Transformative Image

A transformative image, in murray-stein‘s usage, is an archetypal image that takes possession of consciousness and reorganizes the personality around itself. Such images arise from the collective unconscious and appear as dreams, active imaginations, religious symbols, figures of fascination, works of art, or encountered persons.

“From the moment these images appear, they take possession of one’s consciousness and, at least temporarily, change it, sometimes dramatically. Dream images, for example, sometimes will haunt a person for days and continue to draw out emotions and memories, incite desires, and even stimulate plans for the future. Occasionally a poem, a painting, a film, or a concert has the same effect. The major symbolic experiences of this kind we call religious” (Stein 1998, Transformation, ch. 2).

Stein’s theoretical move is to position the transformative image as the mechanism of midlife-transformation. Where Freud reduced all such images to sublimation of sexual libido, carl-jung and Stein after him argue that psychic energy is redistributed through the encounter with an image that gives latent imago-potential a shape. Stein’s leading case is Jung’s December 1913 active imagination, in which Jung was crucified with Christ, encircled by a serpent, and transformed into Aion — an event Stein reads as Jung’s own midlife deification and the onset of the transformation that produced the mature Jungian corpus.

Crucially, Stein follows Jung in distinguishing the depth-psychological use of such images from the traditional religious use. One lets oneself be temporarily identified with the image, then disidentifies and reflects on it as an individual. “It is this latter move that yields the individual. Otherwise the images, being collective, simply create replicas of themselves” (Stein 1998, Transformation, ch. 2).

Relationships

• midlife-transformation
• imago
• active-imagination
• archetype
• individuation

Primary sources

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