“Personality is a seed that can only develop by slow stages throughout life. There is no personality without definiteness, wholeness, and ripeness.” – C.G. Jung
Though people may start with clear orientations either inwardly or outwardly, or more directive than receptive, or more oriented to relationships than rational logic, with individuation, each of these orientations gains strength.
The aim of individuation is “wholeness”—the integration of conscious and unconscious orientations in one unique individual.
As wholeness relates to type dynamics, it means that those type orientations most well developed in ego consciousness are united with the less conscious type orientations in the comparative unconscious. As long as only a few select type orientations are developed, the individual remains what Jung called “primitive” and “one-sided.”
Here is the paradox: How can the integration of all eight orientations, common to every normal person, result in the fuller expression of unique personality? It seems that “wholeness” means becoming more like everybody else!
We can look to nature to address that paradox. Consider snow flakes: The pattern of each snowflake is unique, yet each is essentially a hexagram. Using that metaphor, we could imagine someone with a full octagon of Jung’s eight orientations to consciousness, enabling the underlying unique personality to be fully expressed. If only two of the orientations are engaged, the unique pattern, the full “snow flake” of personality, is only partially expressed.
With individuation a person is less reliant on the earliest two or three type dispositions and becomes capable of a much wider range of expression. With progressive individuation, the individual person could become rationally decisive and poetically idealistic; grandly visionary and precisely practical; highly sociable and deeply intellectual; intensely reflective and boldly innovative.
In “becoming whole,” the unique individual personality becomes more fully expressed.
In a future article we will consider the birth of personality using another metaphor from nature, the butterfly, noting that individuation is not born from exercising the multiple strengths of the caterpillar, but by submitting to the transformative processes of the figurative chrysalis.