Stein Among the Mapmakers of the Jungian Psyche

The Jungian tradition has produced, at every generation, at least one figure whose office is not to extend the master’s reach but to render his opus legible whole. Jolande Jacobi and Frieda Fordham performed this office in the first generation after Jung. Murray Stein performs it for the generation that inherits the late Jung — Aion, the synchronicity writings, the Mysterium — as a completed corpus.

Stein is explicit about the office: his aim in Jung’s Map of the Soul is “an emphasis on the overarching coherence within the theory and its subtle network of interconnections” so that “all the pieces stem from a single unified vision — which I see as a sublime vision of the soul” (Stein 1998, Jung’s Map of the Soul). The thesis is that Jung is not a sprawl to be navigated but a map whose regions connect.

This labor is distinct from — and complementary to — the labor of the extenders. marie-louise-von-franz extends Jung into the archetypal-alchemical and the fairy-tale; edward-edinger systematizes the ego-self-axis as a psychospiritual structure; james-hillman departs from Jung entirely in the direction of soul-making and polytheistic archetypal psychology. Stein’s contrast is with Hillman’s trajectory in particular: where Hillman critiques the interpretive closure of the map, Stein trusts the map and teaches its reading.

The Lineage needs both. Without the mapmakers, each new generation of readers must begin again from the Collected Works as an undifferentiated mass. Without the extenders, the tradition ossifies into commentary. Stein’s place is beside Jacobi and Fordham — the standard introducers — but with the full late Jung in his hand.

Sources

• murray-stein: Jung is a sublime unified vision, not a miscellany; the introducer’s labor is to make the vision legible.
• james-hillman: the Jungian map requires critique; soul-making departs from Jungian cartography.
• marie-louise-von-franz: Jung is extended through the archetypal-alchemical and the fairy-tale.
• edward-edinger: Jung is systematized through the ego-Self axis.