Søren Kierkegaard and Carl Jung are two of my favourite authors. Although they wrote in different centuries and from very different perspectives, I have always been struck by the similarities between Kierkegaard's understanding of becoming the Individual and Jung's understanding of individuation.
Both, in their own way, wrestled with one of the central questions of human existence:
How do we become who we truly are?
There are periods in life when the question “What should I do?” gradually gives way to a much more unsettling question:
“Who am I becoming?”
This can happen during a career transition, the end of a relationship, recovery from addiction, burnout, retirement, grief, or simply at a point when a life that once made sense no longer feels quite right.
Kierkegaard called us toward becoming the Individual.
Jung called the corresponding psychological journey individuation.
Their languages are different. Kierkegaard speaks primarily about existence, choice, despair, faith and God. Jung speaks about the ego, persona, shadow, unconscious and Self.
Yet both describe something remarkably similar: the difficult process of moving away from a life determined primarily by external expectations and toward a life experienced as genuinely one's own.
The Life We Are Given
Most of us begin by learning how to belong.
We learn what our families value, what our culture considers successful, what behaviours receive approval, and what kinds of people we are expected to become.
Jung called the psychological identity that develops partly in response to these expectations the persona.
The persona is not inherently false. We need it. It allows us to function in society and inhabit important roles: professional, parent, partner, leader, caregiver, friend.
The problem occurs when we begin to believe that the persona is the whole of who we are.
Kierkegaard approached the same problem through his critique of “the crowd.”
A person can live according to the values of the surrounding culture without ever consciously deciding whether those values are actually their own.
We can therefore become highly successful at living a life we never consciously chose.
When the Old Life Stops Working
Eventually, something may disturb this arrangement.
Sometimes it arrives dramatically: divorce, job loss, illness, addiction, betrayal or death.
Sometimes nothing obvious happens at all.
A person simply begins thinking:
I should be happy. Why am I not?
From the outside, their life may look perfectly intact.
Internally, something has begun to shift.
Kierkegaard used the language of anxiety and despair to describe aspects of this experience. Despair, for him, was not simply sadness. It concerned our relationship to ourselves—the difficulty of becoming the self we potentially are.
Jung noticed something similar in psychotherapy.
Symptoms can sometimes appear when the personality we have consciously constructed has become too narrow for the life attempting to emerge from within us.
This changes the therapeutic question.
Instead of asking only:
“How can I make this uncomfortable feeling disappear?”
we might also ask:
“What might this discomfort be trying to tell me?”
Kierkegaard: From Possibility to Commitment
Kierkegaard described several broad ways of living.
In what he called the aesthetic mode of existence, we are drawn toward pleasure, novelty, experience and possibility.
Eventually, however, endless possibility can become strangely empty.
At some point we must choose.
The ethical life introduces responsibility, commitment and accountability. Rather than endlessly imagining who we might become, we begin constructing a life through the choices we actually make.
But Kierkegaard believed even this was not the end of the journey.
Eventually we encounter the limits of our ability to create and control our own existence.
For Kierkegaard, the deepest form of individuality emerged through the individual's relationship with God.
The final question becomes not simply:
“What kind of life do I want?”
but something closer to:
“What am I being called to become?”
Jung: From Persona to Self
Jung describes a comparable movement psychologically.
We begin largely identified with our conscious personality and persona.
But eventually we encounter aspects of ourselves that do not fit the identity we have constructed.
Jung called one important part of this the shadow.
The shadow contains qualities we have rejected, disowned or simply failed to develop.
A person who has spent decades being responsible may discover spontaneity buried in the shadow.
Someone who has always been accommodating may discover anger.
Someone identified with achievement may discover vulnerability.
Someone who has built a life around caring for others may discover desires of their own that have barely been acknowledged.
Individuation requires us to encounter these neglected parts of ourselves rather than automatically projecting them onto other people.
Gradually, the ego discovers something humbling:
I am more than the person I consciously believe myself to be.
Jung used the term Self for the larger organizing wholeness of the psyche.
The goal of individuation is therefore not ego perfection.
It is relationship between the ego and this larger Self.
Choice and Integration
Here Kierkegaard and Jung differ in an illuminating way.
Kierkegaard emphasizes choice.
There are moments when we cannot simply continue thinking about life. We must commit ourselves.
Jung emphasizes integration.
Before making certain choices, we may need to understand the competing parts of ourselves that are demanding recognition.
One asks:
What will you choose?
The other asks:
What have you excluded?
Psychologically, we may need both.
Growth requires the courage to examine what has remained unconscious and the courage eventually to act upon what we discover.
Insight without action can become another form of avoidance.
Action without self-understanding can simply repeat old patterns in a new setting.
The Paradox of Becoming Yourself
There is another surprising similarity between Kierkegaard and Jung.
Neither ultimately believes that becoming an individual means simply doing whatever we want.
In fact, the journey gradually challenges the fantasy that the conscious ego should be completely in control.
For Kierkegaard, the individual ultimately discovers the self in relationship with something greater than itself: God.
For Jung, the ego gradually discovers that it is not the centre of the entire personality. It exists in relationship with the larger Self.
The languages are different, and the philosophical distinction between them matters.
But psychologically they point toward a similar experience.
We may begin adulthood asking:
“How do I make the life I want?”
Later we may find ourselves asking:
“What is life asking of me?”
That is a very different question.
Why Psychological Crises Can Become Turning Points
This perspective can change how we understand periods of psychological disruption.
Burnout may not simply mean that we need a vacation.
Career dissatisfaction may not simply mean that we need another job.
Relationship difficulties may reveal patterns of attachment that have existed for decades.
Addictive behaviour may point toward needs, wounds and conflicts that have never found another language.
Anxiety may sometimes accompany the frightening recognition that the old way of organizing our lives can no longer contain who we are becoming.
None of this means that suffering should be romanticized. Depression, anxiety, trauma and addiction can require direct treatment and support.
But psychological treatment can sometimes do more than reduce symptoms.
It can become an inquiry into what those symptoms exist within.
What has been neglected?
What keeps repeating?
What identity am I protecting?
What part of myself has never been allowed to develop?
What am I afraid would happen if I changed?
And perhaps most importantly:
What is trying to emerge now?
Psychotherapy and the Journey Toward Individuality
Good psychotherapy does not tell people who they should become.
It creates a space in which they can begin listening more carefully to their own lives.
That may involve examining childhood relationships, attachment patterns, recurring relationship dynamics, dreams, fantasies, fears, addictions, career choices, losses and the identities we have constructed over many years.
Gradually, patterns become visible.
And sometimes we discover that the crisis we desperately wanted to eliminate was also asking us to reconsider the way we had been living.
Kierkegaard called us to become the Individual rather than disappearing into the crowd.
Jung called us toward individuation rather than remaining identified with the persona.
Both understood that becoming ourselves is not a single achievement.
It is an ongoing process of choosing, relinquishing, integrating and becoming.
Perhaps that is why the question “Who am I?” is never completely answered.
A more useful question may be:
“Who am I being asked to become now?”
James Leitch
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