ABSTRACT
Chapter 4, “Romantic Metasubjectivity: Individuation,” develops the concept of individuation underwriting the experience of the “Self of one's self” as a radically ateleological, purposive self-organising force which articulates knowledge and experience. The theodicy of Schelling's Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (1809) dramatises the emergence of time and history as a yearning for self-articulation God shares with man. This yearning unfolds in man as a rhythmic movement towards and away from the centrum as the basis of personality, and Schelling defines this motile force as evil, which is necessary for human freedom. The Ages of the World (1815) casts individuation cosmologically as the work of the three potencies [Potenzenlehre], but also explicitly introduces psychology (via the potencies' “anxiety” but also Mesmerism and magnetic sleep) in ways which prefigure Jung. The German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin's theory of rhythm and caesura is introduced as a tragic ontology, which prefigures Jung's theory of libido and links it with the melancholic nature of life articulated by Schelling. The Freedom essay and Ages are shown to be remarkably prescient of Jung's notions of inflation (the ego's overpowering by the unconscious) and the transcendent function (the creation of new knowledge in the analytic encounter).
