Self Portrait

The self-portrait occupies a distinctive position in the depth-psychology corpus as a privileged site where the internal constitution of the psyche becomes externalized and legible — not merely as personal confession but as the objective articulation of an emerging psychological imago. Murray Stein’s sustained readings of Rembrandt and Picasso establish the self-portrait as developmental document: across a career, the serial accumulation of self-portraits traces the arc of individuation, registering shifts from ego-inflation and social performance toward archetypal depth, spiritual illumination, and honest confrontation with mortality. For Rembrandt, the late self-portraits reveal a figure illuminated by divine inner light yet brutally honest about physical decline — a paradox that encodes the individuation telos. Picasso’s self-portraits, by contrast, present a mercurial, mask-like elusiveness that Stein reads as the signature of modernity itself: fragmented identity, dissociation, and connection to the archaic unconscious rather than transcendence. Jung’s Bollingen tower is theorized as an architectural self-portrait equivalent — a three-dimensional imago. Across these cases, the self-portrait functions not as narcissism but as imago-formation: the artist discovering and projecting the contours of the deeper self that defines and frees. Shaun McNiff introduces a therapeutic register, noting how self-portraiture emerges in art therapy as a transitional move from imitation toward authentic self-expression.

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in his final self-portraits, he depicts himself as an artist who has joined the company of the immortals… these self-portraits are statements of great personal modesty. The artist is brutally honest about his less than ideal physical appearance, yet he shows his figure as illuminated by divine inner light.

Stein reads Rembrandt’s final self-portraits as the paradoxical fusion of radical physical honesty and spiritual luminosity, exemplifying the individuation telos in pictorial form.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis

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Rembrandt’s self-portraits change dramatically in style and tone. He has entered another phase of inner development, which we can conceptualize as further deepening and enriching the imago we see in the self-portrait just described.

Stein establishes the self-portrait series as a longitudinal record of imago formation, each phase registering a new depth of inner psychological development.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis

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An early play of polarities shows itself in a pair of self-portraits from 1901. One of his most significant early statements, Yo, Picasso [I, Picasso], painted when he was twenty, shows the artist as a handsome Spanish painter with a bright orange-red tie dramatically flaring out above his colorful palette.

Stein introduces Picasso’s early self-portraits as evidence of polarities within the psyche seeking integration, anchoring imago formation in the dialectic of opposites.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis

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In 1907 another self-portrait followed, which developed the mask-like face and further ‘Africanized’ it… Picasso put his developing imago in terms of mythic images, which have the capacity to combine physical presence with a strong statement of archetypal transcendence.

Picasso’s self-portraits are read as progressive mythologizations of the self, each image unearthing archetypal elements of his forming imago.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis

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There is no evidence of achieved serenity in Picasso’s self-portraits or in the biographies written about him. But there is abundant evidence of powerful and abiding connections to the archetypal unconscious.

Stein distinguishes Picasso’s mode of self-portrait — not transcendent serenity but raw archetypal vitality — from Rembrandt’s spiritual luminosity, underscoring that individuation admits multiple imagos.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting

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Jung considered it a representation of the self. For our purposes, we can consider it a self-portrait of Jung’s imago, an expression of his fully realized adult form.

Stein extends the self-portrait concept architecturally to Jung’s Bollingen tower, treating it as a three-dimensional self-portrait that externalizes a fully realized adult imago.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting

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A famous painting from this period, entitled Self-Portrait with Saskia (1636), shows the painter holding Saskia on his lap, both of them dressed in gorgeous…

Stein uses the early Self-Portrait with Saskia as a baseline for tracking Rembrandt’s developmental trajectory, situating the confident, socially embedded persona that later gives way to deeper interiority.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting

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He initiated a major change in his work by attempting representations of real people and things in his surroundings, as well as self-portraits.

McNiff documents self-portraiture as a developmental threshold in art therapy — the moment a patient moves from imitation to authentic self-expression and personal risk-taking.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

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If we look at imago formation — the emergence of the self in adulthood — we find that Picasso, like Rembrandt, achieved a full metamorphosis, but the kind of imago he became is very different from that which Rembrandt embodied.

Stein uses comparative self-portrait analysis to argue that individuation yields irreducibly different imagos, cautioning against any single normative model of psychological maturation.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting

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The antique car on top represents a play on words (self-portrait = auto-portrait), but also suggests the relationship between the mixture of aggressive and self-destructive impulses frequently encountered in perinatal sessions.

Grof uses the linguistic pun of self-portrait as auto-portrait to link self-representational imagery to the perinatal matrix of aggression and self-destructive impulse in psychedelic therapy.

Grof, Stanislav, LSD Psychotherapy: Exploring the Frontiers of the Hidden Mind, 1980aside

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I considered including a woman — Eleanor Roosevelt came to mind as a prime candidate for study, as did Georgia O’Keefe and Frieda Kahlo — but I decided instead to use the historical contrast between traditional imago (Rembrandt) and modern (Picasso and Jung).

Stein acknowledges that female artists — including Kahlo, a renowned self-portraitist — were candidates for imago analysis, noting their exclusion as a limitation of the study’s scope.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998aside

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This patient has a marked absence of just that which characterizes so many women, an interest in the face. She certainly had no adolescent phase of self-examination in the mirror.

Winnicott uses the absence of mirror-gazing and portraiture as a clinical diagnostic marker, implying that self-portrait activity — even its informal specular form — indexes normal self-constitution.

Winnicott, D W, Playing and Reality, 1971aside

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