08/09/2026
On the eve of the greatest battle of his life, the warrior Arjuna lowers his bow and refuses to fight. The army massed against him is his own family: his cousins, his teachers, the people he has loved. To raise a weapon against them seems unthinkable.
In this month's Free Article, 'Symbolic Correlations between the Bhagavad Gita and the Individuation Process' (published in Junguiana, Vol. 41/3, 2023, pp. 181-190), Jungian analyst Maria Zelia de Alvarenga reads the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred text in which this scene unfolds, as a symbolic map of the individuation process.
The battlefield of Kurukshetra, she suggests, is the human psyche, and the war Arjuna is summoned to wage is an inner one.
The "enemies" ranged against him are what Jung called imagos: the inner doubles we each carry. The good mother and the terrible mother, the beloved teacher and the betrayer, the rival, the friend, all of them images forged over a lifetime of experience. We spend much of our lives mistaking them for other people and projecting them outward. Individuation asks us instead to recognise them as our own.
Alvarenga's distinctive point is that this work is not merely about facing our darkness. The luminous doubles, the figures we admire and love, must be integrated too, if we are to become the whole of who we are rather than the product of those who raised us.
Krishna, who urges Arjuna into the fight, is for Alvarenga the voice of that inner wisdom: what von Franz described as a guiding centre within the unconscious. The battle, she reminds us, is the work of a lifetime.
Follow the link in our bio to IAAP News Bulletin No. 54 to read this journal article for free for the month of September 2026.
