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A CHARACTERISTIC FEATURE of analytical psychotherapy is its emphasis on individuation. As a baby each of us started from being a discrete unit. Each came into relation with his mother, experienced first as a diffuse ill-defined affect with a focus on the mouth since at first there was no mother ‘out there’. Each was dominated by the pleasure principle: what was satisfying was pleasure, what was not was pain. Because a baby cannot separate out what is him from what is his mother, the early relation is conceived as a state of periodic identity or fusion with the maternal environment. Complex processes lead to his distinguishing himself from her; they involve pining, primitive guilt, a growing sense of external reality, rudimentary recognition of psychic reality and capacity for love and gratitude. These feelings, linked to the growing acuity of perception and motor skills, give rise to the basic pattern of individuation, i.e. separation from primitive identity by increasing self-awareness (cf. Fordham, 1969b); the pattern repeats again and again throughout life till the development which Jung emphasized in later life is reached. This time it does not take place in the setting of mother and infant but in relation to social and collective forms; it involves relating religious and philosophical attitudes to the individual, and the whole sequence is thought of as growing self-realization.
This very compressed statement is necessary because most therapists—involved as they must be with complex psychopathology—have a frame of reference against which they judge success or failure, the subject of this congress; that of individuation is used by analytical psychologists: if it be fostered there is a measure of success, if not, there is failure.
Before proceeding, a word on terminology: the word therapist will