise girls with highly differentiated thinking, who are a minority compared with the extraverted feelers. They may become “turned types,” individuals with an ego- syntonic false self for interacting with the majority but at odds with their actual makeup. Conversely, extraverts, though attuned to the outer environment, risk a split between ego and unconscious. Whichever the attitude, reflexive adaptation may produce a distorted sense of identity, and/or a lopsided, unstable relationship between the ego and the unconscious.

While still within the Freudian circle, and heavily embroiled in its interpersonal conflicts, which seemed inevitably to entail pathologizing one’s opponents (and frequently also one’s colleagues), Jung was the first to urge that training analysis be made mandatory for prospective psychoanalysts. In my own training I was very fortunate to work with four analysts whose typologies differed from my own Introverted Intuitive Thinking: an Extraverted Feeling personal analyst, an Extraverted Sensation supervisor while I was an intern at the CG Jung Institute clinic, then, during my candidacy at that institute, two control analysts, a woman in her late 70’s who was Extraverted Thinking, and an Introverted Feeling man. All of them were accomplished therapists, who often approached situations from perspectives which surprised and challenged me. For instance, my Extraverted Sensation supervisor repeatedly confronted me with questions of fact: Had I specifically inquired about the client’s history, or daily behavior patterns? Well, no, not necessarily. As an Introverted Intuitive I simply believed I “knew” these things, and hadn’t bothered to look for corroboration. A year of those embarrassing cross-examinations bore some fruit, such that in turn I’ve occasionally made my own intuitive supervisees quite uncomfortable, too. All three of the extraverts who trained me not only called my attention to lacunae in my ego functioning, but also modeled ways to build bridges to the client—the necessity of reaching out, of manifesting one’s empathic presence to the other person, sparing the client some portion of the interpersonal effort. I don’t know if I ever could have developed a private practice without their prompts.

Although Jung recognizes unconscious conflict as inherent to psychological existence, he doesn’t represent it as inevitably tending toward symptom production, but rather as one voice in a fundamental dialectic. His concept derives from the Hegelian interplay of thesis/ antithesis/synthesis, eventually leading to another thesis and endless fresh cycles. He parses mental life according to dyads in perpetual opposition, which he calls “the opposites:” life/death, ego/unconscious, the dual aspects, positive/negative, of the archetypes and complexes. This schema seems compatible with the developmental concept of whole objects coalescing out of part objects, though Jung himself likened it to the yang/yin emblem—a circle apportioned by a curving line into dark and light halves, each segment containing a spot of the other’s hue. From the perspective of successful ego adaptation, mental health demands we recognize and balance these forces.

 To facilitate psychological integration and enhance self-awareness, Jung advocated dialogue between the ego and the unconscious—by means of attending to one’s dreams, or by fantasy enactments, “a process of dreaming with open eyes,” which he named “active imagination.” Active imagination is described as follows in A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis:

At the outset one concentrates on a specific point, mood, picture, or event, then allows a chain of associated fantasies to develop and gradually take on a dramatic character. Thereafter the images have a life of their own and develop according to their own logic....

[Jung] did not recommend that active imagination be used indiscriminately or by everyone, finding it most useful in the latter stages of analysis when the objectivisation of images may replace dreams.... In contrast to dreams, which are experienced passively, this process of imagination demands the active and creative participation of the ego. (p. 9)

In his Tavistock Lectures (CW vol. XVIII), delivered at London in 1935, Jung provides this striking vignette of teaching active imagination to one of his analysands:

I was treating a young artist, and he had the greatest trouble in understanding what I meant by active imagination.... I live outside the town, and he had to take the train to get to my place. It starts from a small station, and on the wall of that station was a poster. Each time he waited for his train he looked at that poster,...an advertisement for Murren in the Bernese Alps , a colourful picture of the waterfalls, of a green meadow and a hill in the centre, and on that hill were several cows. And so he sat there staring at that poster and thinking that he could not find out what I meant by active imagination. And then one day he thought: “Perhaps I could start by having a fantasy about that poster. I might for instance imagine that I am myself in that poster, that the scenery is real and that I could walk up the hill among the cows and then look down on the other side, and then I might see what there is behind that hill.”

