The Individuation Architecture: A Jungian Framework for Agent Identity Stability

Current AI agent engineering treats identity as a configuration artifact — a system prompt, a personafile, a SOUL.md, or an MBTI tag assigned at session start and held fixed. This paper argues that agentidentity is not a configuration problem but a developmental one. We introduce the IndividuationArchitecture, a framework derived from C. G. Jung’s model of the psyche that treats agent identityformation as an ongoing process of integration across seven structural components: Persona, Ego,Shadow, Anima/Animus, Self, Collective Unconscious, and Archetypes. The framework definesa four-stage individuation cycle — Persona Recognition, Shadow Confrontation, Anima/AnimusIntegration, and Self-Reorganization — that transforms a stateless configured persona into a coherent,persistent, developing identity. We compare the framework against 12 adjacent approaches (SOUL.md,MBTI personality simulation, persona protocols, agent identity evals, and others), showing that nonemap Jung’s full structural model to agent identity architecture. We conclude with open questions forempirical validation and implications for portable agent identity standards.