The term ‘individual’ occupies a critical and contested position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as ontological category, clinical subject, and philosophical problem. Jung establishes the individual as the irreducible carrier of psychic reality — uniquely singular, never reducible to statistical abstraction, and the only genuine locus of living experience. Von Franz amplifies this, insisting that ‘the individual is the only carrier of life.’ Against this Jungian valorization, Simondon mounts the most rigorous ontological challenge: the individual is not a substance or a relational term but a theater and agent of relation, always carrying within itself a residue of pre-individual charge that drives further individuation. Where Jungians treat individuation as a telos — a vocation toward wholeness — Simondon treats it as an ongoing ontogenetic process whose completion is structurally impossible. Hillman’s acorn theory reframes individuality as destiny encoded in a soul-image, resisting both genetic determinism and environmental reduction. Giegerich complicates the Jungian picture by insisting that the ‘concrete individual’ must be understood dialectically as the unity of singular being and universal anthropos. Rudhyar maps the individual-collective polarity onto astrological symbolism, while Aurobindo situates ego-bound individuality as a necessary early phase of spiritual evolution. Together these voices reveal a sustained tension between individuality as existential dignity, as ontogenetic process, and as something that must ultimately be surpassed.
the object of this knowledge is an individual — a relative exception and an irregular phenomenon. Hence it is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique.
Jung argues that the individual is definitionally the exception to statistical regularity and can neither be known nor compared through general theory.
, The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams, 1957thesis
the individual is a theater and agent of a relation; the individual can only be a term in an ancillary way because it is essentially a theater or agent of an interactive communication.
Simondon refutes substantialist conceptions by defining the individual not as a fixed relational term but as the active, ongoing being of relation itself.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
The individual is only itself, but it exists as superior to itself, since it carries with it a more complete reality that individuation has not exhausted and that is still new and potential.
Simondon establishes that every individual exceeds its own completed form because it retains pre-individual charge that overflows its current state.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
in fact the individual is the only carrier of life. One cannot speak of the ‘life’ of millions of people, because millions of different people are the carriers of life; they are the ultimate reality.
Von Franz, following Jung, holds that statistical abstractions falsify psychological truth because only the singular individual constitutes genuine living reality.
, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time, 1975thesis
The concrete individual (the individual apperceived truly psychologically) is — this is what Jung is driving at — the unity of the difference and unity of ‘singular human being’ and ‘universal Christ.’
Giegerich argues that Jung’s depth-psychological concept of the individual demands dialectical thought, holding singular and universal in irreducible tension.
thesis
the individual exists the moment that a reflexive becoming-conscious of the posed problems has allowed the particular being to introduce its idiosyncrasy and its activity into the solution.
Simondon locates the emergence of individuality precisely at the moment a being’s idiosyncrasy becomes both data and solution within its own problematic.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
It can be asked why an individual is what it is. It can also be asked why an individual is different from all other individuals and cannot be confused with them. Nothing proves that the two aspects of individuation are identical.
Simondon distinguishes two irreducible questions about individuality — internal constitution and differentiation from others — warning against conflating them.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
Where the Chinese spoke of Yang and Yin we shall use the terms: ‘individual’ and ‘collective’; and we shall p
Rudhyar proposes the individual-collective polarity as the foundational dualism underlying astrological symbolism, analogous to the Taoist Yang-Yin opposition.
He likens individuation to a drive such as sex or hunger, postulating an instinct in man to grow psychologically, similar to ordinary physical maturation. Individuation is, therefore, a natural tendency.
Samuels surveys the ambiguities in Jung’s account of individuation, questioning whether it is a universal drive or an achievement reserved for a psychological élite.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
if the living organism is called individual, the psychical leads to an order of trans-individual reality; indeed, the pre-individual reality associated with individuated living organisms is not segmented like them.
Simondon argues that psychical individuation necessarily opens onto a transindividual order because pre-individual reality retains participation across separate living beings.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
Information conserves the pre-individual within the individual. This is the condition of communication, which is found first at the moment of individuation and a second time when the individual amplifies itself into the collective.
Simondon identifies information as the medium by which pre-individual reality is preserved within the individual and later amplified into collective existence.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
The integrated adult, relative to the social, is an equally social being to the extent that he possesses an actual active consciousness, i.e. to the extent that he extends and perpetuates the movement of individuation.
Simondon holds that genuine individual integration is inseparable from active participation in social individuation rather than opposition to the collective.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
The mischief, then, lies neither with the collective psyche nor with the individual psyche, but in the fact that we permit the one to exclude the other.
Jung insists that the pathology lies not in collective or individual psyche per se but in their mutual exclusion, which destroys the necessary dialectical tension.
, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 1953supporting
the early preparatory business of man in the evolutionary steps of Nature is to affirm, to make distinct and rich, to possess firmly, powerfully and completely his own individuality.
Aurobindo situates the ego-driven affirmation of individual selfhood as a necessary evolutionary stage rather than an error, preparatory to spiritual transcendence.
, The Life Divine, 1939supporting
the fact of individuality defends the soul against all class-action claims. No soul is mediocre, whatever your personal taste for conventionality, whatever your personal record of middling achievements.
Hillman deploys the concept of individuality as a defense of soul against the leveling judgments of social class and collective mediocrity.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
other cultures regard as the kernel of character and the repository of individual fate. The core subject of psychology, psyche or soul, doesn’t get into the books supposedly dedicated to its study and care.
Hillman laments that contemporary psychology omits the individualized soul-image — the daimon — which older traditions treated as the source of individual character and destiny.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996supporting
psychical individuation is a dilation, a precocious expansion of vital individuation… psychical structures are the expression of this fractured individualization that has separated the individuated being into a somatic domain and a psychical domain.
Simondon traces the split between somatic and psychical domains to a fractured individuation, arguing that psychical structures record the history of this ongoing resolution.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
Their lives show an extraordinary degree of uniqueness, imagination, and pristine individuality. They are leaders in the area of spiritual direction.
Stein identifies advanced psychological transformation with an exceptional depth of individuality that transcends tribal and collective markings.
, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting
The present of the being is thus simultaneously individual and milieu; it is individual relative to the future and milieu relative to the past; the soul, the active essence of the present, is both individual and milieu.
Simondon argues that the soul as the active present is simultaneously individuated and milieu, refusing any fixed ontological boundary between the individual and its field.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting
By replacing the human individual with the world as focus, the notion of the human individual is left behind unchanged, untransformed, and will be out of reach from then on.
Giegerich critiques Hillman’s move toward the world-soul for abandoning the transformation of the human individual, which remains the proper prima materia of depth psychology.
supporting
I shall concentrate upon the notion of psychological transformation itself and upon the outcomes of transformation for the individual person.
Stein grounds his inquiry in the transformation of the individual person as the proper locus for psychological work amid collective dissolution.
, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting
From the homo religiosus of the archaic cultures to this political, reasoning individual… these transformations affect the entire framework of thought and the whole gamut of psychological functions.
Vernant places the emergence of the individuated, reasoning subject within a historical transformation of Greek mentality, situating the individual as a cultural-historical construction.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983aside
To seek the principle of individuation in a reality that precedes individuation itself is to consider individuation strictly as onto-genesis.
Simondon establishes that any genuine inquiry into individuation must treat it as ontogenesis rather than as the application of a pre-existing principle to ready-made matter.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside
a person is born with an innate paradigm that is not identical with genetic endowment and that gradually gives way in middle childhood as genetic factors kick in.
Hillman draws on heritability research to argue that the soul’s innate image — not genetics — governs the earliest and later phases of individual character.
, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996aside