Personalization

Personalization occupies a theoretically charged position in depth-psychological discourse, functioning simultaneously as a developmental achievement, a defensive maneuver, and a clinical necessity. The term carries at least two distinct and nearly antithetical valences. In Neumann’s mythopoetic history of consciousness, ‘secondary personalization’ names a regressive-defensive operation by which the modern ego reduces transpersonal, archetypal contents to purely personal, ego-level terms—thereby exorcizing the numinous and inflating the individual at the expense of genuine encounter with the unconscious. This form of personalization is explicitly pathological in Neumann’s account, a symptom of the Western mind’s flight from the transpersonal. Edinger, working from a clinical rather than historico-mythic vantage, deploys the term in a complementary but quite different register: ‘personalization of archetypes’ designates the indispensable developmental process through which abstract archetypal potentials are incarnated in concrete personal relationships—most paradigmatically, the parent-child bond. Without this personalizing work, the archetype remains boundlessly numinous and inaccessible to ego integration. Winnicott contributes a third, object-relational inflection: ‘Personalization’ names a primary developmental line distinct from integration and object-relating, referring to the infant’s psychosomatic establishment of self as dwelling in a body. Across these positions the central tension is clear: personalization can be either the vehicle of psychological growth or its gravest obstacle, depending entirely on its direction of movement.

In the library 15 passages

This tendency to reduce all transpersonal contents to personalistic terms is the most extreme form of secondary personalization… when secondary personalization seeks to assert itself by devaluing the transpersonal forces, it produces a dangerous overvaluation of the ego.

Neumann identifies ‘secondary personalization’ as the ego’s defensive reduction of transpersonal archetypal contents to merely personal categories, producing pathological ego inflation and severance from the unconscious.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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In a facilitating environment the infant person is engaged in making various grades, three of which can be described as: Integration Personalization Object-relating

Winnicott positions Personalization as one of three primary developmental achievements of early infancy, distinct from integration and object-relating, and dependent upon a sufficiently facilitating environmental provision.

Winnicott, Donald, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis

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An important archetypal image has not undergone personalization or coagulatio through a personal relationship and hence retains a boundless and primordial power that threatens to inundate the ego if it is approached.

Edinger argues that archetypal images lacking personalization through lived relational experience retain dangerously unmediated numinous power, making the personalizing process clinically essential.

Edinger, Edward F., Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis

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The effects of this approach, however, were never specifically investigated or given a theoretical formulation… All archetypal realization is and must be personal. The body into which an archetype incarnates is made of personal stuff.

Edinger contends that Jungian theory has undertheorized the personalizing process, arguing that personal incarnation is the sole medium through which archetypes can be experientially realized.

Edinger, Edward F., Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective, 2002thesis

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That part of the archetype which the parent’s personality is able to activate, mediate and embody is the part which the child can incorporate most easily into his or her own personality. That part of the archetype to which the parent has no relation will be left largely unrealized.

Edinger demonstrates that the personalization of archetypes is structurally bounded by parental personality, leaving un-mediated archetypal dimensions existentially inaccessible to the developing child.

Edinger, Edward F., Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective, 2002thesis

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As ego consciousness and individual personality gain in importance and thrust themselves increasingly to the fore in the historical period, there is a marked strengthening of the personal element… the human and personal sphere is enriched at the expense of the extrahuman and transpersonal.

Neumann traces the historical emergence of personalization as a cultural-evolutionary process in which the growth of ego consciousness progressively displaces transpersonal archetypal experience.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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To what extent is personality development determined by innate, a priori patterns within the individual—namely, the archetypal factor—and to what extent is it determined by personal experience and influence from environment, cultural forms and significant personal relationships?

Edinger frames the question of personalization as the central theoretical problem of depth-psychological developmental theory: the relative weighting of innate archetypal structure versus personal relational experience.

Edinger, Edward F., Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective, 2002supporting

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Any reduction of the castration threat, parricide, the ‘primal scene’ of parental intercourse, and so on, to historical and personalistic data, which presumes to paint the early history of humanity in the likeness of a patriarchal bourgeois family of the nineteenth century, is scientifically impossible.

Neumann challenges Freudian personalistic reduction as a methodologically untenable form of secondary personalization, arguing that archetypal complexes cannot be dissolved into historically contingent personal data.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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Could the archetypal experience have occurred without the personal relationship? I doubt it. The archetype must be incarnated, however meagerly.

Edinger insists on the indispensability of personal relational encounter as the vehicle for archetypal incarnation, even when the catalyzing gesture is modest.

Edinger, Edward F., Science of the Soul: A Jungian Perspective, 2002supporting

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For experience to become meaningful requires that bodily excitations, including the archaic affects of infancy, be given mental representation by a transitional parental figure so that eventually they can reach verbal expression in language and be shared with another person.

Kalsched describes the mediation of archaic somatic experience through a parental figure as a precondition for meaningful personal identity, implicitly invoking the personalizing process without naming it directly.

Kalsched, Donald, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996aside

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