In an interview with Marie Louise von Franz in November 1990, Hein Stufkens asked her about the place of individuation in love relationships. Below is her answer:
H.S.: What is the place of individuation in a love relationship?
v.Fr.: In a love relation, as Jung once put it, you risk everything. You put yourself on a table, you stop the power game and the trying to dominate or conquer the other person. If you succeed in really loving the other person, if you really relate, then all sorts of miracles happen. But in the beginning stages a general state of blindness possesses you, illusions or wrong expectations, disappointments, recriminations. You have to work through all that first. And that’s how you become more conscious. I didn’t say it is agreeable. So if you don’t love the other, you run away after a while.Marie Louise von Frantz*
I have expressed this idea of analytical psychology before, that love and the processes of individuation are very closely related. The reason for this is simple – the process of individuation arises from the active relationship of consciousness with the unconscious. The essence of this process is the creative assimilation of the contents that come from the unconscious, and it is love that is most able to activate them. Every deep falling in love and the subsequent disappointment brings to the surface powerful emotions that are a sign that the deeper layers of our psyche have been activated.
Falling deeply in love always comes from a source that is beyond our ego-will, so any effort to end the relationship by just going with the rational arguments of the mind and the desire to leave the relationship to stop suffering inevitably fails. This is the reason why it is argued in this psychology that obsession in love relationships comes from the archetype of the Self. Passion in excess, however, seeks defeat because the desire for power (to force the other to give us what we want) is incompatible and even antagonistic to mature forms of love. The only way to deal with the power of attraction and turn it into an impulse for spiritual development (individuation) is by becoming conscious of the source from which it came. When we come to it, we realize that it is nothing but our Soul.
Anyone who has ever been in love knows that Cupid’s arrows don’t come from the mind; we’ve suddenly become bored and decided to do this. They are the personal messengers of the goddess of love, Venus, and they obey neither the ego’s desire not to suffer nor the ego-mind’s notions of right and wrong. They have stabbed us in the heart to open a wound that has always been there, but we have not seen it. It is the feeling of emptiness, as if a part of ourselves is missing, and the longing to merge and dissolve the boundaries that separate us from others.
The particular nature of this wound also requires a particular kind of healing, that of becoming whole again and reconnecting with Source. It is this process of becoming whole within that is called the process of individuation in Jung’s analytical psychology. In this process we withdraw projections, false expectations and anything else that distorts our perception of the other, until finally the “sense of blindness” disappears and we see through. Jung wrote that our vision is cleared when we see our soul. It is only when we see the hidden reason for everything that happens in our lives that it makes perfect sense and our picture of the world is put in order.
This is why Marie Franz said in the interview that we cannot experience our own unconscious without falling in love – it is the deep love between two people that activates the unconscious: “It is the most powerful constellation of the unconscious. Once it is constellated, you can explore it. When nothing is going on in your life and you are in your daily boredom, it doesn’t usually give rise to new ideas”.
And the “constellation” of the unconscious in question inevitably involves intense emotional pain. Here are all the emotions that make us feel like little children – frightened, dependent, vulnerable, jealous, rejected, inferior… The more powerful the emotion, the closer we are to the energy core – the archetype – from which it arises. When we speak of the archetype of love, it is Venus, the goddess of love, who, through her earthly representative, Psyche, is incarnating on Earth at this moment through our pain.
This is why Marie Franz said in the interview that we cannot experience our own unconscious without falling in love – it is the deep love between two people that activates the unconscious: “It is the most powerful constellation of the unconscious. Once it is constellated, you can explore it. When nothing is going on in your life and you are in your daily boredom, it doesn’t usually give rise to new ideas”.
And the unconscious “constellation” in question inevitably involves intense emotional pain. Here are all the emotions that make us feel like little children – frightened, dependent, vulnerable, jealous, rejected, inferior… The more powerful the emotion, the closer we are to the energy core – the archetype – from which it arises. When we speak of the archetype of love, it is Venus, the goddess of love, who, through her earthly representative, Psyche, is incarnating on earth at this moment through our pain.
All of the above, which Marie Franz lists as the means of liberation from blindness and insight, are the means of embodying the mature forms of love. There is courage and vulnerability, the withdrawal of projections and the ability to stay in the relationship after the rose-coloured glasses have fallen off. But above all it’s the ability of committment.
At first glance, it is a commitment to the other person and the relationship with them. In reality, however, the real commitment is to oneself and to the processes of inner growth. The outer world is a reflection of the inner world, so it is necessary to stay in the relationship until the fire of passion dies down and reaches the ashes. This is the way to stay true to our commitment to the processes of transformation.
Marie Franz writes that if you don’t love the other, you will leave after a while. But the opposite is also true. If you love the other and stay in the relationship as long as it takes for your desire to be purified, then you will leave the relationship when the other has remained the same, untouched. Relationships are a two-way process of mutual influence in which the criterion for a complete process of transformation is how far we have managed to get to the point of acceptance.
Thus the processes of spiritual transformation and love are very closely related. As we persevere in our intention to know the mature forms of love, we establish a relationship with the innermost centre of our being. Once we make this connection, the quality of our connection with other people changes radically. The sense of freedom, compassion and inner strength that comes then has a radically new quality. When we are deeply engaged in the processes of inner development, miracles really do happen. But first we spend a very long time in the purifying flames of hell.
Kameliya Hadzhyiska
If you are interested in the relationship between the processes of individuation and love, you may also like to read Marie Franz’s interpretation of the story of Psyche and Amour from the book by Apuleius. You will also find this quote in the article:
“Love, with its passion and its pain, becomes the impulse for individuation, therefore there is no true process of individuation without the experience of love, because love tortures and purifies the soul”. Marie Louise von Franz
And if you want to understand how to practically work with the differentiation (bringing consciousness) of the feeling function (Eros) and transform it into spiritual intelligence, you can also have a look at The 29 Days Programme. The texts and tasks in it are born out of my experience of searching for the answer to what love is, as that quality of the heart which transcends the duality of the material world. Eros ceases to torment our soul only when we purify our desiring nature – it is working with the energy of desire and its transformation through the mind that is the essence of this Programme.
