The aim of the process of individuation is to attain and cultivate what I call psychological adulthood. It is an important concept to understand for anyone interested in developing self-knowledge.
Psychological adulthood is distinct from biological adulthood, but the comparison can help in understanding it.
Biological maturity means a kind of biological independence: the ability to reproduce, to meet with another human being in the world, and to create a third ‘thing’ that didn’t exist before; a child who is the synthesis of your shared potential; a combination of both but a violation of neither.
Psychological adulthood is similar. It means no longer needing the world to comply with some pre-configured set of preferences or whims. It means taking responsibility for the mind—containing and reconciling needs within yourself while at the same time existing in the world. Just as a biological adult is independent from the world biologically, psychological adulthood means being independent from the world psychically.
Just as a biological adult can meet with its opposite and bring a new being into existence, psychological adulthood involves voluntarily engaging with the synthesis of mind itself. It brings new thoughts into existence. It is the witness and shepherd of necessary change. When it encounters a difference with the world, it meets with it honestly, with a willingness to be transformed by it, and seeks to understand how both self and other are playing a role in what unfolds.
Psychological childhood on the other hand means energetically leaning on the world in order to have it meet your conditioned preferences. It means falling on one side of any issue and not truly knowing why. It essentially believes its way of approaching things is the right one, and for no other reason than it appears to have worked so far—and by “worked” it generally means: “protected me from the experience of pain and suffering brought about by encounters with the unknown.”
If it is not embracing power and control brazenly without any sense of contradiction, it cloaks it in other guises. It outsources its sovereignty to higher powers and believes it has found the key to life in doing so. It finds pragmatic ways to manipulate the world and capitalise on the naivety of others, believing it has finally cracked the code. Or it believes, higher still, that the answer to everything lies in displays of kindness, while simultaneously claiming that morality is a construct. Rather than moving through ever more sophisticated forms of synthesis, it moves through ever more socially defensible forms of dissonance.
In Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Carl Jung wrote:
“We still forget, like children, what happened yesterday. We are still living in a wonderful new world where man thinks himself astonishingly new and “modern.” This is unmistakable proof of the youthfulness of human consciousness, which has not yet grown aware of its historical antecedents.”
Childhood immaturity is always unaware of its immaturity, whereas adulthood embraces the unknown. It knows that it does not know. However, it is neither fundamentally afraid of this fact nor doubles down on it as a new persona, but takes its proper role in relationship to it. It voluntarily faces and continues to confront what is beyond itself while violating neither the other’s freedom nor its own. It thinks systemically, and arrives at meaningful answers through enduring tension—but the answers come in their own time, when they must come, not necessarily on the adult’s clock, and yet not without their own effort. The adult willingly meets with the other and respects its need to be.
Although one has to be very careful because, just as children like to ‘play’ at being adults, psychological childhood likes to ‘play’ at psychological adulthood. To an extent this is healthy as a means of developing the pieces later needed for transmutation—there’s nothing wrong with childhood per se—but commonly it also serves as a guise for avoiding a true dialectic.
Oftentimes, when met with the challenges of adulthood, which require nuanced solutions, one’s desire for power over empathy does not wane, but becomes ever more ironically defended. This makes it harder to spot if you don’t know what you’re looking for, but all the more comically absurd if you do. These are not genuine markers of adulthood but the swan song of a childhood state being clung to ever more tightly.
The practical test of psychological adulthood is the degree to which someone seeks out master-slave dynamics and fails to question attachments, however subtle, to particular viewpoints, particular ways of doing things, particular sides, ideologies, political parties, or whoever. It is characterised on one hand by wilful victimhood, misplaced admiration and self-subordination, and on the other hand by a strong need for certainty, authority over others and that youthful yearning to reverse engineer everything around them to a preconceived result.
There aren’t many lines in the sand in the development of self-knowledge, but there is this one. Moving from psychological childhood into adulthood is one of the few examples of a true paradigm shift. What you thought were paradigm shifts up until this point are in retrospect better described as adaptations and the taking of sides. One tastes like chocolate cake; the other like apple strudel—apparently quite different but nutritionally not far apart.
Only through several iterations of this kind of back and forth, and a great deal of suffering, can a mind understand its meta-narrative, the existence of a path at all, what it really involves and how to navigate it. It is suitably described as a paradigm shift because it is a change on the order of a Copernican Revolution of the mind—the modal assumption is that the mind conforms to an objective world. But what if it were the other way around? What if it is in fact both simultaneously? And what does this mean for your choices going forward?
Genuine shadow work is a breakthrough to psychological adulthood, and it is also analogous to Tier 2 of Spiral Dynamics—both involve the willingness to confront difference and opposites. Adulthood is not the end of growth—its entry marks the beginning of a very different kind of growth. Just as you cannot turn cheese into milk, a psychological adult cannot put back on the lenses of childhood in their experience of life and the world.
Speaking of Spiral Dynamics, just as any psychic system is not best thought of as a type of person but as a system within someone, psychological adulthood is not best thought of as a definitive state that you either do or don’t inhabit. However, there is still a line that is crossed where the individual’s centre of gravity does begin to shift towards responsibility and respect for the unconscious. Likewise even if the prevailing intention is not in favour of dialectic or empathy, there will still be flashes of both even though they will be mostly happenstance and pragmatic.
Psychological adulthood doesn’t sound very exalted or exciting but that’s also the point. It’s the necessary alternative to the swathes of juvenilia aiming to steal our attention by banging on about “waking up” and some kind of “great awakening,” while there remains zero evidence of anything like this actually happening in the world. We don’t need a “great awakening;” we just need maturity.
It is not lost on me that this kind of wording is used almost exclusively by people who are clearly not operating from a place of psychic responsibility or empathy, and in the very act are attempting to gratify something for reasons completely unbeknownst to themselves.
Although they too aren’t above quoting Carl Jung occasionally. He goes on:
“…it is precisely those who give least credence to the autonomy of the unconscious who are the most surprised by it. Because of its youthfulness and vulnerability, our consciousness tends to make light of the unconscious.”
Psychological adulthood is not only needed; it is achievable. And not only achievable, but also uncommon. The term is meant to capture all of this and convey both the essential ordinariness of it at the same time as the depth of it.
Forget about some great awakening. A world where the average biological adult is also a psychological adult would be a wonderful place to live. Let’s focus on that.
If you would like coaching support cultivating psychological adulthood or with the mid-life transition, you can make an enquiry at makeitconscious.com/contact. The Inner Shadow Work course in the Know Yourself Programme is also directly relevant to everything covered in this post—as is Hestia, the Make it Conscious membership community.
