The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Entertaining Ideas: Barbara Knott

Conversation in Quotations: On Becoming Your Authentic Self

Conversation in Quotations is designed to bring your attention to some of the best reading in the world in our several opinions here at The Grapevine and to stimulate further conversations among readers and your own circles of friendship.

The call to individuate is the call to become authentic—to live and affirm consciously one’s own unique individuality. Anthony Stevens, Archetypes (p. 293).

As C. G. Jung said at the end of his BBC interview with John Freeman, … human beings cannot live a meaningless life. (quoted in Anthony Stevens, The Two Million-Year-Old Self, p. 93).

Jung elaborated on that: To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his own being and does not rise to personality, he has failed to realize his life’s meaning. (Jung, CW 17, para. 314, in Stevens, p. 293).

And yet, many people (the lucky ones) reach stages in their lives when they wonder, Who am I? No, really. Behind my persona. Down deep in me. Who am I? In exploring ways to answer the question, we often find that we are also exploring self and soul together on a path that Jung calls individuation. One’s unique individuality is sometimes seen as synonymous with soul.

Bill Plotkin, in his Soulcraft (25), draws our attention to poet David Whyte for elaboration on the notion of soul:

David Whyte’s poetry offers several evocative images for soul:

“that small, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart”

“the one line already written inside you,” the “one life you can call your own”

the “shape [that] waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky”

and “your own truth at the center of the image you were born with.”

(quoted from David Whyte, The House of Belonging, pp. 24, 28, 37).

These are beautiful images to describe what we are looking for, but why the resistance? The postponing? The stagnation? The most helpful insight I’ve found is again in Jung’s work.

Without necessity nothing budges, the human personality least of all. It is tremendously conservative, not to say torpid. Only acute necessity is able to arouse it. The developing personality obeys no caprice, no command, no insight, only brute necessity; it needs the motivating force of inner or outer fatalities. (Collected Works XVII, para.293).

Bill Plotkin reminds us that David Whyte is also the poet who has by now famously pointed out that humans are the one part of creation capable of ignoring or refusing the flowering of our own souls. (Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft, p. 25).

Compare: In The White Peacock (p. 71), one of D. H. Lawrence’s early novels, he is already focused on this motif. Lettie says to George: You are blind; you are only half-born; you are gross with good living and heavy sleeping …. Things don’t flower if they are overfed. You have to suffer before you blossom in this life.

James Hillman adds: The individuation impulse that rouses the personality out of its inertia and toward its development would then be Eros who is born of Penia, need, acute necessity. (The Myth of Analysis, p. 62 footnote).

Eros, the life instinct, expresses itself in the act of bonding, integrating, and creating; Thanatos, the death instinct, in dissolving, disintegrating, and destroying. (Anthony Stevens, The Two Million-Year-Old Self, p. 91.)

With Eros as our companion, let’s turn at last toward our goal with another poet who expresses beautifully what authenticity means. John O’Donohue writes in Conamara Blues (p. 30):