Psychological Healing and the Individuation Process

Abstract

Psychoanalysis basically operates on the assumption that everyone must be, to some degree, unaware of the ways some experience(s) are affecting their behavior. This approach has acquired a bad reputation because a lot of psychoanalysts have made far too many assumptions beyond the one just described. That is, therapists suspect, based on their interactions with their clients, that their clients have suffered some particular trauma or abuse that they cannot remember due to amnesia - but really, a lot of times the particular incidents the therapists suspect to have happened are fabrications and never really did happen. Sigmund Freud, for example, is well known for his persistent nudging of clients toward conceptions of their childhoods as having been fraught with inappropriate sexual desires for their parents (Freud 1975). In more recent history, the “Satanic Panic” of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s resulted in many false recovered memories of “Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA)” (Noll 1). In other instances, clients may fabricate their own memories without any nudging by a therapist to do so, but even a case like that would not delegitimize the practice of psychoanalysis insofar as its purpose is not to verify the many layers of one’s personal narrative. One will always discover inconsistencies or falsities in the stories one tells oneself because those inconsistencies are purposeful. That is, they serve to uphold a certain structure among the many parts of the self. So the work in healing is not necessarily related to verification of one’s inner voices and their stories, but in understanding the motives of those parts of the self so that they and the whole of the client’s personality may be fulfilled or actualized. This process of fulfillment or of becoming whole is what C.G. Jung referred to as “individuation.” This essay will argue that this process of individuation is best aided by structured work with the archetypes to which individuals are predisposed.