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Each of Murray Stein's new books arose out of lecture series. Transformation: Emergence of the Self is number seven of the Carolyn and Ernest Fay series in Analytical Psychology of Texas A & M University. Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction grew from a series of lectures given to students and trainees.
In the prologue to Transformation, the reader encounters Stein walking along a North Carolina country road when his ‘eye happened to fall upon a chubby caterpillar busily schrooching … down the side of the road’. Stein muses about this caterpillar as it looks ‘for a sheltered place in which to spin its cocoon and begin pupation’. He wonders if it knows ‘what it was in for?’ … ‘Did it have a vision?’
In Chapter Two, ‘Emergence of the Self Imago in Adulthood’, the reader is then taken from the caterpillar's transformational possibility to a transformation dream of one of Stein's analysands. The dream echoes the biological process in which the caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly: ‘Who would guess’, writes Stein, ‘that a swiftly darting butterfly once was a thick worm lumbering heavily along the ground?’ Pupation, the inactive stage in the metamorphosis of many insects, follows the larval stage and precedes the adult form. The ‘rudiments of both pupal and adult structures already are present in the mature caterpillar … and some of these rudimentary structures are present at the cellular level, but remain latent. As latent forms, they are called ‘imaginal disks’. This metaphor is carried forward in the following chapters as Stein amplifies it through transformative images, transformative relationships, and finally, portraits of transformation in which the lives of Rembrandt, Picasso and Jung are discussed.
Stein's thesis is that ‘most people grow up and become more whole and complete than their (demonstrable) repetitions can possibly account for in any significant or interesting way’. He holds the view, ‘following Jung, that there are two great developmental eras,