Individuation: from the “Principle” to the “Process”

Jung borrowed the expression “individuation principle” from Schopenhauer, but, by 1916, he was interpreting the concept in a radically different way from the philosopher, who had used it to mean “wanting to live”. Indeed, Jung accentuated differentiation and the guilt feelings it arouses in the subject grappling with individualization and seeking to disengage himself from “mystical participation”. After his encounter with alchemists’ writings in the thirties and forties, Jung reworked the initial “principle”, defining it as a “process” of inner transformation, a striving for a certain conjunction of opposite poles. According to this later conception, the process is mingled with self-realization, i.e. the gradual awareness of the contradictory and conflictual elements which make up the psychic “totality”, conscious and unconscious, of the subject.