One of Carl Jung’s most important and far-reaching ideas was that of individuation – the process by which an individual grows and becomes whole. The individual does this through an ongoing process of bringing the unconsciousness in oneself to the light of consciousness. This was considered a task for the last half of one’s lifespan – the first half being devoted to establishing a central ego capable of taking a stand in the world and focused on outward concerns – family, vocation, and community. The outward movement, according to Jung, should properly give way to an inward movement in the last half of life. In this movement, all of the psychological parts that were repressed and neglected, all conflicts, weaknesses, and disowned parts of the self that were necessarily suppressed or put behind in the process of forming a capable ego as an adult in the world were revisited and re-integrated as the human life moved towards its conclusion.

It is not my purpose here to give an exhaustive rendering of Jung’s theory of individuation; for that, I refer you to his works. I can, however, offer a brief summary of the process. From the point of development of a fully-formed ego in mid-life, Jung postulated that three steps were necessary for the ego to begin its movement towards wholeness. The first consisted of confronting and assimilating the Shadow – those pieces of one’s individuality that had been banished and disowned from conscious awareness as undesirable. Often, prior to this work, an individual reacts most strongly and negatively to characteristics in others that he secretly harbors in himself, whether consciously aware of this or not. This is the activity we know as projection. The Shadow, when not acknowledged or assimilated, is capable of running one’s life from behind the curtain, as we unconsciously react on desires and aversions we don’t know we have. Shadow work is difficult, for it brings us face-to-face with all of those undesirable traits and tendencies we don’t want to acknowledge we have. This acknowledgement of the difficulty may have been the primary impetus for the Jungian quote provided on Jung’s bio page – Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the Shadow and the world of darkness. … [This], … is disagreeable and therefore not popular. The second step of the process consisted of incorporating one’s inner animus or anima. These are the gender counterparts within us, our opposite internal twin. All human being have traits and qualities of both genders residing in their beings; the ones socially accepted and in-line with one’s physical gender get “played up”, while the other gets suppressed. The inner, whole human being is neither male nor female, but more closely androgynous, and thus it logically follows that an attempt to reclaim psychological wholeness must meet this schism and heal it, by incorporating and accepting the elements of one’s inner counterpart within oneself, and to cease repressing these formerly repressed parts. The last part of the process involved meeting the archetype of the “Wise Old Man,” the Senex, or the Crone. These figures symbolize the Self of Hindu philosophy, incorporating truth and a wide and benign wisdom gained through self-apprehension. The following excerpt describes this stage of individuation well:

In the individuation process, the archetype of the Wise old man was late to emerge, and seen as an indication of the Self. ‘If an individual has wrestled seriously enough and long enough with the anima or animus problem… the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form: as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature, and so forth’.

The Senex and Crone ( or collectively, the Sage) in their ultimate development are archetypal personifications of the Higher Self. That is, in their highest reaches, they are images of the woman or man who has realized the Self. The Sage is a seeker of truth, and this archetype operates from a fundamental principle that ‘the truth will set you free’. It is associated with attributes of self-reflection and understanding that enlightens our path to individuation. It implies asking questions to self in order to reach to the answers one seeks in life.

Source: https://www.envisionyourevolution.com/analytical-psychology/the-wise-old-man-archetype-anatomy/1795/

The notion that an individual was capable of growing and developing psychologically through-out his life, while common-place today, was very much a new idea when Jung proposed it. Heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud, psychoanalysis in the early 1900s had adopted the mindset that growth was essentially terminated for a human being after childhood and adolescence. Whatever phobias, neuroses, or other unhealthy patterns had been developed in childhood were then more or less fixed in place, and adults could do no better than attempt to cope with and manage these issues through the remainder of their lives. Furthermore, adults were not conceived of as having new growth potential – change for the positive, a critical element for the entire field of self-transformation, was not deemed as even possible in psychology’s mindset at the turn of the 20th century. It is remarkable to look back on Jung’s contribution 100 years later and see how thoroughly this idea has supplanted the previous notion of human growth capability. Nowadays, it is taken for granted that people grow throughout their psychological lives. While much of this growth may not be the conscious growth that Jung postulated, nevertheless, his voicing of the possibility expanded the field of consideration for the field of psychology and the public. It is now commonly accepted that development in a person’s experience of some sort, whether conscious or not, occurs from birth to death, and that the tasks appropriate to each stage of life, though they may be different, are ongoing throughout a life.

Secondly, and more pertinent for our consideration, the process of individuation was the first time that mainstream Western psychoanalysis began to move towards the realm of self-transformation and the spiritual world that motivates the endeavor. It raised the sights of Western psychological sciences not by degrees, but by entire arcs towards its proper orientation. It began to admit of some of the same concerns that had long occupied the sages, saints, and devotees of Eastern traditions that had pursued these concerns for millennia. Jung’s thought from today’s perspective shows some shortcomings and deficiencies – his notion of the collective unconscious doesn’t clearly discriminate between pre-egoic unconscious material and truly transpersonal material, thus contributing by implication to what Ken Wilber has called the pre/trans fallacy, and Jung seemed loathe in his works to address the possibility of a self-existent spirit world standing independently of the human psyche, perhaps due to his fear of being marginalized in his chosen profession for such “unscientific” beliefs. But these criticisms are minor and amount to not much more than blaming a teen-ager for not exhibiting fully adult characteristics. It was vitally important to psychology to have someone of Jung’s depth and stature blaze a trail that could begin to put the psychological sciences in a much healthier and more constructive orientation for actually helping human beings realize their innate potentials. It was also a critically-needed development to begin to bridge the gap between the clearly reductionistic and limiting behavioral and Freudian notions of the bounds of the human being and the true, much more unlimited possibilities of human growth and development. Jung was the father of this development in Western psychological circles, and the elder brother of the influential ones who followed after him – Adler, Rogers, Maslow, and Assaglioni, who took these ideas as a base of reference and built further upon them. Stanislav Grof, a pioneer in methods to address spiritual emergency and one of the founding transpersonal psychologists, was also a beneficiary of Jung’s work on individuation.

Today, transpersonal psychology is coming into its own as a sub-specialty devoted largely to these concerns. One could say that Jung’s concept of individuation was a precursor to this more developed transpersonal psychology. Had Jung not blazed this trail originally, transpersonal psychology as we know it now would not exist. Individuation is the first cousin to a Self-transformation sadhana and can provide many useful insights and correspondences along the way.