Quotes: Individuation After Trauma

"It seems that the process of becoming the self you were intended to be (Jung’s definition of individuation) involves the materialization of something spiritual. Some seed of true selfhood needs to make a perilous journey through very dangerous territory from the world of eternity to the world of time, from spirit to matter, from divine to human in order to become a human soul. Along the way it will face many trials and suffer great disillusionment and it may never be able to make a full commitment to this hopeful journey if its suffering into reality is too great. It may even be forced to split itself in two, sending part of itself back into the imperishable world from which it came, to make sure the soul is not annihilated. Sometimes it will be able to return from this dissociation and enter life once again. Along the way, glimpses of the “light” of its origins (and its true companion) may support it in its suffering. And if, through all the brokenness of the human condition, it find enough of those sunny days when life seems possible… enough of this resonant images, empathic self-objects (Kohut) and optimal frustrations (Winnicot) that make love worth the sacrifice of omnipotence… if it makes it to these shores with some of its original divinity intact and not as a false self… Then, in the language of T. S. Eliot (1971: 59) it will have “arrived where it started, and know the place for the first time."

Donald Kalsched, Trauma and the Soul