Differentiation
Here
one may ask, perhaps, why it is so desirable that a man should be
individuated.
Not only is it desirable, it is absolutely indispensable because, through
his contamination with others, he falls into situations and commits actions
which bring him into disharmony with himself. From all states
of unconscious contamination and non-differentiation there is begotten a
compulsion to be and to act in a way contrary to one’s own nature.
Accordingly a man can neither be at one with himself nor accept
responsibility for himself. He feels himself to be in a
degrading, unfree, unethical condition. But the disharmony
with himself is precisely the neurotic and intolerable condition from which he
seeks to be delivered, and deliverance from this condition will come only when
he can be and act as he feels is confortable with his true
self.
People have a feeling for these things, dim and uncertain at first, but
growing ever stronger and clearer with progressive development.
When a man can say of his states and actions, ‘As I am, so I act,’ he can
be at one with himself even though he struggle against it. We
must recognize that nothing is more difficult to bear with than oneself.
(‘You sought the heaviest burden, and found yourself’ says Nietzsche.)
Yet even this most difficult of achievements becomes possible if we can
distinguish ourselves from the unconscious contents. The
introvert discovers these contents in himself, the extravert finds them
projected upon human objects. In both cases the unconscious
contents are the cause of blinding illusions which falsify ourselves and our
relations to our fellow men, making both unreal. For these
reasons individuation is indispensable for certain people, not only as a
therapeutic necessity, but as a high ideal, an idea of the best we can do.
Nor should I omit to remark that it is at the same time the primitive
Christian ideal of the
…
with the lack of differentiation of the
anima and without
any relationship to the feminine principle there could be no
eros and no relatedness.
TPoPA 231
In
the unconscious the
inner world and the outer world are not differentiated.
Only that which has become a content of
consciousness is
described as an inner or an outer phenomenon, that is, either as an
introspectively perceived condition, like the welling up of an emotion, or as an
“outer” event or object. Everything else, of which we are not
conscious, remains, as before, an undifferentiated part of the occurrences of
life. P&R 19
for a differentiated personality, or one capable of
differentiation, is of the utmost value to the community. The
levelling down of the masses through suppression of the aristocratic or
hierarchical structure natural to a community is bound, sooner or later, to lead
to disaster. For, when everything outstanding is levelled
down, the signposts are lost, and the longing to be led becomes an urgent
necessity. Human leadership being fallible, the leader
himself has always been, and always will be, subject to the great symbolical
principles, even as the individual cannot give his life point and meaning unless
he puts his ego at the service of a spiritual authority superordinate to man.
The need to do this arises from the fact that the ego never constitutes
the whole of a man, but only the conscious part of him. The
unconscious part, of unlimited extent, alone can complete him and make him a
real totality. TDoP 143