Psychic wholeness is always a relative notion, a realization of man's being which is an objective to be grasped during his entire life. "The personality as a full realization of the wholeness of our being is an unattainable ideal. Unattainability is, however, never anything against an ideal; for ideals are nothing but signposts, never goals." (Integration, 287) The full realization of personality can never become a historical actuality because the unconscious can never be made completely conscious and because the unconscious contains the greater amount of energy. Jung's impossible ideal brings with it the potentialities for man to become truly human. It means that man stands aloof from the "undifferentiatedness and unconsciousness of the herd"; it means that man accepts the call of destiny found deep within his own unconscious. "Only he who can deliberately say `Yes' to the power of the destiny he finds within himself becomes a personality." (Ibid. 296) Only then does he possess the ability to become part of a community, "to be an integral part of a group of human beings and not merely a cipher in the mass, which always consists only of a sum of people and never can become, like the community, a living organism that receives life and bestows life." (Jacobi, 140)

The realization of oneself, in both the ideal sense and the realistic sense, in both an individual sense and a collective sense, is what Jung means the way of individuation: "Becoming an individual being and, in so far as we understand by individuality our innermost, final, incomparable uniqueness, becoming one's own self." (Two Essays, 183) Jung establishes as the objective of wholeness man's recognition of his uniqueness in relation to his collective responsibilities and his place within the whole.

The process of individuation is an intense analytical effort. Jung describes it as the approach of the personality toward a psychic totality. It brings the individual ultimately to recognize himself for what he by nature really is and not what he would like to be. This process recognizes the scientific character of the unconscious elements in the psychic development of personality.

The way of individuation, i.e., the objective of self-realization, is the highest task that man can set for himself. It means that he anchors himself in the eternal and indestructible, in the primal nature of the objective psyche. The individual places himself in the eternal stream, in which birth and death are only stages of life's way and in which the isolated ego is no longer the sum total of life's meaning. Man is related in a new way to his fellow man, in a way of kindness and compassion because he himself has experienced the darkest side of life. He is related differently to the collective because he can present to the collective an individual who is maturely responsible to the obligations assigned to him by his place in society. Jung's analytical objective is the whole person, the person who can stand in responsible relationship to both an individual consciousness and to the collective.

Jung proposes three stages on the way of individuation. The archetypal symbols determine the direction of the process.

(1) The first stage leads to the experience of the shadow which is the archetypal figure of the "other aspect" of personality. Man may meet his shadow in a number of ways: he may meet it when his functional and attitudinal type are made conscious, that is, when he has differentiated only his principal function and attempts to apprehend inner and outer realities solely with his organ of experience. The other types of his psyche therefore must remain in the dark and must be extracted from it piece by piece so that they too may live. Or one may encounter the shadow in an inner symbolic figure, in a dream representing one or several of the dreamer's mental traits in personified form; or it can represent an outer figure, someone taken directly from one's own environment. But the shadow may also be a positive figure and may be the personification of the content of the psyche that has not been lived or has been excluded or repressed during one's life. Or it may personify the tendency in every man to that which is inferior, primitive, unadapted, awkward, and dark. The shadow hinders the way to the creative depths of the unconscious with the dark mass of that stuff of experience we have never admitted into our life.

To confront one's shadow is to come to terms with one's own nature. We accept the fact that darkness is indeed within us.

(2) The second stage of individuation is characterized by the encounter with the soul-image. It is the meeting of the anima (in man) with the animus (in woman), the meeting of the image of the other sex that we carry in us, both as individuals and as representatives of a species. Jung argues that we experience the elements of the opposite sex that are always present in one's psyche: "Every man carries his own Eve in himself." Everything which is latent and unexperienced and undifferentiated in the psyche (man's Eve and woman's Adam) is always projected into experience. That means that the individual relates to another who represents the qualities of one's own soul. Or if the projection is an inner one, dreams, fantasies, and even visions, these can give expression to a "whole sheaf of contrasexual traits of our psyche". The mother is the first bearer of the soul-image; later it is those women who excite the man, whether positively or negatively.

The soul-image coincides with the psychic function that is the least clarified in the unconscious; for this reason, its character will always be diametrically opposed to the most differentiated function and will be symbolized by a corresponding specific figure. For example, the anima of the scholar will be characterized by a primitive emotional romanticism; the intuitive by the earthly and realistic type of woman.

Jung affirms that when one has seen the contrasexual function within one's own psyche, then he has his emotions under control. But again and again Jung assures his readers that such a recognition is an achievement of maturity. Jungian analysis attempts to make conscious the soul-image so that man may have adequate knowledge of the contrasexual in his psyche.