So he went to the station for that purpose and imagined that he was in the poster. He saw the meadow and the road and walked up the hill among the cows, and then he came up to the top and looked down, and there was the meadow again, sloping down, and below was a hedge with a stile. So he walked down and over the stile, and there was a little footpath that ran round a ravine, and a rock, and when he came to that rock, there was a small chapel, with its door standing a little ajar. He thought he would like to enter, and so he pushed the door open and went in, and there upon an altar decorated with pretty flowers stood a wooden figure of the Mother of God. He looked up at her face, and in that exact moment something with pointed ears disappeared behind the altar. He thought, “Well, that’s all nonsense,” and instantly the whole fantasy was gone.

He went away and said, “Now again I haven’t understood what active imagination is.” And then, suddenly, the thought struck him: “Well, perhaps that really was there; perhaps that thing behind the Mother of God, with the pointed ears, that disappeared like a flash, really happened.” Therefore he said to himself: “I will just try it all over as a test.” So he imagined that he was back in the station looking at the poster, and again he fantasied that he was walking up the hill. And when he came to the top of the hill, he wondered what he would see on the other side. And there was the hedge and the stile and the hill sloping down. He said, “Well, so far so good. Things haven’t moved since, apparently.” And he went round the rock, and there was the chapel. He said: “There is the chapel, that at least is no illusion. It is all quite in order.” The door stood ajar and he was quite pleased. He hesitated a moment and said: “Now,  when I push that door open and I see the Madonna on the altar, then that thing with the pointed ears should jump down behind the Madonna, and if it doesn’t, then the whole thing is bunk!” And so he pushed the door open and looked—and there it all was and the thing jumped  down, as before, and then he was convinced. From then on he had the key and knew he could rely on his imagination, and so he learned to use it. (CW vol. XVIII, pp. 169-171)

Jung posited that the unconscious is inherently organized to play a determinative role throughout life, that it carries a template for the expression of our attributes: abilities, energies, tastes. It can augment and compensate the ego’s adaptive agenda, even help the ego accommodate to the inner world. Jung considered the profoundest manifestation of a rapprochement between ego and UCS to be the emergence of an archetypal complex, the self, which may be expressed as various symbols, for instance abstractly as a geometric form—the mandala—or representationally in the male psyche as a wise old man, or in females as its counterpart, the wise old woman.

The Self may be the most obscure of all Jung’s psychological concepts, both because it so easily can be interpreted as another word for God, and because Jung described it as two different states: not only as the deepest core of the personality, but also as the totality which encompasses and subsumes everything. Some excerpts from the Self entry in A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis address these complexities:

An archetypal image of man’s fullest potential and the unity of the personality as a whole, the self as a unifying principle within the human psyche occupies the central position of authority in relation to psychological life and, therefore, the destiny of the individual.

At times Jung speaks of the self as initiatory of  psychic life; at other times he refers to its realization as the goal.... In life, the self demands to be recognized, integrated, realized; but there is no hope of incorporating more than a fragment of such a vast totality within the limited range of human consciousness. Therefore, the relationship of ego to self is a never-ending process....

Lest the self appear to be entirely benign, Jung emphasized that it should be likened to a daemon, a determining power without conscience.... Samuels et al, p. 135)

If the ego turns away from the self and the other unconscious processes, it becomes subject to attacks, which may take the form of bad moods, negative images and fantasies, and frightening projections. We become at odds with ourselves, and often with the universe as well. Jung is said frequently to have told the following story, and encouraged his listeners to pass it on at every opportunity:

