Individual
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1. Etymology
Individual means unique and unlike anyone else, distinguished from what is collective. Related: individuality; society as indispensable link; not identical with the collective.
2. Plain summary
Distinguish the individual from individuality: the person is determined both by uniqueness and by the society they belong to—an indispensable social link—yet precisely that which can never be merged with or identical to the collective. Large communities resting on prejudices detrimental to individuality crush the individual and choke society’s moral and spiritual progress.
The individual standpoint is not antagonistic to collective norms—only differently oriented; the individual way can never itself be a norm. Survival in the mass needs psychological self-understanding and evidence of inner transcendent experience; resistance to organized mass requires one as well organized in individuality as the mass itself.
Examples (exhaustive house list for this Index lemma — common individual motifs named across Jung’s essays and standard Jungian lexica; not a claim that Jung’s CW contains only these):
unique / unlike anyone else; vs collective; uniqueness + social link; never merge with collective; mass crushes individuality → chokes progress; not antagonistic to norms; individual way ≠ norm; extramundane principle / inner experience; organized individuality vs mass; distinct from individualism / individuation.
3. Academic elucidation
In analytical psychology individual names the unique person in / against the collective—Two Essays and Undiscovered Self territory. Descent Press keeps Sharp in §4; Samuels has no dedicated head. Prefer CW 7 / 6 / 10.
4. Lexicon
Sharp (1991)
Individual. Unique and unlike anyone else, distinguished from what is collective. (See also individuality.) A distinction must be made between individuality and the individual. … The individual is precisely that which can never be merged with the collective and is never identical with it. … The individual way can, by definition, never be a norm…
(Sharp, 1991) — cites CW 7 ¶¶519, 485, 240; CW 6 ¶761; CW 10 ¶¶511, 540 in Sharp’s lemma.
Samuels, Shorter & Plaut (1986) — no dedicated individual head
(No dedicated Samuels head.) Related under collective / individuation
5. CW concordance — sample, not exhaustive
See also: individuality; individualism; individuation; collective; persona; self.
References
Samuels, A., Shorter, B., & Plaut, F. (1986). A critical dictionary of Jungian analysis. Routledge.
Sharp, D. (1991). Jung lexicon: A primer of terms & concepts. Inner City Books.