Individuation seems to be the innate urge of life to realize itself consciously. The transpersonal life energy in the process of self-unfolding uses human consciousness, a product of itself, as an instrument for its own self realization."13 According to Jung, therefore, individuation begins with the innate urge of the Self for realization, regardless of the conscious will or external situation. To become "a single, homogenous being" is not something the ego can create at will. Being driven by the Self's urge, it becomes possible for the ego, the center of the conscious personality, to evolve. Jung states: "The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors which radiate out from the self surround the ego on all sides and are therefore supraordinate to it. The self, like the unconscious, is an a priori existent out of which the ego evolves. It is, so to speak, an unconscious prefiguation of the ego. It is not I who create myself, rather I happen to myself."
— J. Marvin Spiegelman
Jung's formulation here is grammatically exact in a way that matters: not "I create myself" but "I happen to myself." The middle voice — the one Greek had and English barely manages — is what that phrasing reaches for. Something occurs in me that I do not author, yet I am not merely its passive recipient either. The ego is moved, but it is not nothing; it is what the movement passes through.
What this unsettles is the developmental fantasy that individuation is a project — something the ego can decide to undertake, optimize, complete. The Self as Jung uses it here is not a destination the ego travels toward but the prior condition from which the ego has already emerged, which continues to surround it, which sends determining factors radiating inward from all directions at once. You cannot stand outside that to get your bearings. The center is already eccentric to you.
This is where the spiritual reading of individuation begins to distort the picture. If the Self is the mover and the ego is moved, then the ego's attempt to align with, attain, or "realize" the Self through deliberate practice already misunderstands the relationship. The striving is itself a product of the thing it strains toward. Whatever individuation discloses, it does not disclose in the direction the striving points.
J. Marvin Spiegelman·Buddhism and Jungian Psychology·1985