A-thirty-five-year-old woman once came to my office to discuss some recent dreams. To my astonishment, and also my everlasting gratitude, she told me a dream of such profound transformation that I never have forgotten it.
Excerpts from Chapter 1: Emergence of the Self Imago in AdulthoodThe driving force, so far as it is possible for us
to grasp it, seems to be in essence only
an urge towards self-realization.C G. Jung
A-thirty-five-year-old woman once came to my office to discuss some recent dreams. To my astonishment, and also my everlasting gratitude, she told me a dream of such profound transformation that I never have forgotten it.
I am walking along a road, feeling depressed. Suddenly I stumble on a gravestone and look down to see my own name on it. At first I am shocked, but then strangely relieved. I find myself trying to get the corpse out of the coffin but realize that I am the corpse. It is becoming more and more difficult to hold myself together because there is nothing left to keep the body together anymore.
I go through the bottom of the coffin and enter a long dark tunnel. I continue until I come to a small, very low door. I knock. An extremely old man appears and says: "So you have finally come." (I notice he is carrying a staff with two snakes entwined around it, facing one another.) Quietly but purposefully he brings out yards and yards of Egyptian linen and wraps me from head to foot in it, so I look like a mummy. Then he hangs me upside down from one of many hooks on the low ceiling and says, "You must be patient, it's going to take a long time."
Inside the cocoon it's dark, and I can't see anything that is happening. At first, my bones hold together, but later I feel them coming apart. Then everything turns liquid. I know that the old man has put one snake in at the top and one at the bottom, and they are moving from top to bottom, and back and forth from side to side, making figure eights.
Meanwhile, I see the old man sitting at a window, looking out on the seasons as they pass. I see winter come and go; then spring, summer, fall, and winter again. Many seasons go by. In the room there is nothing but me in this cocoon with the snakes, the old man, and the window open to the seasons.
Finally the old man unwraps the cocoon. There is a wet butterfly. I ask, "Is it very big or is it small ?"
"Both," he answers. "Now we must go to the sun room to dry you out."
We go to a large room with a big circle cut out of the top. I lie on the circle of light under this to dry out, while the old man watches over the process. He tells me that I am not to think of the past or the future but "just be there and be still."
Finally he leads me to the door and says, "When you leave you can go in all four directions, but you are to live in the middle."
Now the butterfly flies up into the air. Then it descends to the earth and comes down on a dirt road. Gradually it takes on the head and body of a woman, and the butterfly is absorbed, and I can feel it inside my chest.'
The kind of developmental unfolding imaged in this dream and in its central metaphor, the butterfly's metamorphosis, is what I want to explore in this chapter. This is a transformational epoch that extends over a considerable period of time, over years or even a decade or more, during which people find themselves living in a sort of limbo. I call this liminality. The very foundations of a person's world are under construction during this time. Such transformation is life-changing. It is a massive reorganization of attitude, behavior, and sense of meaning. While this typically is triggered by a singular encounter with a transformative image-a religious symbol, a dream, an impressive person, an active imagination- or by major life trauma like a divorce, the death of a child, or the loss of a parent or loved one, it will take months and years to become complete. When there is such a major passage, one can think in terms of metamorphosis or transformation, the passing over (meta, trans) from one form (morph, forma) to another. Sometimes the changes and shifts of attitude are subtle while they are happening, and one is hardpressed to know what if anything is going on. In the long run, though, the change turns out to be lasting and profound.
That people change and develop significantly in the course of their whole lives seems to us today a commonplace observation. We take it for granted that there are "stages of life" "life crises," and "developmental phases." It was not always so, but now these are part of the contemporary vocabulary and its clich6s. Twentiethcentury psychology has contributed a great deal to this vision of human life. Hundreds of studies have been dedicated to exploring and describing human psychological development, beginning in earliest infancy and proceeding through adolescence and adulthood to old age. Many accounts now exist outlining various emotional, cognitive, moral, and spiritual dimensions of this development. The psychological life of people now is seen as changing and developing almost endlessly.