(3) The third stage is the appearance of the archetype of the old wise man, the personification of the spiritual principle within man; the corresponding material principle is within woman -- the magna mater, or the great earth mother. Jung believes that we can get back to the essence of man, that is, to the primordial image of an essential human nature. Man is characterized as principally spiritual in his essential nature. The individual is truly free only when he begins to recognize his own true individuality: "for the man the second and true liberation from the father, for the woman that from the mother, and therewith the first perception of their own unique individuality." (Two Essays, 262)

The self is the archetypal image that represents the union of both the conscious and the unconscious. "The self is not only the mid-point but also the circumference, taking in consciousness and the unconscious; it is the center of the psychic totality, as the ego is the center of consciousness." (Integration, 96) This is the last stage of the way of individuation, what Jung calls self-realization. When man reaches this point, then he may be considered a whole man. Man has then integrated his inner and outer selves into one basic reality. Life for man is completely transformed. He recognizes the impulses which have come from his unconscious. He has made them conscious and has acknowledged and recognized their reality.

But the individual personality is never without conflicts. Suffering pertains to life. One must never attempt to escape from conflicts in a false or artificial way. To do so leads to psychic disease. Suffering which results from a genuine experience always carries with it the feeling of a significance, later to be realized, and of a spiritual enrichment. (Ibid, 153)

Jung describes the nature of that personality which has effected self-realization:

Jung continues, the self "is strange to us and yet so near, quite our own and yet unknowable, a virtual mid-point of mysterious nature. . . . The beginnings of our whole psychic life seem to be inextricably in this point, and all our loftiest, ultimate aims tend thither." (Ibid., 265) The self is the point in time and space about which our psychic life revolves; it is at the same time the goal of our conscious and unconscious lives. The self, therefore, can be psychologically justified but never scientifically verifiable. It is a transcendental postulate akin to Kant's Ding an sich. It represents that in the psyche which is unfathomable but also the indispensable presupposition for the conscious life of man. One can speak of it in religious terms as the image of God in man, the "divine spark", the "central fire". It may be likened to the Christian ideal of the kingdom of God within man. The self, according to Jung, is that point within the human being where God's likeness to man can be recognized most distinctly.

The way of individuation is a way of self-knowledge and self-control in a prospective sense. It intends the construction of a psychic totality within the individual which is entirely new and which attempts to restore the individual's faith in God or in himself or in the meaningful and purposeful quality of life. Jung attempts to confront the disorientation of modern life by projecting the goal of the totality and unity of all of life, including the conscious and the unconscious sides of man's being. The way of individuation is a spiritual act, an act of illumination; it confers a new spirit on man, which Jung likens to the Christian rite of baptism.

Individuation makes man a transcendental being, a superior man, the man who realizes the Christ symbol within himself. Self-realization creates a new picture of the world within which man lives. Life takes on a completely new meaning. The problems of the world before which man stands can now be dealt with in a proper way. They remain insoluble, but man need not be devastated by them. The problems cannot be solved; but they can be transcended. The self-realized personality is that personality which has the capacity to grapple with the basic problems of life. Because his consciousness has been raised, a broader horizon comes into view. Problems lose their urgency; man no longer panics because of them.

The archetypal symbol of man's transcendent power is the unifying symbol which represents all of the partial systems of the psyche integrated into the self upon a higher plane. The unifying symbol represents the resolution of opposites, the unification of the different pairs of opposites in the psyche into a higher synthesis. It is, however, not a metaphysical transcendence but a functional transcendence, in which the personality has been transformed. At that point, the process of individuation reaches its end. Equilibrium has been reached between the ego and the unconscious.

(1) Jung's analytical psychology appears in the guise of a crypto-theology. He interprets the experience of the self and the realization of the self in terms which are religious and theological. The experience of the self is similar to the experience of God. The goal of individuation enables man to experience the Godlike and Christlike quality within himself. Christ becomes the archetypal symbol for the full integration of personality. God and Christ are found within the soul.

Jung is fond of quoting Meister Eckhardt: "God must forever be born in the soul." God will appear in man in the process of individuation. Jung affirms, "We must direct our patients to the place where the One, the All-Uniting arises in them." Redemption becomes a spiritual journey in which the self comes to terms with itself and with the world outside of itself.

Jung's system is therefore attractive and immediately appealing to all practioners of the "cure of souls." He awakens within man the need to find again the meaning of life, meaning which for many of Jung's patients can only be derived from the historic Western religions of Judaism and Christianity. Jung criticizes the rigidity of dogma and institutionalism but not the spiritual deliverance and freedom that Judaism and Christianity hold out as moral and spiritual objectives for man.

(2) The attraction of Jung's system to the Judaeo-Christian is dubious. It does not lead to an intellectual nor a psychological nor a spiritual strengthening of the Jewish-Christian position, but rather to its diffusion and ultimate dissolution.

One can begin a criticism of Jung with the assertion that he commits the "holistic fallacy". The holistic fallacy is that erroneous assumption which says that the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts. Jung makes this mistake. He believes that the self is the fundamental and ultimate reality in the universe. When the self realizes itself and is whole and healthy, then man is capable of taking his place in a responsible and mature manner within society. Jung's psychology intends that the self should know as a direct experience "what keeps the world together at its innermost center." The self becomes the agent for holding the complexities of the world together. But it is not simply an ordinary self, it is the self which recognizes the One, the All, the God, the Christ, and perhaps even the Buddha within himself. It is the self which is capable of transcending all of the insoluble problems of the world by a higher illumination of a more unified consciousness.

