ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Carl Gustav Jung's mid-life crises, and his personal and intellectual development during the years 1912 to 1922. It examines Jung's personal experience of his own mid-life transition help to understand and to contextualize his theory of the individuation process in the second half of life. Jung made the most of his opportunity for self-analysis, and acknowledged that one must pay one's dues to society and purchase the right to individuation. In early adulthood he had sought 'to accomplish something in science', and he did accomplish those ego goals by the time he reached his late thirties. In his essay on 'The ego and the unconscious' written in 1928, Jung differentiated his concept of the Self from the 'ego'. For Jung the Self is 'supraordinate to the conscious ego'. Jung's mid-life crisis has been variously interpreted as everything from a heroic conquest of the unconscious to a psychotic breakdown.