At the beginning of the century, Freud found only four stages of psychosexual character development worth discussing, and all of these occurred in early childhood. He would have frozen major character development at the end of the oedipal stage (roughly ages four to six), and he considered the rest of life as fundamentally only a repetition of these early patterns. Jung soon disagreed. To begin with, he argued for a presexual stage (with the focus on nourishment), followed by preliminary sexual stages that unfolded in childhood and reached maturity in adolescence. He later expanded upon this by proposing a full lifespan developmental schema divided into two major parts: the first half of life, which has to do with physical maturation and social adaptation; and the second half, which is governed by spiritual and cultural development and aims. Other theorists, Erik Erikson among them, have argued that people pass through a discrete number of stages. Erikson proposed eight clearcut and discernible major phases of development that can lead to one of any number of results in the unfolding epigenetic progression. Each phase is loaded with its own specific tasks, hazards, and outcomes. However one divides it, whether more pessimistically as Freud did or more optimistically as Jung and later theorists of the psyche have, the human lifespan has been conceptualized in this century as encompassing several psychological phases, each passage between phases entailing a period of crisis.
A central question I will be focusing on in this book is: After childhood and youth, what? What happens to people developmentally after they have put childhood behind them? Some, of course, would argue that this never happens. This book is dedicated to the opposite view. I believe 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. But my thesis is not, on the other hand, that there is a vast smorgasbord of options, or changes bordering on the endless, like the image of the "Protean self" that has been proposed by Robert Jay Lifton. There may be a plethora of changes and alterations in personality and character-the so-called "stages of development"-but, following Jung, I hold that there are two great developmental eras, a first and a second half of life. The first is a growing and adaptational era, and the second is a consolidating and deepening era. While important psychological developments take place during infancy and childhood, for me the most interesting and spiritually significant ones happen in adulthood, at midlife and after. I do not believe that identity forms, in any deeply significant way, until after midlife, typically in a person's late forties. This identity is rooted in what Jung called the self, rather than in the earlier psychosocial structures that have been assumed for the sake of adjustment and adaptation.
I do not mean to imply that we can become whatever we want to be, our ideal self. This is a typical illusion of the first half of life, perhaps one important and necessary for installing sufficient ambition and selfconfidence in a youth to make the great effort needed for adaptation. But limits are placed on our psyches just as they are on our bodies. Ideals may be no more attainable.in psychological life than they are in the physical arena. We may want to be like Michael Jordan physically, but only a few will even begin to approximate his athletic form. In our Western religious traditions, there has been an emphasis on becoming Godlike through an imitatio Dei or imitatio Christi. This may be no more attainable than becoming small versions of Michael by imitating his moves on the basketball court. When we look at people's lives empirically, we usually see a picture entirely different from what these individuals want to be like or want to appear to others to be. If people live long enough, they become themselves, which is not always reckoned as ideal; they may even be shunned and despised. The self is not something we select; we are selected by it.
What I am interested in exploring is what actually happens to people inwardly when childhood, with its well-known "stages" and its scars and complex formations, is completed and outgrown, not only chronologically but psychologically. What are the instrument and the design that shape our ends, if not childhood patterns and adolescent "outcomes"? Does another kind of psychological development begin in adulthood? If a person stops looking back to childhood with regrets and secret longings for an ideal paradise, or back to postadolescence with surges of desire for eternal youth and ever greater expansion of ego and mastery of the world, as well as the physical perfection denied the aging-and must we not all finally do this?-is there then an opportunity for a second birth, 'another beginning?
I believe that there is such an opportunity and that this starts around midlife, or sometime in adulthood after its first phase has ended. Sometimes this development begins rather early-in a person's early thirties, for instance. Classically it takes place around forty. Occasionally it is delayed until a person has reached the midforties or even the early fifties. At some point, though, a second complete era of psychological and spiritual transformation gets under way, similar to what happened in adolescence but showing different psychological contents and meanings. While the new developments build on and make use of the old structures, they also transcend them.
In terms of lifespan development and cycles, I propose the following schema. Childhood (a first caterpillar stage) culminates in a metamorphosis during adolescence, when adult sexuality enters the biological and psychological picture. This leads to a new psychosocial identity (a persona), which Erik Erikson outlines very well in his works on adolescence, and to the establishment of an adultlike person whose true self is, however, still latent and hidden by the adaptive structures and requirements of this stage of life. This is a second caterpillar stage. It culminates in the midlife metamorphosis, which gives birth to the true self, and this personality becomes filled out and actualized in the second half of life. It is possible that there is a third caterpillar stage between midlife and old age, when there is yet another transformation. This final metamorphosis typically gives birth to a sense of self that is highly spiritual and oriented toward the timeless, as a person prepares for the final letting go and what may be a fourth transformation, physical death. In this book I will be discussing primarily the second transformation-midlife and the following period that reaches to old age-but in the examples I cite in the fourth chapter, there is also consideration of the third transformation in old age.
