Jung is careful here not to let individuation become the vocabulary of withdrawal. The stunting he names is real — not a metaphor, not a rhetorical flourish — and it operates in both directions: the person who submerges into collective standards loses something prior and non-negotiable, a datum that was already there before the group had any claim on it. But the person who mistakes individuation for solitude, for the heroic project of self-cultivation apart from others, has made a different and subtler error. The individual, Jung says, presupposes collective relationship by the mere fact of existing. You cannot individuate your way out of that presupposition; you can only ignore it, which is its own form of stunting.

What this passage quietly resists is the version of depth work that has become indistinguishable from self-improvement: the personal growth framework in which the goal is a more fully realized autonomous self, the relationships serving the project rather than constituting it. Jung's argument runs the other direction. The process, if it is genuine, leads to *more* intense and broader connection — not as a reward for the inner work, but as its very structure. The individual becomes more distinctly themselves and, in that same movement, more implicated in the lives around them. These are not sequential stages. They are one motion.