Part of our human nature is an innate ability to grow into wholeness, or to individuate.

To individuate means to integrate parts of our unconscious with our conscious personality. This is often driven by our need for liberation from any state of being that is too immature, too fixed, or too final. It is not a process of improvement, nor a striving toward perfection, but becoming more of who we really are–complete.

Death and rebirth, as a symbolic process, are an important tool in the individuation process.

To become our whole and unique selves requires an analysis of our roles and an overhaul of how we identify with our conscious identity. To individuate we must let go of a way of being in the world and our identity within it.

As many psychotherapists have noted, letting go of even the most maladaptive roles–no matter how much desire to change–creates inevitable grief. To let go, like any death, means to mourn what no longer is or could have been. And like any death, this is painful.

“It is a most painful procedure to tear off those veils, but each step forward in psychological development means just that, the tearing off of a new veil. We are like onions with many skins, and we have to peel ourselves again and again in order to get at the real core.

– Carl Jung, Visions: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1930 -1934

We let go of old identities and roles to make room for the new. We engage in this painful “peeling” all for an intuitive sense that we are something else beyond our conscious identities. We use that which is destroyed to transform, to enter a new relationship with ourselves and the world. We are born into our complete state.

“To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth.” – Carl Jung, Red Book p. 226

Living in a culture where self-help books regularly make the best seller list it can be easy to get caught up in the process of rebirth and death. There is pressure to see yourself as a never ending improvement project with a list of new habits to overcome and other habits to pursue. We are always looking for the new and improved. But, like many aspects of the individuation journey, we must also let go of our identity with the death and rebirth process.

We must move beyond death and rebirth and into integration. Because, although necessary, death and rebirth is only part of the journey into becoming who we really are.