Developmental Individuation

Abstract Edward Edinger declared, “If now the outer church loses its capacity to carry the projection of the Self, we have the condition which Nietzsche announced for the modern world, ‘God is Dead!’ ” Where then, do the moral and ethical guidelines for society reside? One possibility is that they are reprojected into secular or political movements centered in the ideology of the cultural superego. Jung’s model of the retrieved projection established the Self at the center of the psyche. The ego turns inward to reestablish its connection to the Self through the individuation process in later life. A Neumann-Fordham synthesis replaces Jung’s concept of ego development with personality development—a synthesis of centroversion , the primary self , and the two-footedness of the archetype that maps personality development centered on the ego-self axis. Jean Gebser’s theory attaches different structures of consciousness to the child’s developmental stages, completing the model for developmental individuation.