Midlife Transformation

Midlife transformation names the decisive psychological metamorphosis that falls between the first and second halves of life, which carl-jung identified as the proper site of individuation and which murray-stein has developed as a full developmental theory.

For Stein, the first half of life is governed by persona-formation and ego-development on the archetypal pattern of the hero — a necessary one-sidedness through which the ego separates from the unconscious matrix and adapts to the social world. At a point typically between the late thirties and the early fifties, this project exhausts itself: “Been there, done that,” as Stein summarizes the midlifer’s mood (Stein 1998, Jung’s Map, ch. 8). The task then shifts from separation to unification. “The task now becomes to unify the ego with the unconscious, which contains the person’s unlived life and unrealized potential” (Stein 1998).

Stein insists that this transition is biologically as well as biographically timed. Drawing on Adolf Portmann, he argues that hormonal shifts at midlife function as “triggers” — not creators — of the transformation, constellating conditions under which latent “imaginal disks” can emerge into consciousness as a new adult imago. The transformation typically begins with a powerful transformative-image — a dream, a figure, a religious symbol — and unfolds over months or years in a liminal passage.

The full arc is metamorphic in the entomological sense: a caterpillar stage of adolescent persona-formation, a pupal stage of midlife disintegration and reorganization, and the emergence of an adult imago in which “latent images and structures from the primal sea of potentials in the unconscious” are “assembled into a new imago for adulthood” (Stein 1998, Transformation, ch. 1).

Relationships

• individuation
• imago
• transformative-image
• liminality
• self

Primary sources

• stein-transformation-emergence-self (Stein 1998)
• jungs-map-of-the-soul (Stein 1998)