Here one may ask, perhaps, why it is so desirable that a man should be individuated. Not only is it desirable, it is absolutely indispensable because, through his contamination with others, he falls into situations and commits actions which bring him into disharmony with himself. From all states of uncon- ~ scious contamination and non-differentiation there is begotten a compulsion to be and to act in a way contrary to one's own nature. Accordingly a man can neither be at one with himself nor accept responsibility for himself. He feels himself to be in a degrading, unfree, unethical condition. But the disharmony with himself is precisely the neurotic and intolerable condition from which he seeks to be delivered, and deliverance from this condition will come only when he can be and act as he feels is conformable with his true self. People have a feeling for these things, dim and uncertain at first, but growing ever stronger and clearer with progressive development. When a man can say of his states and actions, "As I am, so I act,'"' he can be at one with himself, even though it be difficult, and he can accept responsibility for himself even though he struggle against it. We must recognize that nothing is more difficult to bear with than oneself. ("You sought the heaviest burden, and found yourself," says Nietzsche.) Yet even this most difficult of achievements becomes possible if we can distinguish ourselves from the un223 THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE EGO AND THE UNCONSCIOUS: TWO conscious contents. The introvert discovers these contents in himself, the extravert finds them projected upon human objects. In both cases the unconscious contents are the cause of blinding illusions which falsify ourselves and our relations to our fellowmen, making both unreal. For these reasons individuation is indispensable for certain people, not only as a therapeutic necessity, but as a high ideal, an idea of the best we can do. Nor should I omit to remark that it is at the same time the primitive Christian ideal of the Kingdom of Heaven which "'is within you."
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung reaches here for what sounds like liberation — the promise that suffering comes from contamination, and that differentiation will end the disharmony. It is worth sitting with what that structure actually is. If I individuate enough, I will not suffer. The logic is tidy, the relief it promises is real, and that is precisely why it wants examination.
Notice where the passage arrives: the Kingdom of Heaven, within you. Jung cannot resist it. Having built an entire psychology of unconscious contents and projections, of the painful labor of distinguishing oneself from what one is not, he ends by ratifying the oldest pneumatic gesture in Western religion — ascent inward to a sovereign light. The neurotic condition is cast as the problem; individuation as the solution; the Kingdom as the destination. The architecture is therapeutic, but the grammar is salvific.
What the passage actually shows, under that grammar, is something more honest: that bearing oneself is the most difficult achievement possible, that "nothing is more difficult to bear with than oneself." Nietzsche's line earns its place here — the heaviest burden turns out to be you. But Jung immediately steps back from the weight of that by promising that differentiation makes even this bearable. The soul's difficulty is not resolved by individuation; it is, at best, met with less illusion about who is doing the suffering.
Carl Gustav Jung·Two Essays on Analytical Psychology·1953