Psychological development is not merely the accumulation of more skills or knowledge.

Death and rebirth are archetypally woven into psychological development.

Becoming ourselves requires letting parts of ourselves die.

Many of us spend years trying to acquire the right career, friends, hobbies, interests, romantic partner(s), and even a highly specific coffee order. Then, rather inconveniently, something within us stops wanting any of it. Suddenly, relationships sever, the job feels wrong, our interests change, and the old ambitions have become strangely outdated. Even our half sugar, no whip, pumpkin spice latte made with oat milk seems to belong to someone else we no longer recognize.

In these situations, we can witness how death is psychologically present long before biological death arrives within our lifespan.

Carl Jung, the pioneering founder of analytical psychology, was fascinated by the persistent appearance of death and rebirth imagery throughout mythology, religion, dreams, ritual, art, culture, and inner life.1 What interested him was what this persistent imagery implied about our own psychology; that the psyche possesses its own transformative intelligence, and that this intelligence is oriented toward a centre other than the rational mind, or what can be referred to as our small ‘i’ (ego). Jung named that centre of the human psyche the Self.

The negotiation between the egoic rational mind and the Self is where the death and rebirth motif lives for most of us.

We typically experience many symbolic, intangible, and psychological deaths throughout our ordinary lives. As adults, our childhood eventually disappears, an identity that once organized our life stops fitting for whatever reason, and........

© Psychology Today