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Murray Stein

Murray Stein

Murray Stein (born 1943) is a Jungian analyst and the pre-eminent contemporary cartographer of Jung’s psychology. Trained at Yale, at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, and at the University of Chicago, Stein has served for decades as a training analyst and taught at the C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago. He has served as Vice-President of the International Association for Analytical Psychology and as co-editor and publisher of Chiron Publications.

Stein stands in the Jungian core of the Lineage as the tradition’s standard introducer. Where marie-louise-von-franz elaborates the archetypal and alchemical, and edward-edinger systematizes the ego-self-axis, Stein performs the labor of rendering Jung’s whole opus legible as a single coherent map. His Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction (1998) has become, for readers coming to depth psychology after the first wave, the standard port of entry to the Lineage.

Stein’s distinctive contribution lies in three registers. First, the cartographic: Stein insists that beneath Jung’s reputed sprawl lies a “sublime vision of the soul,” and he reads the Collected Works as a single three-dimensional topography of the psyche — persona, ego, shadow, anima/animus, the collective-unconscious, the self, synchronicity — whose regions form a connected whole (Stein 1998, Jung’s Map of the Soul). Second, the developmental: in In Midlife (1983) and Transformation: Emergence of the Self (1998), Stein works out the grain of individuation as a sequence of metamorphoses — a caterpillar, a pupa, a butterfly — with midlife as the decisive pupation through which the imago of the second half of life emerges. Third, the alchemical-analytic: Stein takes up Jung’s Rosarium reading of the transference and elaborates the a’–b’ couple — the two players whose unconscious relation constellates beneath the conscious dyad, issuing in a shared rebis image that binds them across time and even death.

Stein’s register is transmissive rather than extensional. He is to Jung what Jolande Jacobi and Frieda Fordham were to earlier generations, except that he writes a generation later and with the whole late Jung in view — Aion, the synchronicity writings, the Mysterium. Where james-hillman departs from Jung in the direction of soul-making, Stein stays with the master’s map and teaches it whole. The tradition needs both offices.

His explicit classical gesture is to plato: the transformative-image, Stein argues, has “many points of intellectual contact with Plato” insofar as both recognize “the transforming power of that which Jung would call archetypal images and Plato the Forms” (Stein 1998, Transformation). The difference is that Jung locates the Form in the psyche. The parallel is nonetheless load-bearing — it places the Jungian archetypal-image in direct inheritance from the Platonic tradition that founds the Lineage’s headwaters.

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Major works

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