Individuation and the Will to Meaning

I was recently listening to an interview with Dr James Hollis, who talked about finding purpose and managing transitions in life. He talked about the concepts and work of Carl Jung, which struck a chord with me. I’ve since read Jung’s book Man and His Symbols, and am noting down some of the key concepts here, which resonate with me at this stage of life that I am at now.

• Individuation: In the book Man and His Symbols, one of the definitions provided by von Franz suggests that the actual process of individuation entails “the conscious coming-to-terms with one’s own inner center (psychic nucleus) or Self” (p.166). At the risk of oversimplifying, I would interpret the process of individuation to be a journey to reach psychic wholeness, through integration of the ego-consciousness with the unconscious.
• Ego: Contrary to current popular use, Jung seems to broadly define the ego as consciousness. The ego is required in order to integrate the contents of the unconscious, and to undergo the process of individuation. This is where cultural mythologies are able to aid in “the development of the individual’s ego-consciousness—his awareness of his own strengths and weaknesses—in a manner that will equip him for the arduous tasks with which life confronts him” (p.112).
• Unconscious: A complex concept, there are several guiding ideas that can help portray the nature of the unconscious. It is suggested that the unconscious is “a natural phenomenon producing symbols that prove to be meaningful” (p.102). Elsewhere in the book, it is suggested that the symbol-making propensity of humans “unconsciously transforms objects or forms into symbols (thereby endowing them with great psychological importance)” and expresses them in both religion and visual art (p.232). The influence of the unconscious upon us as individuals finds regular expression in the instinctual drives and “autonomous emotions erupting from the unconscious” (p.237). And intriguingly, Jung and his collaborators observed that an individual “produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams” (p.21). Paraphrasing a useful quote from Jung to understand the approximate nature of the unconscious, he suggests that until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct one’s life and you will call it fate.

I drew out this diagram based on the ideas and images I encountered in the book Man and His Symbols, to capture my understanding of the relationship between the ego-consciousness and the unconscious in an individual’s psyche:

Representation of the psyche with the ego-consciousness and unconscious.

To me, the process of individuation is a journey towards meaning. A concept I derived from reading Viktor Frankl’s book “Man’s Search For Meaning” is the primacy of the will to meaning. Many of us are familiar with the notion of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which places actualisation at the top of the pyramid, which could be taken to imply that meaning and purpose are a luxury compared to our basic needs. However, Frankl put forward a powerful insight in his book, in which he observed that in the concentration camps, the individuals who were likeliest to survive were those that had meaning to live for, while a pattern of behaviour was observed in those whose “meaning orientation had subsided”, where they eventually gave up and succumbed in a matter of hours under the extreme conditions. This left a deep impression upon me, that effectively; Meaning is of primary importance, and not secondary.

I’ve pulled out a list of questions provided by Dr James Hollis in his book “Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life”, to help guide this journey of individuation. I’ve found these useful for journalling purposes, to help prompt my writing entries and contemplation.

• Is the life you are living too small for your soul’s desire?
  
• What has brought you to this place in your journey, this moment in your life?
• What is true for you that wants to live out in the world?
• Where are you blocked by fear, stuck, rigid, resistant to change?
• What is the fear beneath the fear? The fear that intimidates you only gains its power from the wiring beneath it, the wiring of history, which leads to a deeper fear, a fear from your past. This circuitry activates the old message that this fear, this issue, is larger than you, and so you ignore the conscious, empowered adult you have become since then.
• Why, even when things are going well, do things not feel quite right?
• Why does life seem a script written elsewhere, and you barely consulted, if at all?
• Where do you avoid conflict, the necessary conflict of values, and therefore avoid living in fidelity with who you are?
• What ideas, habits, behavioral patterns are holding you back from the large journey of the soul? What secondary gains do you receive by staying mired in the old—security, predictability, validation from others? Are you now tired enough, hurting enough to begin to take the soul’s journey on?
• Where are you still looking for permission to live your life? Do you think that someone else is going to give it to you? What are you waiting for, someone else to write the script of your life for you?
• Where do you need to grow up? When will this happen? Do you think someone else will do it for you?
• What have you always felt called toward, but feared to do? What new life wishes to come into being through you?
• Why is now the time, if ever it is to happen, for you to answer the summons of the soul, to live the second, larger life?

I find this poem by Mary Oliver captures this notion of the journey of individuation beautifully:

The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.