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In the preface to her book on individuation, the author quotes a letter which she received from Jung in 1948: ‘The systematic elaboration of my sometimes spontaneously pronounced thoughts (Oft nur hingeworfener Gedanken) will be the task of those who come after me. Without such an undertaking there will be no progress in scientific psychology.’ This book is offered as a contribution towards Jung's expectations.
Jacobi does not want to confine the concept of individuation only to the striving towards psychic totality in the second half of life as Jung does. She sees it in its widest sense as a natural process throughout life. Ego development would be a part of this process, belonging to the first half of life.
She distinguishes between the natural process of individuation occurring without the individual's awareness and the deliberately furthered and more or less consciously experienced process of individuation. The widely held view that neurotic symptoms often indicate a blockage of the developmental process is easier to understand if one considers the vitality of such a natural process as individuation; thus, the appearance of a neurosis would be an indicator that the natural process must be brought into consciousness for the sake of health and growth. In analysis, therefore, a ‘natural process’ becomes a ‘deliberately furthered’ one.
The extension of the concept of individuation to the whole of life has already been criticized by Fordham (J. analyt. Psychol, ). In my view, there are enough reasons to extend the concept, but there is also good cause to use it only to define the specific process of individuation in the second half of life. It depends on whether more stress is put on the difference between the early development of the ego out of the self and the later more conscious approach to the contents of the unconscious, or whether one sees these very different phenomena as two parts of a whole. It may boil down to a matter of word definition, always bearing in mi