Pupation

Pupation is Murray Stein‘s governing biological metaphor for the interior labor of adult transformation. In Transformation: Emergence of the Self (1998), Stein proposes a schema of lifespan development in which the human life-cycle passes through two metamorphoses analogous to those of the butterfly: childhood as a first caterpillar stage culminating in an adolescent metamorphosis that yields a psychosocial persona; then a second caterpillar stage of adult social adaptation culminating in the midlife metamorphosis that gives birth to what Stein calls the true self, the imago of the second half of life.

The pupa is the dissolved state between the two forms. “When the caterpillar hears the call, it begins preparing for pupation. The change that now transforms the caterpillar into a pupa is of far greater magnitude” than the surface disturbances of adjustment (Stein 1998, Transformation). Within the chrysalis the larval body breaks down; what emerges is not an enhancement of the caterpillar but a different creature altogether. This is Stein’s figure for the mid-life passage — not a crisis to be managed but a molt to be completed.

The schema carries a diagnostic edge. The puer-aeternus and the puella aeterna are, in Stein’s reading, the pathologies of arrested pupation: figures who have sensed the call and refused it, “a slowly aging caterpillar, struggling ever harder to put off the final day of reckoning… cosmetic surgery may prop up the illusion of never aging, while the real benefit of aging — transformation into one’s full identity as an adult person — is lost in the cuttings on the floor.” Pupation is thus not optional equipment for the developmental theorist; it is the grain of individuation in its adult phase.

The figure is Stein’s and not Jung’s, though it draws on Jung’s insistence that the second half of life operates under different laws than the first. It is also distinct from liminality as a cultural-ritual concept: liminality names the passage between states; pupation names the organic dissolution that makes the passage possible.

Relationships

• murray-stein
• midlife-transformation
• imago
• individuation
• puer-aeternus
• liminality

Primary sources

• stein-transformation-emergence-self (Stein 1998)