Imago

Imago is the term murray-stein adopts from entomology — where it names the adult form of an insect after complete metamorphosis — and restores to its etymological kinship with image to describe the realized adult form of a human personality after midlife-transformation.

Stein’s proposal is that behind the visible personality are “imaginal disks” — latent structures present from embryonic development that “bide their time until conditions are ready to support their advancement into mature form” (Stein 1998, Transformation, ch. 1). The butterfly’s body is prefigured in these disks within the caterpillar. Analogously, the adult human imago is prefigured in the child and adolescent as latent temperament, vocational inclination, character structure, and archetypal orientation — visible in retrospect, sometimes dreamed or intuited in advance, but realized only through the pupation of midlife.

The imago is neither persona nor ego. The persona is the socially adapted mask; the ego is the center of ordinary consciousness. The imago is the whole realized adult form — “a new inner center of value and direction… a new consciousness of soul” (Stein 1998, Transformation, ch. 1). Stein calls this in traditional language “the creation of the spiritual person.”

The concept is Stein’s attempt to give the Jungian self a developmental-temporal grain: the Self as aim becomes the imago as achievement. The imago is what the individuation process yields when it succeeds.

Relationships

Primary sources

stein-transformation-emergence-self (Stein 1998)