IJSP Number 7, 2025

International Journal of Supervision in Psychotherapy, Number 7, 2025 Page | 60 because of the urge to change and adapt to the speed at which everything happens. As Christian Salmon in his Storytelling observes: “..., individuals experience an unbearable tension between the need to adapt to a changing environment and the need to assert their identity, between flexibility and individualism. This neo-management therefore has to meet their contradictory demands for autonomy and interdependence.” [17] This is a process that has to be repeated and enhanced at every new step oriented towards one’s own differentiation, which is, if we want to make a parallel to Jung’s psychology, the long and arduous process of individualisation. It is here the place to accentuate that the solid self and its development takes a lot of time, energy, patience and most of all, emotional and psychic investment. Such a process is not for the faint hearted, or the weaklings, and emotional addicts but it is more on the side of a heroic attempt following the incontrovertible calling towards growth and personal fulfilment. In Bowen’s terms, this complicated issue is expressed as follows: “A relationship system is kept in equilibrium by two powerful emotional forces that balance each other. In periods of calm, the forces operate as a friendly team, largely out of sight. One is the force for togetherness powered by the universal need for emotional closeness, love, and approval. The other is the force for individuality, powered by the drive to be a productive, autonomous individual, as determined by self rather than the dictates of the group. People have varying degrees of need for togetherness, which constitutes the life style (level of differentiation of self) for that person. The greater the need for togetherness, the less the drive for individuality. [18] It becomes evident, from what Bowen accentuates, that we are speaking of a dialectical mechanism that drives us in opposite and antagonistic directions which are not easy to reconcile on a day-by-day basis. In the end, everyone has to handle, for good or for bad, these antagonisms inherent to our human nature. Above all we have to pay attention to the possibility of some crooked dialectics involved in taking either one or the other extreme – fission or fusion – and forgetting the complement. After all, it is not about either individuality or togetherness, but it is individuality and togetherness, or, in other words, individuality accepted, tolerated and included in an understanding and nurturing togetherness. As with every opposite, togetherness and individuality are just different sides of the same coin, intrinsically linked and inseparable in their very own nature. If there is a solid self to appear and detach itself from the family emotional mass, we have to remember that the individualisation process as such is possible solely on the background of inherent family togetherness. In other words, if there is no togetherness we will not have individualisation and individuality as a result. On the other hand, individuality needs togetherness where it can manifest and develop itself in order to grow and flourish. Beyond family bonds and all its emotional intricacies, moral formation implied in the evolution of the solid self presupposes, from an ethical point of view, a certain type of commitment that is inter-relational in nature; as David Brooks mentions it: “In this way, moral formation is not individual; it is relational. Character is not something you build sitting in a room thinking about the difference between right and wrong and about your own willpower. Character emerges from our commitments. If you want to inoculate character in someone else, teach them how to form commitments– temporary ones in childhood, provisional ones in youth, permanent ones in adulthood. Commitments are the school for moral formation.” [19]