Jung Writes

The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and the suggestive power of primordial images on the other.

— Carl Gustav Jung

Jung sets two obstacles in parallel, and the symmetry is the teaching. The persona is too much outside — the polished surface assembled for social survival, the face that gradually forgets it is a face. The primordial images are too much inside — the inherited mythological patterns that seize the ego from below and make it feel luminous, chosen, on the verge of revelation. Both are wrappings. Both convince you that what they are covering is exactly what you are.

The persona problem is relatively legible: most people who have found their way to depth psychology have at least begun to notice the performance. The second wrapping is harder, because it does not feel like a wrapping at all. It feels like arrival. Spirit, revelation, the sense of touching something universal and necessary — these are experiences of genuine power, and their power is precisely what makes them capable of holding the ego in suspension indefinitely, substituting the *feeling* of depth for the actual descent. Jung's phrasing is careful: *suggestive power*. Not false content, not illusion — suggestive power. The image is real; the ego's identification with it is the confusion. Individuation, on this account, is not an ascent into larger selfhood but a patient divestment — from both directions at once.


Carl Gustav Jung·Two Essays on Analytical Psychology·1953