Transformation: Emergence of the Self

In 1998 I had the honor of reviewing Murray Stein's books for "The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal." I had read several of Stein's books before 1998 and was moved particularly by his first book "In Midlife," yet, when I read "Transformation," I was led to say that it spoke more directly to the needs of the soul than any other Jungian text I had come across. Reflecting back on what I wrote then I still believe this today. There is a mystery of transformation contained within this book that speaks directly to the spirit of our times: a need not only for a theoretical post-Jungian analysis of what takes place in psychotherapy, but a clear and practical description of a working method that reveals how transformation may be achieved outside (as well as inside) the consulting room. What are the archetypal structures of thought and feeling through which transformation occurs? What are some methods by which we can put into practice what Stein teaches? What Stein is most adept at describing is perhaps what happens when the scars of childhood have been outgrown during a person's early thirties to early fifties, when "structures" of affect and "feeling" suddenly emerge to color an individual's entire life and oeuvre. Of particular interest to me is the remarkable story he tells of the German national poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, during the periods of inception and writing of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. Here Stein answers my question above about structure and method. Stein shows masterfully how the "poet archetype," or "poet imago" emerged quickly out of structures of affect and feeling from Rilke's early developmental life to transform his consciousness at mid-life utterly. Never before and never again afterwards, Stein writes, was the poet so thoroughly possessed by the Muse as when the text of the Elegies poured forth from his pen, and when he traces this inspiration to its source, what we learn is that "a mood of elegiac nostalgia and mourning dominates Rilke's entire artistic life" (p. 29). Stein traces this characteristic mood beyond mourning over personal losses in his infancy. He describes "a fundamental structure of feeling" that pervades Rilke's entire life as a destiny-pattern and concludes that his "entire poetic oeuvre is, in a sense, a monumental lament" (p. 29). This is a true mythological insight. For we find this to be a fact in ancient Hindu poetry as well as in the songs of our seminal American poet Walt Whitman. Such feelings of profound Grief as Rilke passed through at mid-life inevitably led the poet to unearth memories extending beyond the atmosphere surrounding his infantile trauma, to the "mythic territory and the history of the Laments" (p. 31). Stein postulates that "Lament is the occasion, the necessary condition for transformation" (pp. 28, 29); this proves to be true in the poetry of the Hindu poet Valmiki, as well as in the poetry and prose of Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson. The Land

I love that Stein recognizes and articulates that something strange is going on within us at midlife. He chooses three individuals to explore the change in the "imago" that is the latent self. Two are artists (Rembrandt and Picasso) and the other is Jung. Stein in Transformation says: "Picasso's art, which breaks whole images into pieces and abstract objects and then reassembles them into a novel form, is the key to modern experience. This is what it means to be modern." The frustrating thing about midlife is that it is unique to the individual and thus defies generic solutions. Stein paints with a broad brush that allows the reader to get out his or her own little brush and do his or her own work. Another example of such an effort can be found here: The Light of Nature: Embracing Mystery & Complexity[...].