The Process of Individuation in Tamhīdāt: An Analysis

Mystical text is an area of psychological exploration that provides a cognition, albeit a small one, of the position of nearness to God; it also reveals the hidden aspects of its author spiritual dimensions and shows how he/she understands his/her Lord and how he/she approaches to God. In Jung’s school of analytical psychology, “the process of individuation” is an unconscious effort to achieve mental development; it explains that human beings can never achieve the full psychological development, but can only achieve individual, comprehensive and inner experiences by recognizing the "superego". Tamhīdāt (The Preludes) a treatise written by Ayn al-Quzat Hamadani, the prominent mystic of the fifth and sixth centuries AH, reflects a psychological development. The purpose of the present study is to investigate this development in the unconscious of the author of Tamhīdāt. The research has been done by descriptive-analytical method. The results indicate that the author, in his magnum opus, unconsciously shows the psychological development using the mystical teachings and exploring the unconscious. The unconscious influence of the archetypes, such as "Christ", "Wise old man" which eventually merge with the archetype of "shadow" and guide to light, is evident in the book; Ayn al-Quzat tries to achieve the process of individuation and to reach "the superego" in a pure and original way.