Carl Jung and the Search For Meaning

Today is the 50^th anniversary of the death of Carl Gustav Jung. The Swiss psychologist developed many ideas that have entered common parlance, from the personality types of the introvert and extravert, to notions of the archetypal and New Age. However, perhaps there is one concept that can serve us particularly well, that of individuation.

The story of our lives, Jung believed, can be broken down into two broad movements. First comes the establishment of an ego or persona that presents our face to the world. It allows us to find a place for ourselves and some security in work and in love. However, of itself, the persona is not enough. ‘There is always some element of pretence about the persona, for it is a kind of show window in which we like to display our best wares,’ explains Anthony Stevens, author of Jung: A Very Short Introduction.

This realization typically occurs when people have a mid-life crisis. They then seek a deeper participation in life, variously referred to as seeking the flow of life, a fuller consciousness, the way, God. According to Jung, what is happening is that the ego or persona is being enlarged to embrace the Self. It is a painful process as it is a journey into the unknown. Many resist it. But if the ego needs the Self to find not just instrumental purpose but ontological meaning, so the Self needs an established ego fully to be in the world.

Today, it’s a doubly difficult task. Consumerism celebrates the freedom of the ego – the joy of experimenting with this and then that. In a way, it’s fascinating. There’s always something new around the corner. However, endless novelty comes at a price, of never sinking roots.

The good news is that the Self is persistent. You see its struggle whenever there’s a desire to connect with a richer inner life. It’s the appeal of ecological philosophies that try to re-enchant nature. (Funny how the materialistic age is one that values the material less and less). It’s why complementary therapies thrive, no matter how flaky, because they don’t seek just physical welfare but holistic wellbeing. It’s why narratives, stories and myth-telling dominate entertainment – from sci-fi books to great histories, from online games to fantasy films. They implicitly respond to the Self’s demand for imaginative resources to tell us who and what we are.

Are these options enough? Unlike our forebears who sought meaning too, through their shared spiritual traditions, contemporary meaning-seeking is marked by the constant fear that what we seek lies elsewhere. This week a meditation class, next week some yoga. One Sunday I seek inspiration from a cycle in the countryside, the next I go to church.

The risk is that instead of individuation, we merely skirmish between this possibility and that option. We don’t want ‘the way’ anymore. We can’t trust it. Instead we prefer ‘my way’.

So is this what Jung is saying to us, 50 years on: that we risk losing a fecund individuation to an arid individualism? For without individuation, the individual is left with the sense of life half lived, with a sense that there is more, and they’ve missed it.

Mark Vernon is the author of How To Be An Agnostic (Palgrave Macmillan) www.markvernon.com

 

Comments

[Henry Dunn]

Just noticed I said Jung more interested in Arts than Jung! Obviously I meant Freud!

[Drew Byrne]

I'm glad that clever people like Jung and his tribe think of these sorts of things for us, or else we wouldn't quite know what to make of ourselves.

[Jazzmanhenry]

Individuation an important concept, but so much more to Jung. You briefly mention some of them, which are worth exploring more. Particularly his ideas about therapeutic process and the im,portance of the therapist recognsing his own woundedness (Wounded healer archetype) I wrote about this in a paper called Parallel Journeys: How a Music Therapist Can Travel With His Client, published in a journal called Approaches (link available on my blog http://jazzmanhenry.blogspot.com/ He was one of the most influential of all psychotherapists, far more interested in the healing effects of the arts than Jung. The use of Mandalas is something I have taken from him too - he is rich source of inspiration.