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In This Paper I have tried to clear up some confusion by describing in sequence the various ways in which Jung regarded individuation, and to show that, rather than there being two kinds of individuation or else something peculiar to the second half of life, it is one continuous process from the cradle to the grave. This process may be hindered or distorted, and it may also acquire special significance; for instance, by being stimulated and made conscious through analytic work. It is the manifestations of the process in the second half of life that interest many Jungian analysts, but there are others, notably in London, who are also interested and find value in the earlier manifestations and I shall discuss this in the second part of my paper.
As early as 1913 we find Jung writing to Loy about a powerful urge to develop one's own personality, but it is in Psychological types, published in 1921, that he defined what he had now crystallized out as ‘Individuation’. The definition is a long one, but the essential features are that it is ‘… the process of forming and specializing the individual nature … [and] … the development of the psychological individual as a differentiated being from the general collective psychology’ (p. 561). It ‘is practically the same as the development of consciousness out of the original state of identity’ (p. 563).
As time progressed Jung emphasized another aspect of individuation, namely the integration of the conscious and the unconscious, and this became its most important feature without, however, dropping the original definition which we find reappearing through the years right up to his last work. Let us note in passing that there has to be a development of consciousness before there is anything to integrate.
Jung also wrote of the analytic process, a sequence of dreams or images,