(3) The basic theological problem in Jung's analytic psychology is its implicit mysticism. Depth psychologies must of necessity deal with abstractions, paradoxes, linguistic imprecision, and scientifically unverifiable hypotheses. The reason for this is simply that the discipline is involved structurally in an area of experience which is incognitive and spiritual. The mystic's language and experience perhaps best suit the needs of the psychologist as he attempts to explain what he is about. Jung wants to avoid metaphysical constructs because they impose artificial structures on the kinds of psychic experience that he discovers. He speak of "transcendence of problems", which for him means that a problem cannot be resolved, but can only be experienced, and experienced in such a way as to provide the content for a systematic analysis. Jung must further dodge the logical construct because his realm of experience is incongruent with logical/intellectual order. He takes his experience where he finds them.

Problems of theology arise once Jung discovers that the wholeness of personality emerges from within the individual psyche itself. As soon as you affirm this thesis, you immediately detract from the theological claims of the Jewish and Christian faiths. What both Judaism and Christianity affirm is the historic objectivity of biblical events, events which constitute for the believer the source of his salvation, that is, of man's total spiritual and psychic wholeness. What Jung has done is to reduce the historical fact of the biblical events to an extension and deepening of consciousness. But he can do this only at great risk to the biblical events of Exodus and Resurrection. What he does is to make those events symbols of man's psychic unity. But they cannot have any independent reality over against their psychic appropriation. And for this reason the kingdom of God is always within you. The way of individuation is always the way of the self realizing its own possibilities. Then and only then can you claim that the All, the One, the immanent God has been born within the soul. Jung is explicit: "The psychological fact that has the greatest power in a man acts as God, because it is always the overwhelming psychic factor that is called God." (Psychology and Religion, 146)

Jung speaks about a reciprocal relationship between God and man, but what he really means is that "on the one hand one can conceive man as a function of God and, on the other hand, God as a psychological function of man." (Psychological Types, 340) This means that God is immanent within the soul. "I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me" is a biblical expression which Jung interprets as the feeling that the individual has of being a child of God. But it is a psychic fact and is only an experience of the self. Whatever is the principle of psychic wholeness, it is within the psyche. Jung does not want to use the term metaphysical because he really means psychological, even though the way of individuation appears to rest upon fundamental metaphysical assumptions about man's place in the universe. Jung refers to psychic health as influencing man's Weltanschauung. The archetypes obey hidden supra-empirical laws, internal to themselves. But Jung insists that he is rejecting metaphysical assumptions and cannot offer any intelligent reason for their existence except that the archetypes appear in the psychic experiences of man.

Jung likens the way of individuation and the concomitant experiences to Kant's Ding an sich, which for him is not a metaphysical construct, a possible experience of the known and not the unknown. So he has it both ways: the psychic and the metaphysical merge into one reality, the individual self, which is not simply a datum of empirical observation but is also a postulate of metaphysical speculation.

(4) For Jung, the various world religions give information about the mysteries of the soul.

They are symbolic expressions of the process of individuation and lack all qualities of what Jews and Christians mean by revelation. Religion is transformed into symbolic psychology. The events of biblical revelation can never be more than symbolically appropriated. If they offer health, they do so only in internal and spiritual ways. What Jung has not made explicitly clear is that the process of individuation which he describes is found already within the Christian faith tradition. It is specifically the Christian mystical tradition, represented by Meister Eckhardt, that he holds up as normative for the Christian experience; but to do so is incorrect and inadequate to the rich diversity of experiences possible within the Christian faith tradition.

For Jung all religions are equally true, although restricted to particular national groupings. Race, nation, and culture are different vessels in which divine truths assume different forms. But then divinity is dependent upon psyche. And by so doing, Jung has produced a tantalizing psychologism, a classic representation of a reductionism in which the entire structure of Jewish and Christian revelation is reduced to a particular psychic experience.

This is the reason why Jung appreciates the Eastern philosophers so much. The idea of God is present everywhere. And if God is not consciously known, he can be known unconsciously because he can function as an archetype.

But in this way God is dependent upon the enlightened consciousness, the kind of consciousness that the Eastern philosophies attempt to inspire in man.

Man invented the techniques of religion and passed them on from generation to generation. The various historic religions are therefore an expression of humanity's collective experience. The language of religion is symbolic. The symbol is made up of the two sides of the psyche, the conscious and the unconscious. As an expression of the unconscious it is a translation of its primitive and archaic elements into consciousness. As an expression of consciousness, it is an expression of man's spiritual achievement. The two come together symbolically in the soul, but only in the soul. There is no corresponding objective reality to the psychological unity.

God is an archetype only as a type in the psyche. Jung posits nothing positive or negative about the existence of God. The archetype of hero does not prove the actual existence of a hero. The psyche corresponds then to the God image. It has the capacity to grasp the God image through psychic means. More than that Jung refuses to admit. Psychologically, the process of individuation leads the individual to knowledge of the unknown through an inner experience, whose validity is affirmed only by the individual who has experienced the unknown. And by so doing, Jung brings us back to Gnosticism, that is, the knowledge of the divine by private means.