The Inescapable Unconscious

On the work of individuation

“Something empirically demonstrable comes to our aid from the depths of our unconscious nature. It is the task of the conscious mind to understand these hints. If this does not happen, the process of individuation will nevertheless continue. The only difference is that we become its victims and are dragged along by fate towards that inescapable goal which we might have reached walking upright, if only we had taken the trouble and been patient enough to understand in time the meaning of the numina¹ that cross our path.”

~ C.G. Jung²

The Jungian analyst James Hillman once wrote that one of Jung’s chief contributions to culture was in giving us a means of approaching that age-old human imperative: Know Thyself.³ In four sentences, this passage of Jung’s, quoted above, not only lays out the essence of that approach, but it offers a glimpse of the psychological world-view that underlies it. There is a lot that could be unpacked in this quote, but for now I want to focus on what it suggests about the nature of our psychological life.

The fundamental idea here is that, as conscious beings, we find ourselves in a situation that involves us whether we know it or not; one that affects us whether we participate in it or not. The psyche is a world of experience as real and as unavoidable as the physical environment in which we live and move.⁴ It is populated with figures as impactful and as demanding as the people that surround us in the day-world. These inner figures go by familiar names. We call them our fears and our joys. We think of them as anxieties, temptations, doubts, certainties, questions, desires.

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These names make us think of them as subjective qualities, functional or dysfunctional states of being, that are somehow our responsibility or our fault. We imagine them as rewards or punishments for our behavior, or accidents of our brain chemistry that we must learn how to regulate. We have forgotten — or we never knew — how to understand them as something objective, realities that arise, as Jung says, “from the depths of our unconscious nature,” realities that we must learn how to understand, with which we must find a way to come into relationship.

These inner realities, says Jung, “come to our aid.” That is, they serve a purpose in the process of psychological growth and development. They are the agents, so to speak, of individuation — the inborn process of becoming; the instinctual urge toward self-realization.

Individuation is not something that one chooses. It is not something we can decline. It is a naturally occurring psychological process with which, in one way or another, we must come to terms. Just as the body undergoes a series of changes and developments throughout the life-cycle, so the psyche seeks its own particular unfolding and differentiation. In neither case is the growth process dependent upon the individual’s conscious awareness of it, though both can be influenced either positively or negatively by the attention one gives (or fails to give) to it.

“Our consciousness,” writes Jung, “does not create itself — it wells up from unknown depths.”⁵ The unconscious psyche, then, is an active, creative force of nature. It is not simply the absence of consciousness. It is, on the contrary, the matrix of our consciousness. The unconscious is not rendered inert or ineffective by our unconsciousness of it, but remains the ever-present maker of our moods, influencer of our decisions, weaver of our projections. It is, one could say, the atmosphere that surrounds us, and therefore, it is an inescapable condition of our human existence.

“The unconscious … remains the ever-present maker of our moods, influencer of our decisions, weaver of our projections.”

This can be an unsettling idea to consider because of the responsibility it lays on our shoulders. It demands that we take up a relationship to these psychological depths. Of course, we can refuse to take up this challenge, but that does not relieve us of the burden of the individuation process. “The only difference,” as Jung writes, “is that we become its victims and are dragged along by fate towards that inescapable goal which we might have reached walking upright.”

A simple way to put this is that life happens. We will be met by challenges, crises, and opportunities. We will grow older and need to take on new identities and new attitudes. We will experience conflicts between competing duties, such as the duty we have to those in our care and the duty that calls us to our own creative unfolding. We will suffer disappointments and injustice, as well as triumph and joy. All of these are the raw material of our spiritual and psychological growth. And depending on our ability and our willingness to meet them consciously, they can come to us as tests, initiations, and even ordeals through which we are tempered and transformed, or they appear as the blows of fate — a series of crises and catastrophes that batter us and threaten to break us.

Something is demanded of us by this life we are given. What we do and who we become matters. There is no doubt that even if we take it up consciously, the work individuation will be a challenging one. As Jung notes: “The development of consciousness is the burden, the suffering, and the blessing of humankind.”⁶

Until next time.

1. Plural form of numen: “the spirit or divine power presiding over a thing or place.” The suggestion here is that the contents of the unconscious have an autonomous reality.

2. ‘Answer to Job’ by C.G. Jung (CW11)

3. ‘Healing Fiction’ by James Hillman

4. The “inner” psychic world and the “outer” physical world are ultimately not separate realities bearing no relationship with each other. They are interdependent aspects of our one life that interpenetrate and sustain each other. The division into “inner” and “outer” is a convention necessitated by the general tendency to neglect the interior dimension of life and to overvalue the outer life, which we think of as “real life.”

5. ‘The Psychology of Eastern Meditation’ by C.G. Jung (CW11)

6. Quoted in ‘Psychological Reflections’ edited by J. Jacobi and R.F.C. Hull