This article attempts to discover an important historical precedent for the concept of individuation in the idea of paideia, which today, mistakenly, is often understood to have been simply the form of ‘education’ practised in ancient Greece. Paideia, however, was not limited to the instruction of youth and was based on no fixed programmes. It was conceived as continuing throughout the life of the individual, and as a development of natural, in‐born potential. Paideia articulated a notion of ‘inner culture’, or cultura animi, which has since receded from Western civilization, with its anti‐psychological emphasis on progress, specialization and extra‐version, and with its notion that a civilization's ‘culture’ is primarily defined by its social structures and material tools. Present‐day interest in the Jungian concept of individuation can thus be seen as a return of the repressed. An analysis of the Telemachy ‐ the opening cantos of the Odyssey ‐ in which Odysseus’ son, Telemachus, accomplishes his passage to adulthood, reveals the need for the realization of natural potential to be an innate and archetypal ideal. Homeric poetry is then seen to have furnished a unified canon for the whole human being, whereas the subsequent course of European civilization, starting with the Greek Sophists and an ever more specialized notion of philosophy, is seen to have fostered a unilateral mode of maturation. It is argued that nostalgia for paideia indirectly reasserts itself through the widespread cultural interest in the idea of individuation.

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