Individuation and The Emergence Of The Unexpected

My Aim In This Paper Is to present a few thoughts about one of the major substrates of Jung's work: the reality of individuation.

For a long time I have felt that his view, though powerful and accurate, lacked something. This feeling bothered me until finally I came upon and understood the reasons for it: the result was a hypothesis which I shall formulate in what follows.

Without going back to the very beginnings, I find it necessary, however, to make a few observations on psychological functions. I have been particularly interested in the question of types for several reasons: firstly, as Jung (1921, p. 619) says: ‘The fact of the different typical attitudes is a problem of the first order, not only for psychology but also for all those departments of science and life in which human psychology plays a decisive role.’

I am not concerned here with simply finding labels for a convenient classification considered as an end in itself. This would be, as Kant would say, an analytical judgment, which would teach us nothing we did not already know. Typology, as Jung understands it, is rather a synthetic judgment in that it is not limited to describing purely and simply die appearance of behaviour; rather, it gives us the key not only to what we are but also to what we are not yet. Thus Jung's typology involves the dynamic dialectic of shadow and light which is not implied in the simple description of elements.

I have been interested in the question of types for another reason: the image proposed by Jung for some of these functions seems to me confused and a source of misunderstanding. In using a translation of the original text I realize, of course, that a difficulty of understanding may arise. However, there is such a great agreement between the various translations that I think it is quite possible to follow what the author intended without reference to the German.