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.
In this important paper Andrew Samuels looks at various ways in which analytical psychologists are re-evaluating and modifying Jungian ideas about the self and individuation. Using his own model of the emergence and formation of post-Jungian schools the author shows how the Archetypal school and Developmental school can be seen to have reacted in their own differing but compatible ways against the sterile rigidity of the Classical Jungian school, as well as against its expectations of progression towards wholeness.
Samuels explains how Hillman and the Archetypal school have relativised the idea of the unity of the self. Instead, they wish to emphasise how ‘the many contains the unity of the one without losing the possibility of the many’. Hillman suggests that we can integrate separate bits into themselves rather than into a synthetic unity; indeed the self can be seen to be limited by its restrictive tendency only to synthesise and integrate (qualities which classicists such as G. Adler value above all) and deficient in its capacity to handle the complexities of changing inner relations. For the Archetypal school individuation is just one of many archetypal phantasies, and Hillman suggests that we should talk of a multiplicity of individuations deriving from our internal multiple persons.
Fordham (Developmental) shares Hillman's view that dissolution is as important as integration and resolution; only part selves (deintegrates) can be experienced, the whole self (integrate) is a symbolically irrepresentable abstraction. Samuels argues that Fordham and the Developmental school have democratised the traditional vocational, even élitest idea of individuation as being only a process worked on in analysis and/or in the second half of life, by showing that it is also a natural, neutral and lifelong process starting at birth. He also mentions Plaut's recognition of the importance of pre-ambivalent experiencing of a part object as a ‘constant object’, a one-sided object whic