Quantum Drummer

Introduction

In the editorial note of Carl Jung’s Volume 17, the definition of personality, given immediately at the beginning of the first paragraph, is according to Jung “ an adult ideal whose conscious realization through individuation is the aim of human development in the second half of life.” (Jung, 1954). Jung devoted a large portion of his focus to the study of personality and the process of individuation, which he developed as the way to describe how the individual evolves from having being completely immersed in an ego-centered behavior during the stages of childhood, adolescence and first part of adulthood, and having been focused in following the structure required to blend in the society and be accepted by it, into a behavior in which the individual gets more focused in listening to his or her “inner voice” and following the ideals of the heart, with disregard to the views or influence of others. This process does not happen to all individuals, since most people remain in the structure defined by their cultures and surrounding environment for the rest of their lives. It seems that the calling from the “inner voice” occurs to most people, but most elect to ignore the voice and stay in their normal condition, and the ones that listen to the calling go through an evolution process that gets them in a position to live a more complete and wholesome life, but require them to go a process of self- realization that is always painful and full of risks.

This paper reflects on the main important concepts found in Jung’s theories of personality and individuation, as well as describes some related examples from my real life.

The Development of Personality

In the section of the Collected Works titled “The Development of Personality” Jung mentions that “the ultimate aim and strongest desire of all mankind is to develop that fullness of life which is called personality.” (Jung, 1954) and describes how the so called personality training was an educational ideal that “turns its back upon the standardized, mass-produced, “normal” human being demanded by the machine age, paying tribute to the historical fact that the greatest liberating deeds of world history have sprung from leading personalities and never from the inert mass.”(Jung, 1954). These definitions have several interesting points to reflect upon. First, the indication that personality is a process of development to achieve a better level of life, which is more complete and full than the previous condition of the individual. The process of personality training assumes that the individual is to become different from the normal people, and the liberation of the individual from this standardized behavior, places him or her in a position of leadership that will generate large impact in society. In other words, the development of an individual personality is not popular, and will go against the normal behavior of the masses, but it is recognized to be responsible for benefits that the whole mass will receive. Even today, the same conditions occur, and we can see where societies tend to want individuals behavior to be standard and consistent. This behavior allows for an easier control of the population by the governments, and a simpler way of interaction among individuals. However, this level of standardization in behavior limits creativity, and minimizes the opportunities to achieve breakthrough ideas and inventions. In most cases of successful people in current times, we see that these individuals broke the rules of standardization at some point in their lives, and left the path of normality to walk through their own paths, listening to their inner voices, which led them to achieve things that are out of the ordinary.

In educating children, Jung warns that “Personality is a seed that can only develop by slow stages throughout life. There is no personality without definiteness, wholeness and ripeness. These three qualities cannot and should not be expected of the child, as they would rob it of childhood.” and later he says that “It is impossible to foresee the endless variety of conditions that have to be fulfilled. A whole lifetime, in all its biological, social, and spiritual aspects, is needed. Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination.” (Jung, 1954). Very important aspects are found in these comments. First, it is important to realize that we cannot rush the development of personality in an individual, it is a path that requires long time, and given the many different conditions that surround an individual, it is also a path that is different for everybody, going very much against the normal trend of traditional education that forces standard behavior in individuals. It also requires the understanding of the fact that each individual thinks differently and this thought has an innate condition that is special to every person. By these definitions, we can clearly see that the path of personality development is a very lonely path, as it a personal journey, with a content of truth only known and only applicable to the individual and nobody else. These reflections also indicate that the process requires the development of all different human characteristics, the social, biological and spiritual areas. All of them need to be worked, and need to be part of the balance for the individual to achieve a complete level of personality development and “individuation”.

Individuation

While not all individuals answer the call to walk their own path and follow their vocation, the ability to achieve this evolution is available to all. As Jung indicates “In so far as every individual has the law of his life inborn in him, it is theoretically possible for any man to follow this law and so become a personality, that is, to achieve wholeness.” (Jung, 1954).

Individuation is one of the key concepts of Jung’s contribution to the theories of personality development, and it is described as a process in which a “person becomes himself, whole, indivisible and distinct from other people or collective psychology.” It is important, however to indicate that the term is used to define the process by which a person becomes “in-dividual”, but not shuts out from the world, but “gathers the world to oneself.” (Samuels et. al., 1986).

When the process of individuation is analyzed, we discover the relationship of the individual with two collectivities: first with the collective consciousness, including the public world, the pressures of the society and culture, that generate the “false wrappings of the persona”, and second the collective unconscious, or the suggestive influence of primordial images, such as archetypes. This condition generates two dialogues that occur simultaneously during the process. (Haule, 2011). Hillman also references these simultaneous dialogues as part of what he describes as the “acorn theory”, which talks about the calling, fate, character and innate images, and determines that each person “bears a uniqueness that asks to be lived and that is already present before it can be lived.”. Regarding this concept, Hillman comments how doubts are raised about the paradigm of time, which must be set aside or otherwise “the before always determines the after, and you remain chained to past causes upon which you can have no effect. (Hillman, 1996).