A butterfly's metamorphosis from larva to pupa to adult is a useful metaphor for the human psychological process of transformation in adulthood. This is an image that I want to press further. How far can it carry our thinking about the process of psychological transformation?
Butterflies undergo what is called a complete metamorphosis. However, they also pass through a long series of preliminary moltings before they arrive at the complete metamorphosis. This distinction between large and small transformations will be useful in thinking about psychological transformations in people. Suppose that we undergo many little ones and then, at midlife, a big one. This may suggest a useful perspective on the multitude of changes that occur in the course of a whole lifetime. When larvae hatch from their eggs, they begin immediately to feed, typically on the leaves of the plant where their mothers laid the eggs. From then on they eat without ceasing, and, as they grow to be many times their original size, they shed their skins in a series of moltings. While the moltings are lesser metamorphoses, in them selves they also constitute crises. During each molting, the larva is left vulnerable until a new protective coat grows around it. (Emotional vulnerability and nakedness are characteristic of change periods in a person's life. In fact, this may be the most evident sign of imminent transformation.) When the caterpillar finally is fully grown, its body chemistry changes. What had been a stable balance between the molting hormone and the juvenile hormone suddenly shifts in favor of the former, and this induces pupation, a massive molting rather than just another simple one. The hormone that prevents premature pupation has been termed a youth hormone or a rejuvenation hormone. It is secreted by the corpora allata, the "juvenile glands," and it acts as a brake on what otherwise would be a rush to the butterfly stage. It is only when the hormones of the prothoracic gland gain the upper hand, as a result of a process of diminishing levels of the juvenile hormone in the bloodstream, that metamorphosis is triggered. (The promise this hormone holds for eternal youthfulness, not surprisingly, has stimulated efforts to isolate it and use it to realize the common human fantasy of remaining forever young and beautiful. If we could just get enough of this hormone into our systems, perhaps we would never age!)
Think back to the dream of transformation recounted at the beginning of this chapter. The dreamer, who was thirtyfive years old at the time of the dream, had reached her full physical and social maturity as a woman. The first half of her life was coming to an end. Until then she had lived on schedule, so to speak, accepting tasks and roles laid down by culture and nature. The various steps of maturation, physical and psychological, had been traversed. She had made good use of her native talents and advantages in life to adapt to the social setting into which she had been born. She had developed a highly effective social persona and had achieved a suitable psychosocial identity; she, had realized her female biological potential for childbearing; she was in a favorable position educationally and economically. She had lived the first half of life well enough, and she had accomplished its primary objective-adaptation to the physical and cultural world into which she was born. Ego development, while no ideal, at least was more than adequate. Now, at the midpoint of her life, she was experiencing a "hormonal shift" (metaphorically speaking-she was not yet in menopause), and it registered as depression: "I am walking down a road, feeling depressed." Her actual life in fact was no longer satisfying, and indeed she was threatened with a major depression. The stage of adult caterpillar life was about to end, and unconsciously another phase was in preparation.
Today a depressed person can take Prozac to correct the mood. But imagine what would happen if the caterpillar went to an insect psychiatrist and asked for a prescription of antidepressants to fend off emotional pain: "Moltings have become so hard lately. I'm just beside myself during those painful periods! Help me!" If the doctor were not aware of the bigger picture-of the nature of the life cycle and the importance of bearing the suffering at this particular juncture-the big crisis might be postponed by drugs. Medication, as useful as it sometimes may be for reducing psychic pain, is by no means always the answer. Pupation is terrifying, but without it, there is no transformation, no butterfly. A shift in chemistry is needed for the next stage to begin. The juvenile hormone puts off pupation until the larva is able to take on a full metamorphosis. Delay is a necessary defense against too early onset of maturational processes. One can look at maturation as an increasing ability to bear what at times is the overwhelming challenge of major transformation, with its extreme anxiety and depression. Earlier crises are practice for the later ones which inaugurate the second half of life and later end that life.
