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Individuation comprises the processes whereby the undifferentiated tends to become individual, or to those processes through which differentiated components tend toward becoming a more indivisible whole.

The term serves sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, theologians and embryologists, among others, and thus has been variously defined by different scholars, including Arthur Schopenhauer, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Erik Erikson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Darwin. Nietzsche, for example, offers an extensive discussion of the tension between impartial, chaotic fluidity and individuated subjectivity in The Birth of Tragedy, these dichotomic qualities embodied by the Dionysian and Apollonian respectively. Nietzsche claims that the perpetual, unresolvable tension between these two opposing aspects of nature fosters the conditions necessary for the creation of tragic art.

In economics, individuation parallels specialization and increases the efficiency of the division of labor. It serves as a means for individuals to find comparative advantage in the marketplace.

Accounts of the process of individuation may be found in work by Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, David Bohm, and Manuel De Landa.