You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It Gave Me particular pleasure to read this paper, as I have always enjoyed Forster's novels and believe them to be very close to the processes described by Jung as individuation. Centola brings out very vividly and movingly Forster's account of the anguish of awakening unconscious urges, the misery, bewilderment and, indeed, terror, which is experienced in the ‘muddled’ stage, and the joy and relief of finally admitting the feared and excluded aspect of oneself—the sense of new life and a fresh start that it brings. These are the essential ingredients of the individuation process, whether described in imaginative or in scientific literature.
Two thoughts occur to me, however. I feel a little uneasy about the idealised and somewhat ‘fixed’ nature of the goal of individuation which Centola believes Maurice finally to have achieved. I think he has taken his cue from Forster, who certainly presents Maurice at the end of the novel as now feeling liberated, confident and mature. An integration of a previously disowned part of oneself does, of course, have precisely that effect. But I do not think we can jump from that position to a claim that Maurice has acquired ‘wholeness’, achieved individuation. One never has achieved it. Individuation is essentially a process, not a state. This links with my second thought. Just as individuation is not a fixed state, so perhaps homosexuality is not a fixed state either? In the past ten years I have done analytical work with three homosexual men, all of whom were confirmed homosexuals; they none of them sought ‘help’ for their condition, yet all of them have profoundly changed. I will return to the clinical theme in a moment.
One of Forster's chief characteristics as a novelist, which Centola conveys very sensitively in his paper, is his insistence on the necessity of accepting the ‘truths of the heart’, to follow where they lead. One may not know what the outcome will be, how it will change one's life; all that matters is that one has