Some budding adolescents resist the normal physical developments that accompany another critical stage of development. Anorexia nervosa in adolescent girls, for instance, often is rooted in the wish to remain presexual, to cling to childhood. The same dynamic holds in midlife. Resistance to transformation is strong. If one extends the reasonable wish to be youthful too long and continues to get pumped up with juvenile hormones beyond the appropriate time, however, one will become nothing more than a slowly aging caterpillar, struggling ever harder to put off the final day of reckoning. The mature personality and the deeper, archetypally based identity will not form. After a certain point in life, the puer aeternus (eternal adolescent) and his sister, the puella aeterna, cut rather sorry figures, precisely because they lack this quality. It is a quality of depth and integrity, rooted in layers of the psyche beyond the superficial levels of social adjustment (persona formation) based upon a need to please, to join in, and to get along. Cosmetic surgery may prop up the illusion of never aging, while the real benefit of aging-transformation into one's full identity as an adult person-is lost in the cuttings on the floor. The shift in body image and chemistry is part of the whole life plan, not an increasing deficiency to be remedied artificially so as to feel young a while longer.
When the caterpillar hears the call, it begins preparing for pupation. The change that now transforms the caterpillar into a pupa is of far greater magnitude than any other molts it has undergone previously. This is the big one. Entirely new structures will emerge and become dominant as a result of this metamorphosis. Complete metamorphosis is a dramatic transformation, out of which a creature emerges that bears no resemblance to the one that existed before. Who would guess, just by looking at it, that a swiftly darting butterfly once was a thick worm lumbering heavily along the ground? How does this happen?
First of all, this actually is the same creature. Only in appearance is it utterly different. At a deeper level, it carries what were formerly latent structures, now made vibrantly manifest, along into this new stage of life. The form has changed, but it is not a different being, not a changed soul. Scientific observers have determined that the rudiments of both pupal and adult structures already are present in the mature caterpillar. Indeed, some of these rudimentary structures are present at the cellular level during early embryonic development in the egg. They are primal and always have been part of the organism, but before this phase of life they remained latent. In their latent form, they are called "imaginal disks," a name that indicates their status as faint images or prefigurations rather than as substantial organic structures. It seems that these disks simply bide their time until conditions are ready to support their advancement into mature form in the adult. The adult insect must develop in its own time, and when it does, its form is called the imago. The butterfly is the imago of the insect that previously was incarnated as a caterpillar. The passage from imaginal disks to imago is, as we shall see, a difficult and sometimes hazardous process.
In passing from one form to another, the butterfly draws upon the latent structures that have been present all along but were undeveloped, hidden from view, or disguised by other features. The change from caterpillar to butterfly is a transformation in which underlying latent structures come to the surface and assume leading positions, while other features that were prominent change radically or disappear. In this, we recognize an important feature of psychological transformation in human adults. If one looks carefully into an adult person's early life, into infancy and childhood traits and fantasies and early dreams-that is, into the substructures latent and unconscious in earlier stages of life-one usually can find rudimentary and partially formed images of things to come. The child is father to the man, the old expression goes. In childhood and adolescence, attitudes take form which later will undergo change and development but which will, for all that, express themselves as variations on the same theme.
Character structure, psychological typology, interests like sports or music, sexual orientation, vocational inclination, vocal cadences, sense of humor-all of these may take shape early in life and be recognizable in the adult who grows out of the adolescent, even if they are subtly altered and readjusted in light of later experience. Sometimes the later features that become so prominent in the adult are, like imaginal disks, tucked away behind more obvious features and gross behaviors. In the lives I will be considering later in this work-those of Rilke, Jung, Rembrandt, Picasso-we shall see that some qualities that are largely hidden earlier in life become the most prominent and outstanding features of the second half of life. This can be, and indeed has been, conceived of as the difference between the "false self" of persona adaptation in childhood and early adulthood and the "true self" that emerges after midlife. The socially adapted personality often hides in the shadows personality elements that are the "stone that the builder rejected" and later become the cornerstone of the adult personality. These might be prefigured in the youthful personality but are hard to identify except in a careful retrospective analysis.
