Individuation

On Saturday night I was blessed to attend a talk by Dr Judith Pickering, a couples psychoanalyst, at the monthly CG Jung Society meeting here in Sydney. Her talk was deep, thought-provoking, and jam-packed with novel ways to look at relationships. She has recently published a book, called 'Being In Love', but this talk was less directly focussed on romantic relationships and more oriented towards looking at the individuated self, and the unique markers that we use that act as filters, not only disguising other persons, but also disguising ourselves from ourselves.

Individuation proposes that there is a single, incomparable and homogenous being that arises through the path created by the re-integration of the scattered parts of the self. Jung saw individuation as the greatest endeavour a human being could undertake, and proposed that the meeting of two people could be seen as relational transformation, where the chemical interaction of two personalities produces a transformation where the original substance of both beings is irrevocably altered, henceforth always differentiated.

Object relations approaches to psychology since Jung's time have attempted to map these intersubjective spaces, and neuroscience, with it's supporting evidence of the existence of mirror neurons, provides a sense of how individuation might occur, a movement in the personality that is either with, or against, an external identity. The findings have challenged the old metaphysical divides between what is inner, and what is outer, and our understanding of our interdependence deepens with the recognition that babies seem to be born with an intersubjective instinct.

As Dr. Pickering moved into describing the human experience of love, and her experiences as a couples therapist - noting that us poor English cousins have to make do with one word for 'love', against Greece's six - there was one line, in particular, that she said, that has resounded in my mind:

'Love is the impossibility of reducing the other into myself'.

The duality of self and other must be transcended, not collapsed, and she used the word 'alterity' to define the sense of the strange and uncanny, the unknowable alien within us, that connects in the moment of awareness of the other person. She notes that "other" seems to privilege the 'I' position, whereas alterity allows the space for the recognition of the unconscious, the de-centred subject. To put it in the words of Derrida: ''The unknown is not the negative limit of knowledge'. This non-knowledge is the element of friendship of transcendence of the stranger.

The intersubjective field always includes projections - initially developmentally we seek exogamy (literally, marriage outside one's own group), that is, we seek exit from our old and defensive patterns of relating, but somehow, imperceptibly, we find we're enacting endogamy, our familial patterns of behaving, no matter where we are, no matter who we are with.

Ultimately, the assumption that we know each other inhibits our curiosity, and in the 'interlocking scenes' that are the contexts of all of our projections, in order to promote alethia, where the essentially hidden throws itself towards the light, where we can encounter the undisguised numinosity of the other, we need to understand that who we were yesterday does not equal to who we are today, in the stream of consciousess that is our each, individual, self.