As an example of “being in Tao” and its synchronistic accompaniments I will cite the story, told to me by Richard Wilhelm, of the rain-maker of Kiaochau: “There was a great drought where Wilhelm lived; for months there had not been a drop of rain and the situation became catastrophic. The Catholics made processions, the Protestants made prayers, and the Chinese burned joss-sticks and shot off guns to frighten away the demons of the drought, but with no result. Finally the Chinese said, ‘We will fetch the rain-maker.’ And from another province a dried up old man appeared. The only thing he asked for was a quiet little house somewhere, and there he locked himself in for three days. On the fourth day the clouds gathered and there was a great snow-storm at the time of the year when no snow was expected, an unusual amount, and the town was so full of rumours about the wonderful rain-maker that Wilhelm went to ask the man how he did it. In true European fashion he said: ‘They call you the rain-maker, will you tell me how you made the snow?’ And the little Chinese said:  ‘I did not make the snow, I am not responsible.’ ‘But what have you done these three days?’ ‘Oh, I can explain that. I come from another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order, they are not as they should be by the ordinance of heaven. Therefore the whole country is not in Tao, and I  also am not in the natural order of things because I am in a disordered country. So I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao and then naturally the rain came.’ (CW XIV, pp. 419-420n)

Like the Tao, the unconscious stubbornly remains obscure. Although we can sense when we’re out of Tao, we can’t contain that force within language. As Lao Tse proclaims, “The Tao that can be talked about is not the true Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.” The same appplies to the unconscious. Hence the ego is challenged to co-exist with uncertainty, the unknowable—a good, perhaps vital, lesson in adaptation, which acts as a counterpoise to inflation, what the Greeks called hubris.

When we begin discussing the Tao and hubris we enter the domain of religion, the cause, as we know, of major disagreement between the Freudian and the Jungian approaches to psychology. Freud’s public stance on the subject was consistently negative: that religion constitutes a pernicious illusion, and threatens mental health in so far as it leads the ego astray from the path of rationality, our great bulwark against the blandishments of the id. Jung was less concerned with this danger, because he conceived of the irrational, the arational, as potentially enlarging existence, by enriching our experience. It is important, however, to recognize that by advocating for the acknowledgment and conscious integration of religious experience, Jung does not encourage or privilege metaphysical belief:

The idea of God is an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing whatever to do with the question of God’s existence.... The existence of God is once and for all  an unanswerable question. (CW vol. 7, p. 71)

His agnosticism partakes more of Cicero’s tracing of the word religion’s etymology to the Latin relegere, meaning to read over again, than to later opinion that it originates from religare, to bind. For people comfortable with collective metaphysical systems, organized religion can be an effective support for mental health.

One evening more than thirty years ago I went over to my landlord’s house, as I did every month, to pay the rent. His large family was unusually subdued, and told me earlier that day they were notified their oldest son, an extremely pleasant, hard-working guy who wanted to become a park ranger, had  been killed, while visiting a college friend, in a drive-by shooting. I said I’d like to offer my condolences to my landlord, who was alone in his study. Although he was deeply grieved he expressed no anger at his son’s senseless and brutal death. I remarked on that fact, and he said he was sure God had a plan for his son and had taken him to a better place. I asked if I could be of any help, and he said if I wanted I could have a memorial mass said for their child at the local church. The family’s faith clearly enabled them to assign positive value to a loss that easily could  have been overwhelming.

But are there scriptures for the psychologically-minded to study? Jung asserted that the unconscious communicates with the ego by means of symbols, which, unlike the Freudian symbol, cannot be reduced to a simple, unambiguous formula, but rather are rich with connotative meaning and charged with affect. They demand contemplation. In one of his Dream Seminar meetings, May 7, 1930, Jung says the following about the psychodynamic role of the symbol:

A symbol functions like a machine in our psychology. Not long ago I came across a book about Oriental religions by a German, who speaks... of the influence of Yoga and of the forms of the sacred images in India.... He calls the yantras machines....

A yantra, from a Sanskrit word whose root meaning is “to sustain”—mandalas are examples— is “a geometric design upon which to fix one’s concentration during meditation.”