The early indications of these later structures, before the full structures show themselves more clearly later in life, could be subject to a variety of interpretations. In the early stages of development, one could imagine a thousand possible outcomes. Only in retrospect can one see the full imago that previously was hidden in shadow. The future is prepared in the womb of the past and the present. For some people, there seem to be huge discontinuities in life-almost several different lifetimes-but this is only a surface phenomenon. At a deeper level, there is a single process of becoming; major but perhaps hidden continuities exist between latent structures from the past and prominent structures of the present. Children sometimes will dream or imagine or playact their future imagos with surprising intuitive accuracy. One may be bold enough to think that a psychological ground plan for life is present all along and that, if occasionally we contact it in dream or intuition or vision, we can foresee the future of our lives.
The stunning transformation of caterpillars into butterflies through the virtual death of pupation historically has given rise to much speculation about analogies to human fate and destiny. Perhaps, it has been proposed countless times, our entire earthly life is analogous to the caterpillar stage. Our physical body is a larva. At death, when the body begins to decay and dissolve into its basic chemical elements, a soul emerges from it, like the butterfly from a pupa, and soars into a life beyond the material world. The butterfly, so this thought goes, symbolizes our immortal soul, which is released by death from the larval body and freed into its new life in the spirit. The physical experience of dying is really only a kind of pupation. This analogy between the immortal soul and the butterfly is ancient and widespread. The Homeric Greeks saw the soul leaving the dead body as a butterfly, and the Aztecs considered the butterflies fluttering in the meadows of Mexico to be reborn souls of fallen warriors. The Balubas and Luluas of Kasai in Central Zaire speak of the grave as a cocoon from which a person's soul emerges as a butterfly. Turkic tribes in Central Asia believe that the dead return in the form of moths.
In our skeptical scientific culture, we are inclined to doubt the possibility of an afterlife, so we look for transformation on this side of the grave. It is this skeptical attitude, I believe, that has opened the way to observing (and expecting!) developmental changes in humans during their earthly life. Only since the end of the Middle Ages has there been a general awareness of such "stages of life" as childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. And it has only been in the twentieth century that these stages have been observed carefully from physical, psychological, and spiritual viewpoints. We prefer to locate transformation on this side of the grave.
As depicted in the dream, the central act of the transformation drama takes place during the pupa stage. This is when the larva disintegrates and gradually assumes the form of a butterfly. The onset of pupation, which is the name of the process by which a caterpillar enters its dark night of the soul, is triggered by a shift in hormonal balances. This change in body chemistry stirs the larva to begin preparing for its virtual death and rebirth. The caterpillar stops feeding for the first time and sets out to find a safe place to pupate. This does not always mean that it will spin a cocoon. Some types of caterpillars do not.
There are three main methods of pupation, only one of which involves the construction of a cocoon. In one, the pupa hangs head downward, attached by an organ called a cremaster that is deeply embedded in a mat of silk fibers secured to a stable surface such as a fence post. The vulnerable pupa is protected by a hardened surrounding shell, and together they constitute the chrysalis (from the Greek chrusos, "gold"; the chrusallis is a "goldcolored sheath"). In a second group of insects, the pupa hangs by its tail in the open air, held in place by a silk girdle that raises and supports its head. In a third group, we find the true cocoon, which the larva creates by spinning silk and constructing a sac, often adding other materials to make a firmer structure. While not all larvae create cocoons, all do go through a state of radical disintegration, so it is of paramount importance for them to find a safe place with adequate shelter. The quest for a suitable site may take considerable time and effort. Sometimes hours pass in a patient search for a place to settle. Once there, the larva goes to work spinning threads of sticky silk and anchoring them to a secure surface. A final expulsion of excreta frees the larva to begin building a cocoon; in the pupa there is no more excretion of waste.
Transformation of the larva into the mushy disintegrated pupa does not always occur immediately after entering into the cocoon. The larva can live intact inside the cocoon in a state of profound introversion for weeks or months, in what is called diapause. The duration of diapause is determined by the interplay of hormones secreted by glandular tissue in the head and prothorax. These hormones are carried by the blood to various parts of the body, where they trigger or inhibit specific activities. The pupal diapause ends, it is supposed, when the prothoracic glands, stimulated by a secretion of neurosecretory cells in the brain, release a triggering hormone into the bloodstream. These brain cells secrete their substances when certain environmental stimuli reach them. The necessary stimulus to set this chain of events in motion, for some species, is the increasing warmth of spring; for others, it is the moisture that indicates the end of a dry season. It is this combination of external stimuli and internal hormone release that determines the specific timing of pupation.
