Video Transcript
Joseph Campbell
Mr.
McKnight: Now I'd like to ask you a question regarding the individual
life span. In a sense this is a question of relating to the purpose of
life. Last night in your lecture you mentioned that an individual goes
through a first process of life up to about the age of thirty-five where
he's becoming socially conditioned and serving a purpose in society and
after that there is an inward turning which Jung would probably call the
process of individuation. I'd like you to explain how this happens and
how we can help the process along.
Mr.
Campbell: Well, society dismisses you at a certain point. The first part
of life one is trying to find one's way in to the world of one's time
and one's place. Some people flip out and some people manage. Then, shortly
after middle life you begin to lose momentum and the society disengages
you. Furthermore, you're gradually disengaging yourself. When everybody
you meet reminds you of somebody you met before, everything that happens,
I mean read the newspaper today and go back twenty years and read the
same thing you sort of got the message and there's an inward turning.
Now one thing that's 
lacking
in our contemporary teaching is what you do with the energies that go
inward again - have a nervous breakdown is what happens or I'm told that
the average of years lived after retirement is very very low. That's because
the body and psyche say, well, there's nothing for us to do. But if the
idea of finding or rather letting the flower of your spirit bloom totally
from what you will have learned and what you have assimilated, if that
becomes your zeal in the latter part of life you carry on and move into
what Jung calls the problem of the second half of life - that's individuation.
And this is not individualism in the rabid way of "I've gotta win" You're
not taking anything from anybody when you go in or begin to digest 
what
you've lived and learned. And you can become of help to your friends in
helping them to straighten out their lives and so forth and that's the
proper function of age to represent wisdom and justice and life energy
and life knowledge. So, there is a career after your career you might
say.