Dissertations on Individuation

Sandwerk as an individual spiritual practice

by Virginia Bunnell Graham (2006)

How can psychospiritual experiences result from a new form of sandplay, a method of applied Jungian psychology introduced by Kalff in 1980? Sandplay is a therapist-assisted use of miniatures in a sandtray, a nonrational, preverbal, sensate method for self-exploration and healing.

This dissertation explores and documents the phenomenon of an individual's creating three intentional sandtrays in solitude and reflecting on them. I have coined a new term, sandwerk, describing a way one can practice this adaptation of sandplay for personal growth.

Sandwerk offers a process for recognizing and assimilating some contents of the unconscious. One provides one's own free, protected space for creativity and relating to imaginal figures, and explores symbols that personify archetypal patterns of energy. This experience, as a transformative practice, offers the potential to integrate the unconscious into waking life and develop a stronger personality during the second half of life.

Art therapy, drawing mandalas, and dreamwork employ similar visual projective techniques.

This dissertation uses phenomenological research methodology by gathering data from a small sample of six therapists and spiritual directors, aged 49-70. Each co-researcher focused on a subjective question and created three sandtrays within one week. They discussed their individual introductory rituals and experiences of the process. I distilled the interviews after making my own sandwerks.

Some results of the study were unexpected. Participants expressed a range of feelings: surprise, fear, love, despair, wholeness, and fascination. They reported discovering meaning, respect, awe for the process, and further questions. On various levels, co-researchers were able to contain conflict assisted by experiencing the images. They extended their insights and transformed, assimilating contents of the unconscious. Their relationships with imaginal figures deepened their sense of the symbolic, and mediated inner and outer life.

This research finds that sandwerk—an individual practice for personal development that is intentional, serial, imaginal, and relational—offers a method, a process, and a potential for integrating unconscious dynamics into awareness. It facilitates individuation, a Jungian term for becoming one's authentic whole self in relationship to a transpersonal power. Moreover, sandwerk can liberate Jung's depth psychology and Kalff's sandplay from the consulting room.

Vocation as redemption: Returning to the church as a path of Individuation

by Patricia Ann Amrhein (2002)

Return is a resolution, a reconstitution of a departure, loss, or rupture. Universalized in the mono-myth of the hero's journey, return is an archetypal theme fundamental to the ritual of shamanic initiation, the spiritual path of descent into darkness preceding light, and the Christian myth of death and rebirth. Cradle Catholics returning to the Church as a path of individuation dramatize this journey. Return to the Church, viewed through the lens of analytical psychology and seen as part of a mutually fueled process of redemption of God, Church, and human being, is the subject of this hermeneutical study.

Through the duality of private and communal experience, the Church offers a template for wholeness, or redemption. The mandala, with its center representing the mystical experience of unity and the periphery representing the opposites, is an image of the individual and collective nature of the Church, whose energy flows between the inner and the outer in the regression and progression of praxis, the cycle of contemplation put into action. The vocation of return constellates a personality who becomes a living expression of the struggle to contain the opposites, and who draws closer to the center through tethering to its periphery.

The constellation of the Self is redemptive, not just for the individual, but for the entire collective. The transformation and redemption of the Church depends on the work of the individual who is no longer contained by the Church, but becomes the container. Rather than the Church existing for the redemption of the sinner, the individual returns and belongs for the redemption of the Church. The struggle and suffering of homecoming is largely due to the difficulty of being tethered to a collective that has moved away from its own mythology. Afraid of wholeness, the Church proclaims Christ but as an institution is terrified of the Christ mystery. Yet as the Church is formed around a numinous experience of the Christ archetype, it exists to preserve the value and the meaning of that experience. Its authentic life depends on relationship to the original revelation, which is ultimately lived through the individual.

Mystica Communitas: Toward a Gnostic psychology of individuation

by Robert Lloyd (2004)

Using an original adaptation of a dialogical hermeneutic, called the Gnostic method of research , the study explores the archetypal roots of Jung's theory of individuation in ancient Gnostic myths and practices. Because the Gnostic method recognizes the need for the soul to return to its own spiritual origins before it can discover the truth of events, ideas, and written texts, the study includes descriptions of imaginal experiences and subjective associations to complement the theoretical analysis of gnosis and individuation.

The thesis argues that Gnostics achieved their gnosis by personal experience of the autonomous, archetypal realms of the psyche and articulated their numinous encounters in mythic symbols. Gnostic myths point to a developmental progression inherent in the individuation process expressed here as the conception, gestation, and birth of the Self. With the correct attitude of an initiated ego assisting the process, the developmental progression of the Self is viewed to move from latency to manifestation to realization.

