Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

16
The Way of Individuation
Individuation is a process of differentiation, having for its
goal the development of the individual personality. 49
In alchemical writings there is a famous precept known as the
Axiom of Maria. It goes like this: “One becomes two, two becomes
three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.” 50 Jung saw
this dictum as an apt metaphor for the process of individuation, a
progressive advance of consciousness in which conflict plays a profoundly
important part.
In brief, one stands for the original, paradisiacal state of unconscious
wholeness (e.g., childhood); two signifies the loss of innocence
occasioned by a conflict between opposites (e.g., persona and
shadow); three points to a potential resolution; the third is the transcendent
function; and the one as the fourth is psychologically
equivalent to a transformed state of conscious wholeness.
Thus simply put, individuation is a kind of circular odyssey, a
spiral journey, where the aim is to get back to where you started,
but knowing where you’ve been.
The process of individuation, becoming conscious of what is
truly unique about oneself, is inextricably tied up with individuality
and the development of personality. The first step is to differentiate
ourselves from those we have admired and imitated: parents, teachers,
mentors of any kind. On top of this, individuality and group
identity are incompatible; you can have one or the other, but not
both. Jung notes:
It is really the individual’s task to differentiate himself from all oth-
49 “Definitions,” Psychological Types, CW 6, par. 757.
50 “Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy,” Psychology
and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 26.
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