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Murray Stein's newest and perhaps most ambitious book, Practicing Wholeness, will be of interest to analysts of all persuasions, to psychotherapists who want to know more about a contemporary Jungian approach, and to anyone who desires to understand the individuation process better. The writing is clear, and the theoretical arguments cogent, concise and easy to follow.
In the introduction we learn that the book took shape not from conscious intent, but from an ‘unconscious ground plan’. The author only gradually realized that he was circumambulating the theme of wholeness. This means that the text describes the process of approaching wholeness, while simultaneously illustrating it. That is, just as a dreamer dreams a dream in order to make its symbolic potential available to consciousness, the chapters of Practicing Wholeness were written in order for both author and reader to become more aware of the nature of the search for wholeness.
Stein approaches the concept of wholeness from a variety of viewpoints. Like a growing number of Jungians, he is conversant with psychoanalytic, object relations, and self psychological theory, and interdigitates their insights with his own personal experience and understanding. We learn, in fact, that openness to multiple narrations of psychic reality is an integral aspect of what Stein means when he writes of practising wholeness.
The idea, or more accurately the ideal, of wholeness, so central to Jung's conception of the psyche, can be approached as symbol — the transforming potential of affect-images; as process — the regulation and development of the psyche; and as goal — individuation in which the centre of the personality shifts from ego to Self. Stein's text describes aspects of symbol, process and goal, and relates them to analytic work in ways that are both original and valuable. ‘Wholeness’, he writes, ‘is what we desire most deeply even if we do not know what it is we are striving after and cannot put a name to it’ (p. 11).