This dissertation extends Jung's idea of the developmental unfolding of the Self to include a Gnostic vision of the realization of the spiritual individuality of the human being. The "birth" of the manifest Self is perceived to be the end of strictly sense-based ego consciousness and the beginning of a life of gnosis as a source of perception and valuation. The thesis argues that under the proper circumstances, the Self may continue its development and realize its full potential as the union of the twin spirit above (outside time and space) and the unified complex of body, soul, and spirit in the time-space, physical world. Several Gnostic symbols and themes convey the idea that during the individuation process, the many uncooperative parts of the personality are gradually convinced by the celestial spirit to cooperate with the image of wholeness which the human being was born to achieve. During the Self's realization, the beings of the collective and personal unconscious find a communitas around a central image of wholeness. As such, the culmination of individuation is imagined to be a mystica communitas .

Non-ordinary experiences of ordinary women: Initiation and individuation on the medicine path

by Tamara Oxford (2004)

Drawing on personal experience and grounded in a theoretical understanding that is derived from depth psychology, my research asks the question: What is the lived experience of the modern nonindigenous medicine woman? Within this context, I explore the lives of five women who have adopted and adapted traditional and indigenous spiritual paths that have, at their core, the ritual sacramental ingestion of entheogenic (often hallucinogenic) plants. Within these traditions, plant medicines, such as the iboga of Africa, the ayahuasca of South America, and the peyote of the Southwest are considered to have divine powers and have been used extensively throughout history as agents of healing—physically, emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. These are embodiment traditions in which the Divine is incarnated by way of eating "the flesh of God", modern paths that derive from an ancient, alchemical approach to literally, not metaphorically, bringing spirit into matter.

Jung reminds us that the "purpose" of human existence is the sacred task of serving psyche. Meaning may be gained by offering one's "life in service of this process. Such an individual offers himself as a vessel for the incarnation of deity and thereby promotes the on-going transformation of God by giving Him human manifestation" (Edinger, 1984, p. 113).

This research demonstrates that the medicine path can be the embodied expression of this cognitive concept. The experiences of these modern women, seen through a Jungian lens, allow us to understand an ancient way of initiation and awakening as a path of individuation.

Here, these "ordinary" women, sharing their "nonordinary" experiences, can be seen offering themselves as vessels on a voyage to the Beyond—that we may travel in their wake. In their willingness to traverse the astral realms, they alter our world, with loving intention. If, in our bias to a consensual reality that fails to comprehend "the reality of the psyche," we fail to fathom the mettle this takes, it does not minimize their task or their sacrifice. Willing to wrestle with God, they are engaged in soulmaking. They are living Jung's myth for a modern age: the incarnation of God in man.

Soul Dancing: Individuation within Intimacy

by Alison Poulsen (2003)

The question at the heart of this dissertation is how two autonomous individuals who desire intimacy can sustain passion without becoming controlling, needy, bored, or chaotically reactive. This question has led me to focus on how depth psychology can inform David Schnarch's theory of sustaining a "passionate marriage"— marriage denoting emotionally committed couples of all orientations. Schnarch argues that the individuals in a marriage must maintain their own integrity through Murray Bowen's notion of differentiation , which indicates the ability to be emotionally objective, that is, to be caring and intimate, while being nonreactive and separate. Schnarch shows how the sexual relation of a couple reveals dynamics ultimately grounded in their level of differentiation. Moreover, he explains how the enhancement of differentiation fosters passion, intimacy, eroticism, and spirituality within a couple's marital and sexual relation.

This paper addresses the ways in which Carl Jung's notion of individuation deepens and amplifies the notion of differentiation in reference to a couple becoming more nearly whole and passionate within marriage. Specifically, I will apply Jung's theory of the unconscious, the psychological typologies, and their corresponding inferior functions to intimate relations to give further descriptive nuance to problems of fusion (or undifferentiation) within marital relations and sex. Further, I will describe some of the potential subtleties of unrealized sexual potential stemming from one-sided psychological typologies. It is fitting that Jung's discussion of the alchemical conjunction of opposites as a metaphor for the process of individuation also represents the sexual union between two people.

A heuristic search for the discovery of personal meaning of passionate relationships led me in my choice and application of Jungian work to Schnarch's texts. A hermeneutic study of Jungian texts grounds the depth-psychological research around the themes of interpretation and intuition. Appropriately, hermeneutic dialectical inquiry may be an apt metaphor for the openness needed for soul to dance in passionate marriage.