Every advance in culture is, psychologically, an extension of consciousness, a coming to consciousness that can take place only through discrimination. Therefore an advance always begins with individuation, that is to say with the individual, conscious of his isolation, cutting a new path through hitherto untrodden territory. To do this he must first return to the fundamental facts of his own being, irrespective of all authority and tradition, and allow himself to become conscious of his distinctiveness.
— C. G. and Pauli, Wolfgang Jung
Jung is not describing self-improvement here. The isolation he names is not a temporary discomfort on the way to belonging — it is the actual mechanism. Consciousness advances precisely by cutting, by the individual becoming distinct from the undifferentiated mass of inherited assumption. Without that cut, there is no new territory, only the old territory with fresh decoration.
What makes this difficult is that the very traditions asking you to individuate — therapeutic, spiritual, philosophical — have a strong interest in your eventually rejoining them, validated and certified. The return to "the fundamental facts of his own being, irrespective of all authority and tradition" includes irrespective of depth psychology's own authority, irrespective of Jung. The passage eats its own frame. A system that makes individuation its telos must, if it is honest, accept that the individuating person may find the system itself is what needs to be cut.
The conscious awareness of isolation is not the problem to be solved. It is the epistemological condition under which anything genuinely new becomes possible. Closing that gap too quickly — through community, through spiritual arrival, through the comfort of a named framework — forecloses the very advance Jung is pointing toward.
C. G. and Pauli, Wolfgang Jung·The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche·1955