Dear reader,
In preparation of a workshop in autumn, I’m delving deeper into the theme of Jung for Young Adults. I’m investigating what Jung said about adolescence and how Jungian thought can be interpreted to fit this life phase. During the coming months, I aim to share more about my explorations with you.
To start simple, I analyzed the wonderful This Jungian Life podcast’s episode: Shadow and Self in Adolescence: Navigating Rage, Love, and Individuation. If you’re interested in the theme, I greatly recommend watching / listening to it!
In this article, I’d love to share my thoughts around some of the things discussed during the episode with you.
#1 Jung didn’t say much about adolescence, maybe because adolescence wasn’t really a thing back then.
The hosts of the podcast (Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee) describe how our cultural perspective on what it means to become an adult has changed over the last few decades. In Jung’s time, for most people, growing up was a much faster process than it is now. Childhood was a less luxurious and protected phase and life was also more physical. At some point, usually somewhere between 10-20 year old, you just had to start helping out paying the bills. Hence, adolescence – the grey area between childhood and adulthood, is considered to be quite a modern concept.
According to the hosts, the increased levels of safety, time, and other resources cause modern youth to “cling to childhood” more than most young adults did before. They continue to describe emerging adulthood as the process of:
“Breaking the spell of childhood”, “the loss of childhood”, and “the loss of innocence”.
I find it a fascinating thought that adolescence is a relatively new phase of life that’s been added to childhood, because we live more luxurious lives now. And whereas I recognize how young people around me tend to linger within this phase for quite some time, some of them trying to postpone the onset of real adulthood for as long as they can, I also feel the need to point out an additional perspective.
Through years of work within sustainability sciences, jungian psychology and also by being a young adult myself, I have observed that within adolescence, young adults now have time for personal development and shadow work: before we start a career, before we start a family, before we start repeating patterns. Jung mostly wrote about doing these things in the second half of your life, after starting a family and investing in a career. However, it seems to me that for some of us, the call to start with individuation is coming earlier and earlier.
It’s as if the spirit of our time demands it:
Do your personal and spiritual work before you start something serious and before people start depending on you.
And doesn’t that make sense? The more space and time we get because of our increasingly machine-driven lives, the earlier in life we can start doing the work of personal growth, of individuation. Information about psychological and spiritual work also has become more available, accessible and more accepted.
And we might need this. Because even though life might have been less overstimulating and less complicated in the past, it was also more rigid, more oppressive and forced and it has left many marks and traces within our internal family systems.
#2 Adolescence is about the questions: “Who am I?” “What are my goals, values and beliefs?”
In other words, according to the hosts, adolescence is about shaping your identity as an adult. I’ve recently gone through it, and I believe that it’s much easier to shape an identity when you’re able to filter out the expectations that society, your parents, your teachers, and you yourself have consciously or unconsciously put on you, but which don’t connect to who you truly are.
This might be an extremely gen-Z thing to say, but I think it also fits the spirit of our time. We’re collectively reconsidering what’s meaningful, what’s worth striving for and who gets to decide those things. Therefore, I also kind of belief that our culture as a whole (speaking from a Western European perspective) is in an adolescent stage as well!
Hence, I think that modern adolescents have a simultaneously difficult and essential task. They have to 1) find out who they are as adults within an overarching system that is trying to mature and therefore constantly changes as well, and 2) they have to play a pivotal role in shaping the new, mature culture.
For the continuation of my exploration, I wonder about several things:
- How can we make sure that doing Shadow work before our identity has fully developed isn’t too confusing?
- What is the best way of guiding young adults in Jungian Analysis? What traditional approaches still work and which ones should be altered?
- What roles do older generations, facing their own challenges, play in guiding young adults and setting an example, while the dominant culture that they grew up in and that shaped them is changing?
- If it’s true that many young adults are doing Shadow work earlier in life than adults did before, what will their second half of life be about?
- And as a bonus question: how does this all relate to the emerging challenges of the 21st century?
The podcast discussed many more interesting points around the meaning and purpose of adolescence, initiation rituals, myths and fairytales, the roles of adults and the challenges of our time. I’m excited to discuss some of these points in my next articles!
In the meantime, if you have any ideas, questions, or anything else, don’t hesitate to reach out. There’s so much to be said about this topic and I really don’t consider myself to be an expert yet. I’m enthusiastic, though. So let’s exchange and learn!
