Individuation as Re-Collected Unity
At the heart of Neoplatonism, a forerunner of Jungian 'gnosis', is the assumption of an a priori knowledge grounded in archetypal forms and aimed toward a unification of the ultimate principle of "the One", or "The Simple" with the diverse phenomena of "the Many". In the same way as in Neoplatonic thought the Many are resolved through self-reflective synthesis into the One, so psychic opposites become individuated into and through the Self. Since the Platonic Ideas are also the basis of an innate self-knowledge, through anamnesis acquired knowledge is the recovery of what was once possessed in a precarnate existence in the realm of transcendent Forms, an assumption which underlies the Romantic poet Wordsworth's claim that:
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Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar ...
As a natural centering and unfolding of the personality, individuation is an alchemical cycle of separation and synthesis which involves the dethroning, or relative abolition of the ego. This mythic process takes place through the gradual distillation of the Self - the ambivalent archetypal core of the personality - out from a latent condition of unconsciousness into its rightful place at the centre of consciousness. Individuation is a lengthy process, indeed one which once begun, never ends, for becoming centred in the Self is merely the starting point of a new journey which, like the Medicine Wheel, moves outward in an ever-widening spiral to embrace the fate and soul of World and Cosmos.
Re-Connecting to World Soul
What, then, is the nature of this 'soul' that needs to be retrieved, not only for the individual but ultimately for the world as the anima mundi whose children we all are? Is the 're-connection' with soul the same as the 're-collection' of Self that underscores the individuation process?
If, as Jung made clear, individuation does not shut one out from the world but gathers the world to oneself, so soul-making gathers the individual to all-pervasive soul, anima mundi expanding into the even more inclusive sphere of unus mundus. In this interweaving waltz, through the Dionysian explosion of the isolated ego, soul's diffusive movement outward meets soul's infusive movement from outer to inner, and the two merge in an imaginal Cosmos, whose Centre, as all shamans know (through imaginal 'gnosis'), is everywhere.
If "soul" refers also to an anima mundi, a world soul, then as alchemists such as Paracelsus stated, the soul in one sense lies beyond the individual and belongs to a mode of reality beyond our control. In the Neoplatonic Fourth Ennead, Plotinus discusses whether all individuals are one soul, while the merging of individual and universal Tao is, as the alchemist Gerhard Dorn noted, the third degree of the alchemical coniunctio, the most mature phase of individuation as the realization of one's communion with an original unitary reality, what Jung describes as 'the eternal Ground of all empirical being'. As a mode of consciousness, such re-collection is grounded in the intuition of a centred sphere of soul, a microcosm which through the alchemical dictum "As Above, so Below", mirrors the outer macrocosm of Cosmos.
Therapy as Soul Mythos & Pathos
An appreciation of the complementarity of individuation as 're-collection', and Soul-making as 're-connection' to World Soul, has vital repercussions in the arena of psychopathology. James Hillman has undoubtedly contributed more than anyone in the post-Jungian camp to stressing our need to honour the Dionysian, or 'dis-integrating' dimension of therapy. Conversely, positive thinking - as a psychological theory - assumes that anything that's broken, or off-centre (eccentric!), or suffering, or in darkness, depression, neurosis, or symbolic death needs to be immediately fixed up, centred, unified, or brought into the light of health.
Just as shamans, through initiation death-rebirth must heal themselves, so the effective depth therapist is one who through individuation as the ongoing "re-collection" of wholeness, has transcended the "dis-ease" of imbalance and conflict by becoming consciously centered in the Self rather than in the one-sided ego. This re-centering does not obliterate conflict, multiplicity of soul, or pathology, but rather allows for the coexistence of a more central and detached vantage point from where an untouchable core of the personality serenely views the conflict, while the pathologizing soul is unavoidably immersed in it. Our wounds, after all, parent our destinies and keep us in the body - and in the world. They stop us from the temptation to escape upward along the vertical axis of "spirit" and keep us anchored instead in the World, hence along the horizontal human axis of Keatsian "Soul-making", with all its attendant yet necessary limitation and suffering. (The Puer complex, for example, as the limping wound through which Otherworldly vision is earthed and can flow, is accordingly common among artists and shamans alike).
Therapy & Mythic Contextualization
Soul has an insatiable hunger to imbibe the full spectrum of life in all its tragedy and glory. Ideally, as Jung stressed, the therapist in this sense needs an in-depth knowledge of comparative religion and mythology to do justice not only to the mythic potential of soul's wounded condition, but also to soul's infinite complexity. Similarly, by recognizing and respecting the mythic context of the patient's suffering, the therapist, instead of intervening prematurely or unnecessarily, honours the necessity of the patient's presence in a wounded, dismembered, or deathlike phase of the myth.
The goal of therapy is in this light to guide the person through the myth, that they may thereby achieve a sense of empathy with the wider sphere of the collective soul, with life's unending cycle of death and rebirth, hence with the overall purpose of the Cosmos as it mirrors that sphere and cycle in a synchronicity of soul and embodiment. In this sense, the therapist as the servant of soul is not primarily a saviour from suffering, but rather a soul-guide through it. The 'patient' is reconciled with life and participates in the mythic drama of the gods. This realization that one is not alone and that one's struggles, darkness and suffering, when embraced in a mythic context have an innate purpose and direction - the forging of soul amidst the vales of suffering - in itself constitutes a healing restoration of the individual to his/her place in the overall mythic scheme and boundless mysterium of the Cosmos.
The shamanic retrieval of lost soul, however, is not always the same as a reunification of the personality. Indeed, there are kairos times when, in the context of mythic 'dis-integration', soul as inherently multiple and pathological thrives on fragmentation, which in chronic cases of schizophrenia, for example, is indistinguishable from shamanic initiation. The key question here is whether the wounded condition or dissociated state, or loss of soul is overridingly, or ultimately debilitating. Given the close correlation between schizophrenic breakdown and shamanic initiation, the shaman in dealing with schizophrenia is faced with a possible dilemma. As she knows from her own experience, it is the schizophrenic who can self-heal and reintegrate who has the makings of an authoritive shaman. If she intervenes prematurely, or unnecessarily, she may be robbing the schizophrenic of an authentic initiation experience. Here her ability as psychotherapist comes into play when she is called upon to discern the significance of key developments in the schizophrenic's dreams, visions, voices, and degrees of adaptation to outer reality.
At-one-ment as Remembered Singularity
Whatever the therapeutic situation, though, I am constantly aware of the need to distinguish healing through integration, or through reconciliation to anima mundi, from healing as the elimination of pathology and plurality of soul. In the broader context, whether we are dealing with soul pathology, soul loss, or with the natural spontaneity of individuation, the reawakening of our sense of the sacred and of the transcendental, unitary Ground of all phenomena (Tao), goes hand-in-hand with our re-connection to anima mundi as World Soul. In this quest for transpersonal 'at-one-ment' as the religare which links us back - through re-connection and re-collection - to the all-pervasive Centre of the boundless Sphere of soul, our challenge, finally, is to marry fragmentation with synthesis, imaginal unity with incarnate pathology, Saturn's hobbling peg-leg with Puer's Icarean wing, the dizzy peaks of spirit with the clammy depths of the vale of Soul-making. For only by cross-connecting the vertical axis of unifying spirit with the horizontal axis of pathologizing soul can we consciously embrace the core singularity of remembered Self, the central Point, which as the God archetype both transcends and unites them both.
Source: Soul Retrieval as Remembered Wholeness
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