Introduction

This chapter attempts a psychosocial comparative study of Swiss psychoanalyst C.G. Jung’s individuation process, German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s individualization theory, and Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquidity, leading to the proposal that in current ‘second-late modernity’ or ‘second-late individualized society’. Beck-Gernsheim claim that when living an experimental life, everything is a matter of self-responsibility, and Bauman underlined that the burden of responsibility that fluid modernism places on the individual consists of the need to replace traditional patterns with self-elected ones. Jung claimed that modern meditation methods are ‘only for increasing concentration and consolidating consciousness, but have no significance as regards effecting a synthesis of the personality. German Jungian psychoanalyst Wolfgang Giegerich claims that psychotherapy ‘should fundamentally be comprehended as improvisation’, which, for him, ‘is the opposite of the application of a technique or of expert knowledge’.