ABSTRACT
In this chapter we regard individuation as a way of self-discovery in an intersubjective process. Throughout one’s life, the ability to engage in dialogue, to distinguish oneself from others and to relate to and empathize with other people develop. Individuation is as well a lived dialogue with social reality. Starting at the end of the second year of life, all essential ‘building blocks’ of individuation are already present in the child. The ego is confronted with archetypal possibilities and images that have not yet been realized at every stage of life and with the still unknown others. Individuation is like a river in which I swim: a flow of experiences, feelings, thoughts, dreams, fantasies and meanings of people and things. The intersubjective perspective emphasizes the context dependency of the intrapsychic. The relationship between You and I (M. Buber) creates an emotional and relational intersubjective field in which the differentiation of the ego takes place. The individuation process becomes conscious when this flow is obstructed or interrupted, and life tasks can no longer be mastered. In the psychotherapeutic relationship, a neurotic, borderline-like or no standard case for individuation, the own countertransference and the regression level of the analysand have to be considered well.
The importance of the inner functioning of the parent complexes is highlighted. It shows how important it is to be able to resist the power of the parent complexes. The symbolic image of this power is the Uroboros, the tail-eating snake. Girls and boys have to fight their way out of their embrace in the process of individuation. Symbolically it is about a fight against the ‘old ruling system’. Positive and negative imagines of the mother and father are helpful or frightening. The individuation path of the woman as an active lover is described. In the therapeutic relationship, the view of parents and ancestors as real people with strengths and weaknesses should always be opened up.
With a psychopathological symptomatology, an analysand brings the intolerability of an inner or outer situation into a symbolic scene. We try to understand what is rejected by the symptoms and the suffering. A central problem is regularly not being able to be alone with oneself anymore. There is an enormous urge to cling to others or to withdraw completely into catatonic states. In order to find support in one’s own unconscious again, the confrontation with the shadow as content of the personal unconscious has to be initiated. The term ‘shadow’ refers to all characteristics of the personality that are deliberately unacceptable and therefore repressed. Many problems depend more on the shadow sides of personality than on other people. Shadow content is usually projected onto others. Shadow themes are often interwoven with archetypal contents of the collective Unconscious, which can evoke enormous fears. The ‘Shadow’ means a considerable moral and ethical problem in psychotherapy: a differentiation must be made from the collective norms and from the contents of the collective unconscious. The analyst thereby has the role of a ‘soul leader’.
The transcendent function is presented as the ability to understand unconscious and conscious contents in their relationship to each other in such a way that an expanded level of consciousness can be approached. The quality of the analyst’s experience with the transcendent function and his own symbolic attitude are important for the analysand’s possibilities of development. Qualitative ‘jumps’ often occur through moments of meeting. These are transactional events that enrich the implicit relationship knowledge of the analysand by expanding the interactive field of analysand-analysts through conscious understanding. The transcendent function is the technical term for the process of identity-finding, which is aimed at integrating the relationship to one’s own self.
Mental suffering is often associated with transgenerational unconscious stress. The pedigrees of the mothers and fathers often explain the individuality of the children more than the immediate parents. The development of a transgenerational perspective with the analysand and the goal of integrating the imagines of the ancestors is an important integration step: the analysand can, so to speak, experience himself ‘standing on the shoulders of his ancestors’. Furthermore, he could think about which strokes of fate these ancestors had to struggle with and which spiritual and physical characteristics he owes to them.
Psychic traumas and their preservation in the ‘fear system’ are often associated with the imagines of parents and grandparents. Limited or harmful mentalization conditions result in ‘early disorders’ combined with the difficulty of distinguishing one’s own inner world from the inner world of others. One’s own feelings are therefore experienced as external real events. This results in long-lasting disturbances of interpersonal coordination possibilities. The countertransference reactions of the analyst are the result of his ability to symbolize. They give the analysand’s behaviour a psychological significance that he alone cannot perceive.
Another important development factor is the quality of the early attachment relationships. The quality of attachment relationships can be described in a spectrum between attachment security and attachment uncertainty. Experiences of attachment have a high significance for the formation of one’s own self in the individuation process.
It is enormously important that an analysand can experience a reliable, emotionally oriented, constant, crisis-resistant and at the same time delimited relationship between the analyst and himself.
