Education as a Personal Journey: An Excursion into Jung’s Notion of Individuation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/SPI.2015.012Keywords
Carl Gustav Jung, individuation, analytical training, person, apophaticism, Christian orthodox traditionAbstract
After more than six years of Jungian training in Zurich, the task of talking about “individuation” is still a perplexing one. Rather than attempting to recapitulate Jung’s theory of individuation, this exposé aims to sketch the rough contours of a matrix for the exploration of individuation in a wider frame which includes my experiences and diverse readings. As such, this text marks a point of departure, a general itinerary for a continued exploration rather than an attempt to tie threads together or to offer an exhaustive critique. After hundreds of hours of training analysis, courses, psychiatric internships, control cases and seminars, aimed at training a candidate into an analyst, I find myself reflecting on that experience as a whole. Where am I as I reach the final stages of my training in comparison to where I started? What does this “education” actually consist of? What has been learned? What can be put in words as to be properly recounted? Does the gist of psychoanalytic training consist in learning a theory and in mastering a certain analytical/clinical toolkit ensuing from it? Or is there something else, additional or extraneous, that provides the under-bed, the foundation, for one’s actual conversion into an analyst that needs to occur as a consequence of the training process? In the same vein, what is it that analysis affects, as a therapeutic method, to its clients/patients/trainees? What does its cure consist of? Does it properly belong to the realm of medicine, where psychotherapy firmly resides in our days, or is rather education its more natural and authentic field of belonging? Such questions, although not directly addressed, nevertheless inform this ongoing inquiry from the background.
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