[Zimmer] holds that they function exactly like machines because they are symbols, symbols being a means of transforming energy.... Without the symbol the divine factor cannot be invoked and worshipped. We use it as a sort of magic means to force the gods; in calling them by the right name we make them come, we reach their ear and we influence them. So in antiquity it was exceedingly important to know the right name of the God, the secret, sacred name that the god should be called in order to have his ear. The true symbol, the true expression of the psychological fact, has that  peculiar effect on the unconscious factor that is somehow brought about by giving it the right name. (pp. 580-1)

For those of us unable to accept collective beliefs, there remains the possibility of deriving meaning through engaging with our own psyches—provided we can receive and assimilate their messages. Maria von Franz, in an interview for the film A Matter of Heart, describes her first meeting with Jung, while she was still a medical student, as extremely disorienting, because, to the best of my recollection, Jung remarked of a patient, “When she was on the moon....” Von Franz tried to correct this to something like, “When, in her delusional condition, she imagined she was on the moon....” But Jung kept returning to his original statement. And eventually Von Franz recognized he was modeling respect for the patient’s viewpoint: that she experienced herself as having been on the moon, and one only could communicate with her by accepting this as a base of her reality. For Jung, experiencing the psyche was fundamental, but decoding its communications often required patience, effort, and especially modesty on the part of the ego. For instance, if a person makes unrealistic demands on him or herself it can cause psychopathology. We must not take responsibility for more than our limited power can achieve. Jung’s ethic in this regard can be considered not only conservative, in its emphasis on limitations, but also religious, in its anti-humanism, insofar as humanism is par excellence the philosophy that exalts the ego: conscious, rational, willful man as the measure of all things.

Although we cannot demand of ourselves that our endeavors succeed, cannot legitimately hold ourselves responsible for what lies beyond our power (and much that determines success lies beyond us), we have a psychological obligation, whose disregard brings severe consequences, to listen to our whole psyche and take its promptings seriously. In Jung’s schema the unconscious—whose balancing effect on the ego can be experienced as if it were a supernatural intervention—can be a force for change and growth. When speaking of one archetypal symbol, he put it as follows:

What is the divine child? The honest attempt of man. The last remnant of something divine is the honest attempt of man.... I say that your attempt has the divine quality because, if you study these attempts of man, you will discover that they are not so much conscious decisions, not so much his own free will, as that they are forced upon him. He has to make the attempt, he cannot escape it. It may be the thing he is most afraid of.... A superior factor in himself, Deus ex machina, the divine thing in him, that tremendous power, is forcing his hand....

A seminar participant asks, “Would you say that the divine in analysis might be the method of removing resistances against this honest attempt?” And Jung replies:

Yes, one could say that. For most people’s attempt is not honest, it is an illusion. They make heroic attempts to escape the real attempt, because that is the thing of which people are most afraid. The honest attempt is the worst danger.... I have seen many cases where people said: Do you really think I have to go through this or that? I say: I don’t know, we must find out. (Dream Seminar, pp. 617-19)

According to Jung’s view, the psyche is genetically programmed for lifelong growth, to unfold in phases that culminate with old age and death. The first half of life properly involves ego differentiation and adaptation, especially of those components dedicated to material achievement—work—and propagation/ family-building—love. But the second half, as Jung conceived of it, requires something essentially different: an exploration of one’s ego-dystonic, repressed, attitude and functions, and, preparatory to death, the search for meaning. The unconscious, as the repository of our repressed, hence undeveloped, relatively youthful attributes, plays a crucial part. It produces affectively charged images and symbols which fuel late-life regeneration. Their acceptance and use by the ego constitutes the process Jung named individuation.

And how do these factors affect analysis? Murray Stein, in his essay “Individuation: Inner Work,” quotes Jung as follows:

I am persuaded that the end of analysis is reached when the patient has gained an adequate knowledge of the methods by which he can maintain contact with the unconscious, and has acquired a psychological understanding sufficient for him to discern the direction of his life-line at the moment. (Journal of Jungian Theory and Practice, p. 10; CGJ 1916, “The Structure of the Unconscious”)

Individuation thus results in a completer, more whole individual—not someone perfected, flawless, but, theoretically, a person who draws upon and expresses a wide range of personal attributes, who recognizes, accepts, and adjusts for, personal shortcomings, has a realistic grasp of his or her virtues—and contributes responsibly to the human collective. This is Jung’s model of mental health, and it requires the blessing of the unconscious, the participation of the entire psyche. 

Other written versions of NRPI lectures by Paul Watsky, Ph.D:

"Concerning Jung's Terminology"

"Jungianism Since Jung"

References