Centroversion and Individuation

Neumann’s relation to Jungian individuation is neither repetition nor departure but structural extension. “Whereas in the first half of life the central position of the ego does not allow the workings of centroversion to come to consciousness, the middle period is characterized by a decisive change of personality. Centroversion becomes conscious. The ego is exposed to a somewhat painful process which, starting in the unconscious, permeates the entire personality. This psychological mutation with its symptomatology and symbolism Jung has described as the individuation process, and he has amplified it with a wealth of material in his works on alchemy” (Neumann 2019, p. 387).

The first phase of centroversion “led to the development of the ego and to the differentiation of the psychic system”; its second phase “brings development of the self and the integration of that system” (Neumann 2019, p. 388). Individuation, in Neumann’s reading, is the second phase of a single drive toward centering that has been at work since infancy. This is the distinctive move. Jung had treated individuation as a task of the second half of life; Neumann locates it as the conscious phase of a process that has been operating unconsciously throughout the first half.

The cost of the claim is that ego-formation and individuation become continuous, which for the Archetypal School — james-hillman above all — reintroduces precisely the developmental teleology polycentric psychology resists. The Developmental School receives it as vindication; the Classical School (in Samuels’ taxonomy) treats it as a legitimate elaboration; the Archetypal School treats it as the substantialism to be overcome.

Sources

• erich-neumann: centroversion as the single drive underlying ego-formation and individuation
• carl-jung: individuation as a task of the second half of life; Neumann’s extension reshapes the claim
• andrew-samuels: maps the post-Jungian schools’ divergent receptions of Neumann’s extension