The endocrine mechanism of the insect has been compared by biologists to the function of the pituitary gland in vertebrates. There are organic tissue similarities, and both function as master timers of bodily activities. Adolf Portmarm asserted in the early 1950s that the discovery of insects' brain chemistry and of the hormones that regulate the stages of an insect's life had been "one of the most significant achievements of zoology in the last fifteen to twenty years." This discovery further cemented the analogy between insect metamorphoses and human aging and transformation processes. Certainly human transformation also is biologically conditioned, and its timing has close links to sequences of physical growth and change. The turning point from first half to second half of life is timed by an internal biological clock, and the subtle physiological changes in hormonal balance and equilibrium that occur in humans at this stage of life may well be the key also to the timing of that profound shift in attitude, perception, valuing, and attribution of meaning at the psychological level that we call the midlife transformation. Hormones, in short, may be a key trigger of the midlife crisis. This means that the point of the life cycle that we call midlife is not only, or even primarily, a sociological phenomenon found only in Western postindustrial societies, as is sometimes supposed. It should be evident wherever and whenever people live long enough in a relatively healthy condition to experience this phase of life. When lifespans regularly and normally reach the seventies and eighties, the phenomena of midlife transition reasonably can be predicted.
Portmann, the prominent Swiss biologist and for many years a leading figure in the Eranos Conferences in Ascona, stressed the important insight that, while the hormones secreted by the larva are triggers for a process, they are in no way to be taken as creators of the content or the structures that come about through the processes they set off. They are stimulants that constellate a process which allows inherent potential to be realized. The innate potentials themselves "result from hereditary reaction patterns in the tissues." They are created by genetic programs. In the case of human psychological transformation, similarly, it needs to be recognized that the hormonal changes at midlife do not account for the essential features of the new attitudes and for the content of the psychological and spiritual developments that come about. They do not create the images that transform consciousness (see chapter 2 for a discussion of these images), but they well may control the biological conditions under which the unconscious is stimulated to release these images into consciousness. Hormones can be the triggers of the psychic processes.
What happens when pupation finally comes into full play is a massive breakdown of larval tissue, called histolysis. ("At first, my bones held together, but later I felt them coming apart"-he dream.) While the disintegration of larval structures in the pupa is not total, there is a considerable amount of it (the most radical disintegration takes place in the muscular system). Histolysis is combined with another process that moves the now emergent imaginal disks into place and substitutes them for former structures. The most specialized larval structures give way to new specialized structures of the imago. Meanwhile the pupa exists in an impermeable, sealed integument ("he brings yards and yards of Egyptian linen and wraps me from head to foot"- the dream); the pupa has been described as "a complete introvert." There is almost no exchange of substances with the environment and only minimal respiration by diffusion through the spiracles. There is no food intake and no discharge of waste.
This prolonged period of incubation and restructuring has captured the imagination of psychotherapists and other helping professionals who regularly accompany people through periods of transformation." In my book In MidLife, I write about three phases of this process and refer to this one-the middle one-as liminality. It transpires "betwixt and between" the more fixed structures of normal life (the larva and imago stages). In liminality, a person feels at a loss for steady points of reference. When the established hierarchies of the past have dissolved and before new images and attitudes have emerged fully, and while those that have appeared are not yet solid and reliable, everything seems to be in flux. Dreams during this psychological metamorphosis tend to show themes both of breakdown (images of buildings being torn down, of changing houses, sometimes of actual dismemberment and physical disintegration) and of emergence (images of construction, giving birth, marriage, the divine child). Angst is the mood of liminality. A person is ambivalent and depressed, and this is punctuated by periods of enthusiasm, adventure, and experimentation. People go on living, but not quite in this world. The analyst feels like the old man in the dream quoted above-watching a process unfold, observing the seasons passing, waiting patiently for new structures to emerge and solidify. It is an article of faith that what is under way is "a system 'developing itself,' a process embodying the whole specific nature of the living creature"-faith that a butterfly will emerge from the cocoon where liminality reigns.
