Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

68 Togetherness vs. Intimacy with Distance
I say, “Of course it is most regrettable that you always get into trouble,
but don’t you see what you are doing? You love somebody, you
identify with them, and of course you prevail against the objects of
your love and repress them by your very self-evident identity. You
handle them as if they were yourself, and naturally there will be resistances.
It is a violation of the individuality of those people, and it
is a sin against your own individuality. Those resistances are a most
useful and important instinct: you have resistances, scenes, and disappointments
so that you may become finally conscious of yourself,
and then hatred is no more.” 58
Individuation, finding your own unique path, requires a focus on
the inner axis, ego to unconscious—getting to know yourself. The
ideal of togetherness lets you off that hook. Togetherness doesn’t
acknowledge the natural boundaries between people, and it gives
short shrift to their differences. All you’re left with is unconscious
identity. When you are on the path of individuation, focused on
your own psychological development, you relate to others from a
position of personal integrity. This is the basis for intimacy with
distance. It is not as sentimental as togetherness, but it’s not as
sticky either.
A relationship based on intimacy with distance does not require
separate living quarters. Intimacy with distance means psychological
separation, which comes about through the process of differentiation—knowing
where you end and the other begins. Intimacy
with distance can be as close and as warm as you want, and
it’s psychologically clean. Togetherness is simply fusion, the submersion
of two individualities into one, variously called symbiosis,
identification, participation mystique. It can feel good for a while
but in the long run it does not work.
Togetherness is to intimacy with distance as being in love is to
loving. When you’re in love, you absolutely need the other. This is
symptomatic of bonding, which is natural between parent and infant,
and also at the beginning of any relationship at any age. But
58 The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, p. 7.