not online —–Influencers

 

 

 

MURRAY STEIN Jungian psychoanalyst

I once heard in a lecture given by Murray Stein, where he talked about Jung’s idea of a one-time-born individual or a two-times born individual. The one-time-born, he said, refers to those individuals that slide through life, so to speak, in the sense that they enter the best schools, marry the “correct partners,” have beautiful children, never seem to get stuck…but they don’t develop an inner life, they are, one could say, the “blessed non-individuated.” Whereas the two-times born referred to those individuals whose life at some point  had stopped, where they had become stuck in some way and had had a regression of some sort. And this then activated the inner world and one was forced then to deal with the contents of the inner world; to deal with oneself in an inner way. In a case like this, he says, then our problem is now our own self and not the outer world and this leads to having to adapt oneself to the inner world. Such movement eventually then leads to a new kind of adaptation to the outer world where the libido begins to progress again. But here, one progresses as a more individuated person  because one has had to confront oneself, one’s shadow, one’s complexes, one’s problems, one’s weaknesses, one’s past history  and so on.