Does the caterpillar know that it will emerge as a butterfly when it enters the cocoon, becomes a pupa, and dissolves? There must be an act of faith on the insect's part. "Instinct" is our bland name for a remarkable act of spontaneous courage. For the larva must not resist the process that grips it with such urgency, but must cooperate with all its energy and ingenuity. Some larvae, when they enter the stage of pupation, must perform amazing feats of gymnastics, "as though a man hanging by the grip of one gloved hand had to withdraw the hand from the glove and catch hold and hang from it, without using the other hand or anything else to hold on by during the withdrawal." Surely the insect's resolve is accompanied by a guiding image, a sort of vision. As Portmann puts it, these "systems of action [the hormones] and reaction [the tissues] ... are parts of a larger system, which already in the germ cell is attuned to transformation in time." The insect has been waiting for this moment all its life. In metamorphosis, it is fulfilling its destiny by obeying the guidelines inherent in this "larger system." In analytical psychology, we refer to this master system as the self. The imago is programmed into the developmental agenda of the self. It is the fullest approximation of the self we will ever manifest.
Once the imago has taken shape within the pupal shell, the adult creature can emerge. At this stage it has a double task: first, to break out of the pupal encasement; and second, to free itself from the surrounding cocoon. For extricating itself from its protective covering, it either possesses cutters or is able to secrete a caustic substance that dissolves the cocoon. In one way or another, it is able to force separation from the protective shell. At a certain moment, the body forces a burst of fluid into the head and thorax, which puts enough pressure on the pupal shell to crack it open. Thrusting upward, the insect pushes its legs forward and then pulls its abdomen through the opening. Freed of encasement, it maneuvers itself to a place where it perches, wings downward, and begins to expand its body parts by swallowing large amounts of air into its stomach, or crop, and its tracheal sacs. At first it is a delicate and fragile creature with pliable structures. But muscular contractions force blood into the wing pads, which expand to their full size and begin hardening in place. The drying membranes of the body stiffen and hold the wings steady. They are now spread to their full extent. Other body parts also harden. Next the proboscis is formed by uniting the two jaws of the ancestral chewing mouth, forming a tube through which the butterfly can later draw liquids. Once formed, the tube is pushed neatly into place underneath the face. This is a rapid sequence of unfolding structures.
Compared to the lengthy period of pupation, which may have extended over weeks or months, or in some cases even years, the final emergence of the adult is lightning fast. It may take only fifteen minutes. Within so brief a time, the insect becomes ready to take up its adult life as a butterfly. The dream depicts the same process: there are intense periods of activity at the outset and at the conclusion, and a long spell of slow transformation in between. At the beginning is the sudden entry into pupation, as the hormonal balance shifts and depression sets in and an intense preparation is begun for what is to come. At the end there is the emergence of the new form, a butterfly, which, in the dream, after drying out and trying its wings, becomes the dreamerashuman again, while the butterfly is absorbed into her center as a soul image. The butterfly is a symbol of her new nature. She now has her imago, her adult form. Through this transformation she indeed has become a new being, but a being whom she always fundamentally has been. For the imaginal disks-the latent form-have been resident in her psyche since the beginning of life. The soul is fundamental, and the imago is its incarnated form. It is absorbed, as it were, into her earlier body form and character structure, a new psychic constellation that will guide and orient her through the course of her future life.
What living the process of transformation yields is a new form of life, something different from what has preceded it. At the end of the process, we look for a new selfdefinition and identity distinct from that of the first half of life. This new imago rests upon, or surrounds, the former character structure and gives it new meaning. It is not that the personality is changed such that old friends would not recognize the person anymore. But there is a new inner center of value and direction. There is a new consciousness of soul. This appearance of the inner life in the midst of adulthood is what in traditional terms is called the creation of the spiritual person. The actual person who dreamed of transformation into a butterfly lived her midlife transformation in part by returning to school and assuming a professional identity, in part by establishing some new personal relationships and changing old ones, but in greatest part by learning to trust her unconscious and live her deeply spiritual nature. She could connect to what Jung called "the transcendent function," the link between conscious and unconscious process. A new form of life emerges from this dynamic exchange, which includes some pieces of the past, discards others, draws out latent images and structures from the primal sea of potentials in the unconscious, and assembles the parts into a new imago for adulthood. This is the form that then is lived, deepened, and enriched throughout the remainder of the individual's life. I believe the dream states this process better than any sort of conceptual language could.
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