ABSTRACT
The concept of individuation has played a significant part in the history of dynamic psychology: it provided a basis for a psychology of maturity at a time when psychonanalysts were investigating its infantile components. C. G. Jung's idea is as follows: the alchemists projected their unconscious processes into their chemical experiments and this resulted in a peculiar mixture of chemistry and symbolic imagery. The extended conception would indeed appear to necessitate a regression to rather old-fashioned teleology. The extended thesis does have some justification in that it attempts to account for the manifestation of archetypal images, including those referring to the self, in a more simple form in children and young adults. Historical evidence can be used by analytical psychologists in two ways: first it can be scrutinized for archetypal manifestations, secondly it can be investigated to understand how consciousness develops.
