[2] The concept appears in numerous fields and is encountered in works of Leibniz, Carl Jung, Gunther Anders, Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, David Bohm, Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze,[3] and Manuel DeLanda.
[5] Other psychoanalytic theorists describe it as the stage where an individual transcends group attachment and narcissistic self-absorption.
[6] The news industry has begun using the term individuation to denote new printing and on-line technologies that permit mass customization of the contents of a newspaper, a magazine, a broadcast program, or a website so that its contents match each user's unique interests.
This differs from the traditional mass-media practice of producing the same contents for all readers, viewers, listeners, or on-line users.
Communications theorist Marshall McLuhan alluded to this trend when discussing the future of printed books in an electronically interconnected world in the 1970s and 1980s.
Doing so enables the person, at an individual level, to be tracked, profiled, targeted, contacted, or subject to a decision or action which impacts them - even if their civil or legal ‘identity’ is not known (or knowable).
[16][17] Rapid advances in technologies including artificial intelligence, and video surveillance coupled with facial recognition systems have now altered the digital environment to such an extent that ‘not identifiable by name’ is no longer an effective proxy for ‘will suffer no privacy harm’.
[19] For Schopenhauer, the principium individuationis is constituted of time and space, being the ground of multiplicity.
[23] In addition to Jung's theory of complexes, his theory of the individuation process forms conceptions of an unconscious filled with mythic images, a non-sexual libido, the general types of extraversion and introversion, the compensatory and prospective functions of dreams, and the synthetic and constructive approaches to fantasy formation and utilization.
mark its stages like milestones, prominent among them for Jungians being the shadow, the wise old man .
[28] The philosophy of Bernard Stiegler draws upon and modifies the work of Gilbert Simondon on individuation and also upon similar ideas in Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.