Individuation and society - Reflections on the religious dimension of history

According to Jung, individuation is the ongoing dialogue between the ego and the unconscious. In the future, however, Analytical Psychology has to describe individuation also as a process between the individual and society; the manifold manifestations of society have to be seen as manifestations of the unconscious. There is no society as such which makes individuation an impossible process; but each society in its specific form requires an adequate expression of critical distance and of commitment in both a permissive consumer society and a political or religious homogeneous and authoritarian institution. Men do not only have a history, they are their - personal, religious and cultural - history. The collective unconscious in each individual is the place where the time and space of humanity are gathered and where the individual experiences transcendence, religio, i.e. relatedness to a greater timeless and numinous reality.