Although Jung frequently points to two stages of psychological development with somewhat different goals; his theory of individuation is ultimately aimed at the discovery of meaning. Jungian scholar Steven Herrmann says that “meaning took on absolute significance in his hypothesis of individuation.”

How does the psychology of humans interact with the technologies we have developed? Technologies like Artificial Intelligence have risen in prominence in the past years with the promise of ever more scalable ways for humans to meet an increasingly complex world. This paper will review the interaction of these developments with human psychology in the areas of cognition and meaning-making using a psychoanalytic theoretical frame. The human race has evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, and technology must be seen in this evolutionary context. Humans developed incredible cognitive skills as well as relational and meaning-making skills to navigate the world and our place in it. However, with today’s technology, we meet challenges to meaning-making due to our relationship with technology, increased technological scaling, cognitive offloading, and reduced metacognitive skills. While technology offers immense opportunity for efficiency, it may impact humans’ ability to create meaning and thus result in reduced well-being due to the experience of meaninglessness.

Jung posits that we must learn to discriminate between “intentional and unintentional contents of the mind.” This paper will focus on the work surrounding ego development and differentiation as a part of individuation from a Jungian perspective.

This semester in my Masters of Psychology program at Columbia, I dove into Adult Psychopathology (as defined by the DSM). My focus was on Charlie, the main character from the 2022 movie, The Whale.

Over the past few years there have been a string of work-related phenomena that have touched the collective cultural minds of America. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, remote work has risen into cultural consciousness and is now an expectation for vast swaths of the workforce.

"To create beauty in the world and in others…" This was my aspirational personal mission statement as I completed my undergraduate studies in architecture and moved into the working world.