Jung's Path of Individuation, illustrated by Beyoncé and the Tarot
The Queen, and some Tarot archetypes, illuminates the way of the crux of Jung
Individuation as explicated by Carl Jung is the single most important concept necessary to live a life that is both extraordinary (in the sense of leaving a legacy) and enjoyable (in the sense of flourishing and accomplishing what is true for you and your destiny).
And it’s important to be aware of the major stages of the individuation process, which is spirallic and ongoing throughout life, to help you weather the storms that inevitably arise on the way.
What is Individuation?
To individuate is to self-realize with the aim of moving toward psychological wholeness.
Wholeness is the state wherein all of our latent potential is actualized and all the elements of our unconscious brought to the light of consciousness and integrated harmoniously into our character structure.
Along with wholeness comes coherence, the only truly sustainable hack for a more easeful and abundant life that ever existed. Most of us spend most of our lives at cross-purposes, taking one step forward and one step back, because the various parts of our conscious and unconscious self are not integrated, they have different prerogatives (this is what the Western magickal tradition calls “the divided will”).
This is the reason why you create your list of traits of your ideal partner but then seem to fall into the same toxic situationship time and time again, why you plan on writing that book/launching that spiritual business/ applying for that job but keep putting it off, why you plan on ditching sugar but end up on the couch with a pint of ice-cream…
.. you’re operating with a split will: one part of you is truly committed to growth and transformation, but the larger, hidden part of you is fiercely defending the safety and familiarity of the status quo. Add into the mix unmet childhood needs, internalized social dogmas, and traumatic imprinting and we have a fairly chaotic operating system. No wonder most people tend to revert to the same baseline level of happiness over their lives.
The Queen B Beyoncé is a useful case study for what the process of individuation can look like over one magnificent lifetime.
PERSONA // MASK // CHARIOT
According to Jung, the first 30-odd years of life are rightfully dedicated to building up a durable persona, or face to show the world.
This is a complex— and often, it turns out, traumatic— dance between our inborn gifts, virtues, and delights on the one hand— and the expectations and demands of the world the soul is thrust into. With family karmas, societal expectations, and ideologies.
As a young Black girl growing up in the 80s in Houston, Beyoncé found herself in a fortuitous match between her obvious natural flair for performing and the pop era of Whitney Houston, Tina Turner and Mariah Carey. Her delight and ease in performing was apparent from a young age.
Still, there was tension and pain wrought by being cultivated into a pop star. Beyoncé was naturally shy and introverted so she had to famously invent the alter ego Sasha Fierce to keep up with performing. Her father, Matthew Knowles, left his job to manage her career full-time, putting such strain on the family as to contribute to a separation between her parents.
She had to perform to hold onto the love, status and safety her talents afforded her. And it hurt.
This is a pattern I see often in high-achieving clients: the arena in which they effortlessly distinguished themselves from a young age, whether it was singled out as gifted in school, excelling in sports, or even seen as especially beautiful, becomes a double-edged sword: they come to conflate their ability to excel with their worthiness of love, and reject any aspects of the authentic self that fall outside of this persona.
Persona-development corresponds to the Chariot major arcana card: we build up an identity which is durable enough to cart us out into the world, but is necessarily a bifurcated chimera of the full self.
The persona requires us to repress any of our authentic qualities which get in the way of its functioning. But the authentic self often has its own life-force prerogative, which leads to the second phase of individuation…
DISSOLUTION
You can taste the dishonesty
It's all over your breath
As you pass it off so cavalier
But even that's a test
Constantly aware of it all
My lonely ear
Pressed against the walls of your world-Pray You Catch Me, Beyoncé
The Chariot-Persona wasn’t built to last. At some point in the lead-up to midage, the chinks in the armour of the persona, which was never meant to express the full Self but merely provide enough of a worldly identity to attain some independence from one’s family of origin and cast us out into the world, appear.
This often occurs in the form of a crisis in the normal operation of the self in the world: ruptures in relationships, career crisis prompting self-reinvention, broad disenchantment with all that is.
(And in the worst cases, despair, depression and addiction)
The important thing to know if you are going through a dark night of the soul, upheaval, or rupture is that in every case I have personally experienced and shepherded clients through, is that as improbable as it seems whilst you’re in the throes of it, is that you are mining gold, and that your soul’s evolutionary wisdom is growing and emerging.
I can one-hundred-percent guarantee that in a not-too-distant future you will look upon the greatest prosperities and blessings in your life and be able to connect them directly to your current pain. Your greatest pain produces your greatest wisdom.
For Beyoncé, this process was alchemized and brilliantly expressed in 2016’s Lemonade, which confirmed what had been rumoured for years: that her partner of more than 15 years and father of her children Jay-Z had been unfaithful to her, that she had gotten very close to leaving him over it, and that instead the relationship was able to repair around Beyoncé’s new integrated identity, which would transform not just her family but her art.
The card corresponding to the alchemical dark night of the soul is the Tower. In a Tower initiation, the foundations and structures of our lives are uprooted, but they were never true foundations to begin with. Begin again.
INTEGRATION
I’m going to make a big claim here.
The upheaval of dissolution of the persona, and how we choose to navigate out of it, is the most consequential and high-stakes transition of life.
More than childhood patterning, more than choice of spouse, more even than luck..
…your ability to choose authenticity, soul, liberation and truth over stability, familiarity and comfort is the single largest determinant of how enjoyable and impactful your life will be.
This crossroads presents us with two choices: we can continue to tuck the loose threads of our authentic self under the shell of the persona, and carry on with an identity that is now manifestly inauthentic.
(We all know people like this, who cling stubbornly to their worldly identity like puppets. It once broke my heart to have to leave a man like this— the persona he’d built up in the world was exquisite- prestige! beauty! success! accolades!- and he was understandably attached to it, but it required so much repression of his true nature that over time he was as authentic as a wax figure.)
Or we can choose the path of individuation: of embracing our dimensionality, of becoming our own selves and surrendering to the unknown process of growth.
This growth of the Self arises from the unconscious, and the parts of us that we have relegated into our shadow.
Beyoncé shows us what individuation can look like on the creative journey in her work post-Lemonade.
In Renaissance, the Beyoncé we meet isn’t the sweet and impeccably polished star from her earlier career. She is instead much rawer, in touch with her primal sexuality, fueled by lineage and damn unwilling to continue the cycle of wives tolerating cheating husbands that, apparently, her mother Tina Knowles experienced.
Individuation means becoming an “in-dividual,” and, in so far as “individuality” embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self.
And since consciousness arranges and sculpts our external world, coming into individuation tends to re-constellate our relationships, creativity, and life circumstances exquisitely.
The phase of integration corresponds to the Tarot card Art:
This great alchemy of blending opposites, of merging the unconscious into the conscious to create new, expanded forms of creativity, is the true Art, and the Art is infinite when we are elevate to higher consciousness.
Interested in accelerating your individuation journey? There are two ways to work with me: through my private membership group ALETHEIA and in a 1:1 Jungian mentorship container: I invite you to schedule a 20-minute chat to discuss further.