Jungian Psychology seeks to restore the fragmented self in order to overcome illness and loss of vitality and lifeforce. Jung asserts that there is a deeper call in all of us to become whole. Individuation, the drive toward wholeness, is not a linear advancement, but a circumambulation around a numinous center point, which Jung named the Self. The Self is an archetype, an instinctual pattern that forms the structure of the unconscious. The archetype of the Self is seen as an “ordering, regulating, harmonizing, and meaning-giving agent of the psyche” (Smith, 2007, p. 120) Jung was always inspired by the shamanic practices, and compared certain shamanic phenomena as manifestations of the archetypal Self. As the center point, the Self is an orienting force, similar to the axis mundi or World Tree of shamans, the sacred center point of orientation around which an individual or a community orients itself and navigates for healing and wholeness (info from "Jung & Shamanism" by C. Michael Smith, 2007).
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