Individuation Quotes

“No one is free who has not obtained the empire of himself. No man is free who cannot command himself.”
― Pythagoras

“Nostalgia is an illness
for those who haven't realized
that today
is tomorrow's nostalgia.”
― Zeena Schreck

“The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing ... He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths ... There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. "You are no different from anybody else," they will chorus or, "there's no such thing," and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as "morbid"...He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. "His own law!" everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law...The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization — absolute and unconditional— of its own particular law ... To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being ... he has failed to realize his own life's meaning.”
― Carl Jung

“The frightened individual seeks for somebody or something to tie his self to; he cannot bear to be his own individual self any longer, and he tries frantically to get rid of it and to feel security again by the elimination of this burden: the self.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“When one has let go of that great hidden agenda that drives humanity and its varied histories, then one can begin to encounter the immensity of one's own soul. If we are courageous enough to say, "Not this person, nor any other, can ultimately give me what I want; only I can," then we are free to celebrate a relationship for what it can give.”
― James Hollis, Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other

“The paradox of individuation is that we best serve intimate relationship by becoming sufficiently developed in ourselves that we do not need to feed off others.”
― James Hollis, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife

“The act of consciousness is central; otherwise we are overrun by the complexes. The hero in each of us is required to answer the call of individuation. We must turn away from the cacaphony of the outerworld to hear the inner voice. When we can dare to live its promptings, then we achieve personhood. We may become strangers to those who thought they knew us, but at least we are no longer strangers to ourselves.”
― James Hollis, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife

“You have to be able to recognize your truths in the daylight before you can find them in the dark.”
― Kelli Jae Baeli, Immortality or Something Like It

“How can families harm us when they love us? Very easily, unfortunately. Most of us overlook one important fact when we think love is enough: Love and respect aren't the same thing.

Love is fusion. As a baby, you belong to your parents, you're extension of them.

Respect is differentiation: you belong to yourself, and you're an extension of no one.

Differentiation is essential for happiness of adults.”
― Barbara Sher, I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get It

“The goal of individuation is wholeness, as much as we can accomplish, not the triumph of the ego.”
― James Hollis, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife

“The freeing of an individual, as he grows up, from the authority of his parents is one of the most necessary though one of the most painful results brought about by the course of his development. It is quite essential that that liberation should occur and it may be presumed that it has been to some extent achieved by everyone who has reached a normal state. Indeed, the whole progress of society rests upon the opposition between successive generations. On the other hand, there is a class of neurotics whose condition is recognizably determined by their having failed in this task.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Sexual Enlightenment of Children

“But if we understand anything of the unconscious, we know that it cannot be swallowed. We also know that it is dangerous to suppress it, because the unconscious is life and this life turns against us if suppressed, as happens in neurosis. Conscious and unconscious do not make a whole when one of them is suppressed and injured by the other. If they must contend, at least let it be a fair fight with equal rights on both sides. Both are aspects of life. Consciousness should defend its reason and protect itself, and the chaotic life of the unconscious should be given the chance of having its way too - as much of it as we can stand. This means open conflict and open collaboration at once. That, evidently, is the way human life should be. It is the old game of hammer and anvil: between them the patient iron is forged into an indestructible whole, an ‘individual.’ This, roughly, is what I mean by the individuation process.”
― C.G. Jung

“She was my mother. Never before this had I looked at her and thought of her as someone separate, as someone else. Now, so near to her that I could smell the subtle scent of her perfume and see the clear, faint texture of her skin, I realized for the first time that I was looking at another human being who was complete within herself. She was my mother, but she was more than just a loving and convenient extension of me and my needs.”
― Florence Engel Randall, The Watcher in the Woods

“I had to follow the ineradicable foolishness which furnishes the steps to true wisdom.”
― C.G. Jung

“The aim of the individuation process is not to overcome one's psychology, but to become familiar with it and this in itself leads to a change in attitude towards oneself, as well as others.”
― Daryl Sharp, The Secret Raven: Conflict and Transformation in the Life of Franz Kafka

“The only way to separate yourself from a person like my mother is to embody her fears and insecurities about herself, to become as far removed from her idealized self-image as possible. Or, to be more specific: Go through an awkward Goth phase. Buzz all your hair off in the middle of the night, surprising her in the morning. Get a memento mori tattoo somewhere conspicuous, a reminder that the body is nothing. Put on twenty pounds and wear a tight dress. Now you're free.”
― Ling Ma

“...the ritual cycle that makes men from boys is a kind of structural transformation by which children are changed into adults, narcissistic passivity is changed into selfless agency, and the raw protoplasm of nature is changed into finished culture.”
― David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity

