You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Our modern era has been called the age of anxiety, but Murray Stein argues that this could be revisioned, if we are able to shift our perception from ego to self. ‘Angst’,
he says, ‘is the mood of liminality’ (p. 20), and if we understand that personality and society have to be deconstructed before they can be reconstructed we might be able to see that anxiety is a prelude to transformation. In Transformation: Emergence of the Self, Stein adopts the view, well known to readers of Jung's Civilization in Transition (1964/), that Western civilization is in the throes of an individuation process, and at present the crisis and breakdown of old forms is more apparent than the rise of new forms. Stein encourages us to see beyond the purely negative ‘decline of civilization’ and to look for signs of development and renewal. Stein believes that by revealing the ‘emergence of the self in the present chaos, we can find new meaning in the upheaval and disruption of our time. It is important, he argues, ‘to manage the anxiety that attends transformation’, and although this book is far from blind to the crippling and petrifying potentials of anxiety, it always encourages us to take heart and look forward to the birth of the new.
In Transformation, Stein adopts a double view throughout. He analyses individual personalities, including artists such as Rembrandt and Picasso, the poet Rilke and Jung himself, and at the same time he is reviewing civilization as a whole. It is a very satisfying double vision, because he keeps one eye on the clinical and another on the cosmic, and moreover, he shows how these two levels of reality belong together, and why it is important to view the individual in relation to the world, and the world in relation to the individual. At both levels, Stein adopts the view that things have to change and cannot continue as they have before. The creative individual has to struggle beyond the cocoon of the ego to achieve the freedom and complexity of the Self, a