Murray B. Stein > Quotes

“The shadow is the image of ourselves that slides along behind us as we walk toward the light. The persona, its opposite, is named after the Roman term for an actor’s mask. It is the face we wear to meet the social world around us.”
― Murray Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction

“The personal aspects of which one is ashamed are often felt to be radically evil. While some things truly are evil and destructive, frequently shadow material is not evil. It is only felt to be so because of the shame attached to it due to its nonconformity with the persona.”
― Murray Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction

“Just as the migratory and nest-building instincts of birds were never learnt or acquired individually, man brings with him at birth the ground-plan of his nature, and not only of his individual nature but of his collective nature. These inherited systems correspond to the human situations that have existed since primeval times: youth and old age, birth and death, sons and daughters, father and mothers, mating, and so on. Only the individual consciousness experiences these things for the first time, but not the bodily system and the unconscious.”
― Murray Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction

“For everyone, though, the persona must relate to objects and protect the subject. This is its dual function. While introverts can be very outgoing with a few people, in a large group they shrink and disappear and the persona often feels inadequate, particularly with strangers and in situations in which the introvert does not occupy a defined role. Cocktail parties are a torture, but acting a role on stage may be a pure joy and pleasure. Many famous actors and actresses are quite deeply introverted. In private they may be shy, but given a public role they feel protected and secure and can easily pass as the most extroverted types imaginable.”
― Murray Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction

“The outcome of an actual encounter with someone who is a carrier of the anima or animus projection 'frequently gives rise in dreams to the symbol of psychic pregnancy, a symbol that goes back to the primordial image of the hero's birth. The child that is to be born signifies the individuality, which, though present, is not yet conscious.' The real psychic purpose of the conventional man's affair with his very unconventional anima woman is to produce a symbolic child, which represents a union of the opposites in his personality and is therefore a symbol of the self.

The meeting with the anima/us represents a connection to the unconscious even deeper than that of the shadow. In the case of the shadow, it is a meeting with the disdained and rejected pieces of the total psyche, the inferior and unwanted qualities. In the meeting with the anima/us, it is a contact with levels of the psyche which has the potential to lead into the deepest and highest (at any rate furthest) reaches that the ego can attain.”
― Murray Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction

“The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness. This problem is exceedingly difficult, because it not only challenges the whole man, but reminds him at the same time of his helplessness and ineffectuality.”
― Murray Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction

“Analysis tries to uncover the complexes and expose them to the conscious reflection of the ego. This intervention can alter them somewhat. In analysis a person learns how the complexes function, what triggers their constellation, and what can prevent their endless repetition. Without such intervention on the part of the ego, a complex will behave like an animated foreign body or an infection. In the grip of a complex, a person can feel quite helpless and emotionally out of control.”
― Murray Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction

“just because one suffers from depression, from childhood memories, or from whatever does not necessarily mean that one is not in the grip of a power complex!”
― Murray Stein, Jung's Red Book For Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions

“According to the rule, whatever is left out of the conscious adaptation to the regnant culture of the individual person is relegated to the unconscious and will collect around the structure that Jung named anima/us. For an extremely effeminate man the inner attitude (anima) will be masculine in quality because this is what has been left out of the persona adaptation.”
― Murray Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction

“the way of the “spirit of the depths” necessarily leads to the murder of the heroic.”
― Murray Stein, Jung's Red Book For Our Time: Searching for Soul under Postmodern Conditions

“The human opus—the work we as individuals and to some degree as communities can do and where we can make a difference—is to become conscious of what is given to us, whether it comes by way of biology, personal or collective history, or the endlessly creative unconscious, and to develop it to the best of our ability. In doing so, we also contribute a dimension to existence that did not exist previously, the dimension of consciousness.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“From this forceful realization that the numinous element in spirituality can heal, an individual was freed from his addiction to alcohol and a worldwide self-help organization was born. Once the true underlying craving for spirit was effectively addressed and integrated into daily life, the desire for alcoholic ecstasy could be held in check.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“Are not all addictions, one wonders after having seen such a wide variety of them in clinical practice, a search for something so elusive as to be considered somehow “of the spirit”?”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“But in a Jungian vocabulary, self has the opposite meaning. To say that someone is self-centered is to say that they are precisely not egotistical and narcissistic, but rather philosophical, having a wide perspective, and not personally reactive or easily thrown off balance.”
― Murray B. Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction

“The human opus—the work we as individuals and to some degree as communities can do and where we can make a difference—is to become conscious of what is given to us, whether it comes by way of biology, personal or collective history, or the endlessly creative unconscious, and to develop it to the best of our ability. In doing so, we also contribute a dimension to existence that did not exist previously, the dimension of consciousness. I take my cue from C.G. Jung, who saw this as the human contribution to the universe.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“In other words, the attainment to numinous experiences, while significant in itself, was not of final import; rather, it provided the essential ingredients (the alchemical prima materia) for further stages of refinement in the individuation opus.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“The ego rests on the surface of the unconscious and occupies the center of consciousness”
― Murray B. Stein, Map of the Soul - Ego: I Am

“This is a thumbnail sketch of the psychological opus of individuation. It is an operation of sublimation, which transforms the spiritual into the psychological and renders numinous experience practical and useful. The archetypal images exposed in numinous experiences become integrated into psychological functioning and assimilated into the contemporary world.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“individuation as Jung presented it in a multitude of writings is vastly more complex and has essentially to do with casting light into the darkness of psychological life and integrating the various polarities and tensions”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“This transformation from one state (the spiritual) to another (the psychological) is described as sublimation.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“When the ego is well connected to the self, a person stands in relationship with a transcendent center and is precisely not narcissistically invested in nearsighted goals and short-term gains. In such persons there is an ego-free quality, as though they were consulting a deeper and wider reality than merely the practical, rational, and personal considerations typical of ego consciousness.”
― Murray B. Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction

“An understandable wariness about the grand enthusiasms generated by religion, ideology, or mythopoetic hermeneutics has introduced in some people an uneasy suspicion of Jung’s psychology and classical Jungian perspectives on dream interpretation and the hermeneutical methods of amplification and active imagination”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“As used in everyday parlance, self is equivalent to ego. When we say that someone is selfish, we mean that they are egotistical or narcissistic.”
― Murray B. Stein, Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction

“people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, any more than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“Our experience in life, especially in the first half of life, like with the BTS members in their 20’s, is that we discover the Self in others and through others. We call it projection, but projection can be a kind of dismissive way of talking about finding the soul when you are in relationship to another person, let’s say a beloved. When you are in a relationship with a beloved, you are with your soul. That’s why it becomes so crucially dependent to be with her. She is your soul, or he is your soul. But that doesn’t mean it’s all out there. Inside and outside get mixed up, mixed together.”
― Murray B. Stein, Map of the Soul – Persona: Our Many Faces

“PEOPLE DO NOT CREATE their personalities willfully by choosing a specific identity or character any more than they form their physiques by picking out a complexion, a size of foot or hand, or a particular combination of facial features.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“Individuation is an imperative that drives us forward and, if successful, releases us from the trap of endlessly repeating the patterns that have conditioned us.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“Numinous experience creates a potentially convincing link to the Infinite, and this often leads to the feeling that character flaws like addictions or behavioral disorders are trivial by comparison with the profound vision of wholeness and unity imparted in the mystical state.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness

“Individuation is not, therefore, tantamount to a mystic journey, which prizes the experience of union with God or the vision of the Mysterium tremendum as the apex. Individuation does not culminate in an act of worship. Nor is it identical with the resolute via negativa of such religious traditions as Zen Buddhism. It has elements of both—experiencing the numinous and cleansing the mirror of consciousness—but it includes these as two movements within a greater opus.”
― Murray B. Stein, Principle of Individuation: Toward the Development of Human Consciousness