Transformation: Emergence of the Self by Murray Stein

Vol. 24, No. 2, November 1998

Transformation: Emergence of the Self. By Murray Stein. (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1998, 200 pages.)

Imagine what would happen, Murray Stein suggests in passing early on in this book, if a caterpillar went to an insect psychiatrist and asked for a prescription of Prozac or some other antidepressant.

“Moltings have become so hard lately. I’m just beside myself during these painful periods! Help me!”

Stein suggests that the results could be unfortunate if the psychiatrist were unaware of the bigger picture. Stein himself is very much aware of the bigger picture. His prescription is not likely to short-circuit necessary processes of transformation and is likely to be of benefit to us individually and collectively in helping our butterfly psyches emerge.

Stein is a Jungian psychoanalyst practicing in the Chicago area, a lecturer, author and book editor and, if memory serves me right, originally a Saskatchewan boy. He has lectured to the C. G. Jung Society of Montreal several times and I was quite an admirer of him even before reading this book. The book did not diminish my already considerable admiration for its author and is a worthy addition to his other works, such as In Midlife and Practicing Wholeness.

Unlike much of Practicing Wholeness, which I reviewed in this space not long ago, Transformation is not a clinical book but very much one for the general public, based on a series of guest lectures at Texas A&M.

The book situates transformation—Wandlung or Verwandlung in German—centrally to both Jung’s thought and its significance for us today. With his flair for touching themes in the popular psyche, Stein notes at the beginning of the introduction that 1912, the year the Titanic sank, “signaling the end of an era and the beginning of the Age of Anxiety,” was also the year C. G. Jung finished his pivotal work Wandlung und Symbole der Libido, literally “Transformation and Symbols of Libido” but known in English as Psychology of the Unconscious. In the same year, Stein writes, Reiner Maria Rilke was inspired to begin his most important poetic work and Franz Kafka composed his famous story “Die Verwandlung,” known in English as “Metamorphosis.”

For Stein, transformation and the formation of identity, generally occurring in a person’s late 40’s, is no simple matter but a deep psychological process generally involving the creation of images, often grotesque ones. The transformed identity too may appear grotesque, especially to other people.

If people live long enough, they become themselves, which is not always reckoned as ideal; they may even be shunned and despised. The self is not something we select; we are selected by it.

In Stein’s view, a person’s destiny

—which is made from the qualities and markings that end up establishing themselves as the deepest etchings of character, mission and meaning in life, the features that define a particular life as unique—is importantly, perhaps most essentially, constituted by a series of transformative images and experiences. What happens is that a person’s integrity and potential as a unique human being become realized through these transformations. One becomes the person one most essentially and uniquely is, by means of the images that draw one’s psychic energy into a certain configuration of attitude, behaviour and motivation.

Stein deals effectively with transformation in human relationships, including marriage and analysis, and in society at large. In his view, a marriage can be a transformative relationship “only if an irrational bond grows up between the partners and holds firm as the relationship develops and deepens”; the union must take place on both the conscious and unconscious levels. Otherwise, there can be “a good social marriage, but it will not be a transformative relationship.”

Stein also has some eminently sane things to say about Jung’s love life. Stein writes:

It is noteworthy that Jung dedicated his essay on transference to his wife. Whatever his difficulties in marriage may have been—Jung’s biographers have duly noted them—he must have found in retrospect that his relationship to Emma was transformative, or he would not have dedicated “The Psychology of the Transference” to her. In fact, the marriage was a deeply bonded, enduring, nearly life-long relationship for both of them.

Stein’s vision of transformation also embraces society as a whole.

It is apparent in our time [he writes] that Western culture, and indeed all world cultures, are going through a dark phase of internal transformation. Perhaps, at the same time, there are spiritually advanced individuals who are pushing ahead to new spiritual frontiers ...

I look upon this as a pupation and refuse to think that the archetypes have abandoned us.

In another passage, Stein enunciates what I think of as perhaps the mission of “Jungians” today. He looks for the constellation of an image of adult maturity that will be different from traditional ones: not homo religiosus but homo psychologicus.

The book features lengthy case studies, so to speak, of transformation in three seminal figures in western culture: Rembrandt van Rijn, Pablo Picasso, and Jung. There is also a discussion of the series of alchemical pictures from the medieval alchemical text the Rosarium Philosophorum, which Jung himself discusses in “The Psychology of the Transference.”

—Harvey Shepherd