“He suffers, so to speak, from the violence done to him by the self. The analogous passion of Christ signifies God's suffering on account of the injustice of the world and the darkness of man. The human and the divine set up a relationship of complimentarity with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way to realizing his wholeness. As a result of the integration of conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the “divine” realm, where it participates in “God's suffering.” The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely “incarnation,” which on the human level appears as “individuation.”
― C.G. Jung

“It can be stated that, subjectively, for the descendant to prevail, the ascendant must perish – the permanence of both nullifies continuity, the essential purpose of existence. Then comes the disconcerting observation of psychology: in order for children, figuratively speaking, to live fully, parents need to vanish.”
― Geverson Ampolini

“We tend to forget that not only must we gain inner freedom from one another, but we must also leave the other free and abandon any fixed concept we may have of him in our imagination.”
― Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: the Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943

“It is, moreover, useless to cast furtive glances at the way someone else is developing, because each of us has a unique task of self-realization. Although many human problems are similar, they are never identical. All pine trees are very much alike (otherwise we should not recognize them as pines), yet none is exactly the same as another. Because of these factors of sameness and difference, it is difficult to summarize the infinite variations of the process of self individuation. The fact is that each person has to do something different, something that is uniquely his own.”
― M.L Von Franz

“I am
neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with
high ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the
individual human being – that infinitesimal unit on whom a
world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the
Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal.”
― Carl Jung

“The human ego, through its discriminating function, assigns a good or bad valence to experiences. The degree of conscious awareness of the process of assigning a negative or positive valence can shape the ego's later capacity to integrate things into consciousness. Depression, for example, can be personally experienced as very negative, but from the teleological standpoint can be viewed as a positive process or moment in one's individuation. Jung has clearly shown that neurosis can often serve as a means to a higher level of development and individuation that could not happen any other way. By unifying negative and positive elements (experiences) an individual is able to "extract" greater meaning from life.”
― Vladislav Šolc, George J. Didier

“In truth we have been so preoccupied with the outer aspects of mythology that we have failed to realize that it is the inner, the subjective, dimension of mythology that is the potent healing place in each individual. The journey, once told, is what we take mythology to be. But the myth came forth spontaneously in a human being before it ever became a story told. And it came forth for the purposes of healing and growing that individual; it was a specific, unique, personal experience."
. . .
By developing an open and direct relationship with our deep imagination, we open ourselves to that wisdom that dwells in aliveness itself. The deep imagination carries within itself the potential of all experience. Not just the experience of this short lifetime that we take to be our own, individually, but the experience of that entire path that aliveness has traversed from the very beginning, from the origin of life itself."
- Eligio Stephen Gallegos, PhD, Into Wholeness: The Path of Deep Imagery”
― Eligio Stephen Gallegos, PhD

“There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoral—immoral from the scientific point of view.”

“Why?”

“Because to influence a person is to give him one’s own soul. He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of some one else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him. The aim of life is self-development. To realize one’s nature perfectly—that is what each of us is here for. People are afraid of themselves, nowadays. They have forgotten the highest of all duties, the duty that one owes to one’s self. Of course, they are charitable. They feed the hungry and clothe the beggar. But their own souls starve, and are naked. Courage has gone out of our race. Perhaps we never really had it. The terror of society, which is the basis of morals, the terror of God, which is the secret of religion—these are the two things that govern us.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorain Gray

“The way to the Self is through the "least" aspects of ourselves
(ie through assimilating shadow for reaching wholeness)”
― Edward Edinger

“The “complete human being”—that is, the Son of Man—is at the heart of this new person born into the kingdom of God.

Because personality is the ultimately valuable thing in creation, since it is life’s most unique expression, and because the kingdom is the goal of personality, the kingdom is futuristic and goal-centered.”
― John A. Sanford, The Kingdom Within: The Inner Meaning of Jesus' Sayings

“The opposite sides of personality are so different that only a great force can draw them together in union. This power is love. Love is a stronger power than the forces of disunion.

In love even the opposites can become one, and their differences unite in one indivisible whole.”
― John A. Sanford, The Kingdom Within: The Inner Meaning of Jesus' Sayings

“The kingdom involves the realization of our personalities according to the inner plan established within us by God; hence, the unfolding of a Self that predates and transcends the ego.”
― John A. Sanford, The Kingdom Within: The Inner Meaning of Jesus' Sayings

“If we’re indeed, like Neo in THE MATRIX, “living in a dream world,” the inevitable questions then become: Can we wake up? If so, how do we wake up? What exactly awaits us if and when we do wake up?”
― Sol Luckman, Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality