The Daring Voyage

In my teaching of high school students I sometimes use a story based on Vergil's Aeneid entitled "The Daring Voyage of Aeneas." Many times I have thought of the journey of individuation as being like that of some epic hero who faces many challenges on his quest. Some years ago I wrote an article and a poem along those lines using Odysseus as an example. More recently, however, I have realized that Aeneas is probably a better symbol of a person on the path of individuation.

Vergil's epic hero was a citizen of ancient Troy. After fighting the Greeks and seeing his home destroyed, he escaped the flaming destruction with a band of faithful men and set sail to find a new home. While Odysseus, a Greek, spent ten years trying to get back to his old home, Ithaca, Aeneas spent years in search of a destination he didn't truly know. He was more like Abraham of the Old Testament, trusting in a divine being for directions as he traveled. Aeneas, like Odysseus and Abraham, faced many challenges. At points temptations arose which could have sidetracked him on his journey. But being an epic hero, he persisted, never completely losing sight of his purpose.

So, how is "The Daring Voyage of Aeneas" like the course of individuation? I see many parallels. To begin with, many of us are not motivated to do the work of individuation until something rocks our status quo. For Jung, midlife was a time when that was likely to occur. Today we sometimes trivialize that passage in our lives by joking about midlife crises, but, in fact, dealing with midlife can be no joking matter. It is often a time of looking back on what our lives have been about to that point and re-evaluating. If outer events, perhaps a broken marriage or a career change - not to mention tragedies like 911, throw our old, comfortable "world" into disarray, we may, like Aeneas, have a choice of getting stuck in the conflagration of what has been or setting out on a journey to find a new "home." With individuation, the journey is really a journey to find the Self.

Individuation is the process of achieving personality, which Jung describes as "nothing less than the optimum development of the whole individual human being." He goes on to say:

Personality is the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being. It is an act of high courage flung in the face of life, the absolute affirmation of all that constitutes the individual, the most successful adaptation to the universal conditions of existence coupled with the greatest possible freedom for self-determination ("The Development of Personality" CW 17, pars. 284-323 as quoted in Storr, p195).

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