Auseinandersetzung — the word means, literally, a setting-apart-from-one-another. Not merger, not transcendence, not the ego dissolving upward into something larger: a genuine exchange between realities that remain distinct. That is the operative word in Jung's concept, and it is the one most easily lost. What the culture tends to do with individuation — the myth for the modern, as Hollis names it — is convert the dialectic into an ascent narrative. The Self becomes the destination, the ego the vehicle that dissolves once it arrives, and the whole movement looks uncannily like every spiritual bypass that preceded it. The dry soul is wisest and best; move toward the light; the higher self awaits.

Jung resists this, though not without ambivalence. The Auseinandersetzung only works if the ego holds its ground — insists on its own reality as a counterweight to what is transpersonal and superordinant. The mystery is served precisely by remaining someone who can argue with it. When that resistance collapses, when the ego capitulates in the name of growth or surrender or self-transcendence, the dialectic ends and what looked like individuation quietly becomes its opposite: the self swallowed by an overwhelming interiority it could not sustain.