Trying to understand how the individual must evolve, and what types of influences does he or she has to manage, we see that there are a few of these influences, the influence of the surrounding environment, the influence of the archetypal messages found in the collective unconscious, the influence of past experiences, and the innate vocation voice that we all have and sometimes hear inside our thoughts. Hillman calls this voice the daimon, or soul companion. The Daimon

According to Hillman, “the soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected an image or pattern that we live on earth. This soul companion, the daimon, guides us here: in the process of arrival, however, we forget all that took place and believe we come empty into this world. The daimon remembers what is in your image and belongs to your pattern, and therefore your daimon is the carrier of your destiny.” (Hillman, 1996). This concept that Hillman describes as the soul companion has several important implications. It is described by Hillman as an entity that “remembers” what is our image, since we have forgotten all that took place, providing the idea that we are reincarnated through several lives, but that our soul passes through many lives and the daimon remembers patterns and images that are to be used to guide us through the new life. However, if we believe that the daimon is the carrier of our destiny, this means that the daimon has already lived our life, but our normal consciousness does not remember anything about it. Peake also makes reference to a similar entity, who he calls the Daemon, and is part of the dyad Daemon-Eidolon, in which the Eidolon is our normal state of consciousness and the Daemon is the hidden voice that is aware of our life path, and provides guidance when required. In Peake’s theory, the Eidolon “receives the message as a hunch, a dream or even as a voice.” (Peake, 2010).

The concept described by Hillman as the daimon and described by Peake as the Daemon might explain the belief of each of us having a “guardian angel”, or the voice of conscience that guide us to do one thing over another. Regardless of the way the phenomena of the Daemon-Eidolon theory might work, there are some examples in history that could be explained by it. One of the most clear cases that could involve the guidance from the Daemon is the story of Jan of Arc, who since a young age indicated that was hearing a voice that she interpreted as being the voice of God. This voice gave her instructions in how to behave, and when she was a young woman directed her in a way that helped her bring the future King of France into power and win several battles against the English armies.

In The Development of Personality, Jung also brings up the element described here as the daimon or Daemon. He describes how “Only the man who can consciously assent to the power of the inner voice becomes a personality; but if he succumbs to it he will be swept away by the blind flux of psychic events and destroyed. That is the great and liberating thing about any genuine personality; he voluntarily sacrifices himself to his vocation, and consciously translates into his own individual reality what would only lead to ruin if it were lived unconsciously by the group.” (Jung, 1954.) This description is of great importance, particularly since one of the questions when dealing with the concept of the daimon as the keeper of an individual’s destiny is about where is the room for freedom of decisions, and if it makes sense for the individual to even worry about making a choice since his destiny is already arranged. The way Jung describes the condition requires the individual that has achieved the level of personality therefore has been individuated to be able to consciously use all the different influences, from the cultural and environment background, from the images that communicate archetypes, and from the information received from the inner voice as well, and make a decision with basis on a conscious analysis of all inputs. The way this is explained implies that a person that blindly follows only his or her inner voice, or blindly follows only his or her cultural and environmental background references in the making of decisions, is an individual that has not achieved individuation and is on a lower level of personality development.

The Voice of Good and Evil

According to Jung, “What the inner voice whispers to us is generally something negative, if not actually evil. This must be so, first of all because we are usually not as unconscious of our virtues as of our vices, and then because we suffer less from the good than from the bad in us. The inner voice, makes us conscious of the evil from which the whole community is suffering, whether it be the nation or the whole human race. But it presents this evil in an individual form, so that one might at first suppose it is to be only an individual characteristic. The inner voice brings the evil before us in a very tempting and convincing way in order to make us succumb. If we do not partially succumb, nothing of this apparent evil enters into us, and no regeneration or healing can take place.” (Jung, 1954). He also explains that “The highest and the lowest, the best and the vilest, the truest and the most deceptive things are often blended together in the inner voice in the most baffling way, thus opening up in us an abyss of confusion, falsehood and despair. (Jung, 1954).

This description given by Jung is a reminder of how the process of individuation requires the person to be faced with the most negative part of our psyche, also known as our shadow, which has the combination of all of the evil that is inside us. The important aspect explained here is that the individual must only partially succumb, and then regeneration and healing can happen, but the individual must allow for the evil condition to enter his consciousness. When Jung mentions that this is an “apparent” evil, he quickly clarifies that this might be too optimistic, making a clearer point that the condition will be very difficult and be very negative for the individual.

For the three years that I have been attending the doctoral program in Jungian Psychology, I have struggled with the thought that the individual needs to find growth through suffering and pain. I have been optimistic most of my life, and I always was of the opinion that the person could grow and achieve higher levels of consciousness without the need for suffering. The first half of my life went by in a very structured and quiet way, and I always complied with all the rules and expectations of my environment, and I was successful in most everything I did, without pausing to consider if I was living my life or somebody else’s. I started feeling that I was missing something out of life several years ago, while I was studying consciousness and psychology as well as mindfulness and eastern philosophies. I heard the calling of knowledge and focused large amounts of my energy in learning more and more of the human mind, emotions and feelings. In parallel my life became much more complicated and I started feeling suffering and made others suffer more than ever before. In a recent dream that a dear friend of mine shared with me, she found herself having an argument with a person that we both dislike, this person was heavily questioning if my friend believed that we had experienced true happiness, since we both had been through very hard times. And my friend in her dream, after reflecting for a while on the question, was able to answer: “Yes, this is true happiness, including good and bad, yes this is complete happiness.” Later, when she told her dream to me, she was very proud of having dreamed with what she described as a more mature and advanced version of herself, who had taught her, and also me, the lesson of how happiness includes all experiences, good and bad, that are part of a person’s life, and how the good balances and makes the bad tolerable.

At this stage of my life, I know that not all in life is good. I know what suffering is and how it feels to be a person that does bad things and hurts others. I believe the balance of my life has been positive and I believe that I am learning much more than ever. While I hope that I have hit bottom, I feel that I might not done so yet, and I know that I need to be patient and keep hope that once the worst happens, I should be able to rise myself and be a better person, having achieved my process of individuation and having survived it.