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Transformation: Emergence of the Self
Transformation: Emergence of the Self
Transformation: Emergence of the Self (Texas A&M University Press, 1998; Carolyn and Ernest Fay Series in Analytical Psychology No. 7) is Murray Stein’s theoretical elaboration of the midlife material he first developed in In Midlife (1983). The book presents transformation as the central human task of adulthood and the specific work of the second half of life.
Stein proposes a developmental schema of successive metamorphoses — adolescent, midlife, late-life — modeled analogically on the butterfly’s complete metamorphosis from larva through pupa to imago. Behind the adult personality, Stein argues, are “imaginal disks”: latent structures present from early embryonic development that await the hormonal and biographical conditions of adulthood to emerge. The imago is the adult form such disks realize.
The mechanism of transformation is the transformative-image: an engaging, even arresting archetypal image — dream, vision, active imagination, religious symbol, encountered person — that takes possession of consciousness and reorganizes the personality around itself. Stein’s leading case is Jung’s 1913 active imagination of the crucifixion, serpent, and Aion, which he reads as Jung’s own midlife deification and the onset of the transformation that would produce the mature Jungian corpus.
The book also takes up the rebis — the alchemical double figure — as the mutual image constellated in long transformative relationships, chief among them the analytic dyad. Chapter 4 reads Rembrandt, Picasso, and Jung as three portraits of imago-emergence in the second half of life.