Is personal transformation anything like cooking? In cooking, you begin with something raw and often indigestible, submit it to a myriad of large and small violences, and are left with something nutritious and delicious. People going through profound change often describe something similar. They’re gutted, peeled, diced, thrown into a pot, stirred until they don’t recognize themselves, then set out on a platter for the world to see. As a psychotherapist, I’ve spent forty years asking what is happening during personal transformation and is there anything we can do to assist it? So I did what any reasonable person would do: I convened an imaginary conference. I sent imaginary invitations to some of the most penetrating thinkers on human transformation I know and imagined what they would say. They were a psychologist who built his theory of change on medieval alchemy, researchers who mapped the anatomy of personal crisis, a mythologist who followed the hero’s journey across a hundred cultures, an anthropologist who watched young men become elders in the forests of central Africa, a management consultant who guided people in suits through the wreckage of their careers, and a philosopher who documented his own dissolution and rebuilding with unflinching honesty. I booked an imaginary conference room, arranged imaginary name placards, and hired an imaginary chef named Marcel Dupont to cook us imaginary beef bourguignon while we talked. Marcel is magnificent. And the beef bourguignon, as I imagined it, was extraordinary. The question I put to this unlikely gathering was simple. What actually happens when a person changes in a divorce, a career collapse, an addiction, a grief, a reinvention at fifty, or a coming of age? Is there a pattern underneath all of it? And are Marcel’s skills an illuminating analogy for any person who attempts to be a catalyst for change? You’re welcome to pull up a chair. There’s plenty of imaginary bourguignon left. Let me introduce you to our panelists. Carl Jung was the first person I thought of inviting. An influential psychoanalysis from the first half of the last century, he based his theory of personal transformation on medieval alchemy. In Jung’s view, alchemists accurately described how the human psyche changes. I also wanted to give James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente a seat on the panel. They would have to share the seat but, since they’ve collaborated on research all their lives, I figured they could sit on each others’ lap, or side-by-side and speak for each other. Where Jung went deep into myth and symbol and the unconscious, Prochaska and DiClemente observed how thousands of people managed to quit smoking. Prochaska and DiClemente came up with a model of the Stages of Change. I’ll be interested in seeing whether their stages match the ones Jung derived from alchemy and the steps of Dupont’s recipe. Since personal change is a story, I invited an expert on stories, Joseph Campbell, to join us. He was a mythologist who studied stories from cultures across centuries and throughout the world. To him, personal transformation is a heroic quest and he kept finding the same structure underneath all hero narratives. He’ll tell us how the story goes and what it has to do with beef bourguignon. Victor Turner was a wiry, pipe-smoking Scotsman who went to Zambia in the 1950s with a notebook and came back with a theory. He lived among the Ndembu people for years, watching initiation rites with the patience of a man who understood that the most important things happen slowly. William Bridges was a literature professor who walked away from academia into the uncertain world of management consulting. He spent the next thirty years figuring out why. His clients were mostly people in suits who had lost their jobs. He was practical, wry, and allergic to jargon. I invited St Augustine, a fifth-century theologian who wrote one of the most unflinching accounts of personal transformation ever put on paper. Today we would call him a recovering sex addict, but what he wrote about in his Confessions went far deeper than you will ever read in a modern account of that condition. I gave him a seat on the panel so he could tell us how he became a saint. Chef Dupont, made quite an entrance to the conference, leading a compliant, full grown steer. He immediately pulled out a knife and slit its throat. Gallons of blood pooled at his feet as he cut open the beast, pulled out his organs, and cut up the carcass to steaks, ribs, and roasts. This caused quite a stir among the panelists, who were all nerdy, academic types. They didn’t know they would be among all this gore, but it was necessary to demonstrate that’s how I suspect personal transformation starts. Something has got to die and it’s seldom pretty. The following is a transcript of our discussion. I was the moderator: SlaughterDUPONT: (Wiping his blade) Before anything can become beef bourguignon, it must first stop being a cow. MODERATOR: Is that also true of people or is it a dramatic overstatement? Can a person genuinely transform while preserving continuity with who they were, or does there have to be a break from the person they once were? JUNG: The alchemists called this part of the process the nigredo, the blackening. Before gold could emerge, the base material had to be broken down completely, putrefied, reduced to a dark, chaotic mass. They may have been speaking of metals, but I mean the psyche. The old identity, the persona we have constructed and polished and presented to the world, must be dissolved. Not refined. Dissolved. What dies is the ego’s certainty about who it is. And I will tell you from clinical experience, the patient fights this with everything they have. A neurosis arises when there is a refusal to be slaughtered. PROCHASKA and DICLEMENTE: We’d want to be careful with the metaphor. In our research, the people who changed successfully, thousands of smokers, drinkers, people changing deeply entrenched behaviors, most of them didn’t experience it as death. What they experienced, first, was not even awareness that anything needed to change during Precontemplation Stage. The steer was in that stage when he was being led in, oblivious of the knife. The moment of change comes, not as a death, but as a question, “Do I need to change?” A doctor’s report, a spouse leaving, a morning you can’t get out of bed tips them into Contemplation Stage. CAMPBELL: In every hero story, the journey begins not with a choice but with a rupture. Odysseus loses his ship. Psyche loses Eros. The hero is ejected from the ordinary world, whether by catastrophe or by a summons they cannot ignore. I did not invent this structure, I found it in every culture, on every continent, and across every century I examined. The hero must cross a threshold, and crossing it means leaving behind the self that was sufficient for the old world. The old self does not come with you. The myths are very clear on this point. Orpheus cannot bring Eurydice back, and he cannot go back himself. To attempt it is to lose everything. TURNER: Every rite of passage begins with separation, the ritual detachment of the individual from their prior social position. Among the Ndembu, the boy who enters initiation does not return as the same boy. The community does not treat him as the same boy. His old social identity is ceremonially killed so that a new one can be constructed. The question of whether something must die is, anthropologically speaking, already answered. Every culture that has successfully transmitted transformation across generations has put death into the ritual. The ones that skip it produce, at best, incomplete transformation. BRIDGES: Almost nobody believes transformation when it’s happening to them. In my work with people in career transition, the single greatest obstacle was always the ending. People want a new beginning. They want a new job, a new identity, a new chapter. What they do not want is to admit that something is over. They want to slide from one thing to the next without the mess in the middle. I spent years telling them the mess in the middle is not the obstacle, it is the process. You cannot get to what comes next without first accepting the ending. You cannot begin until something stops. AUGUSTINE: I knew for years that something in me had to die. I was not ignorant of it. I could describe it with great precision, which is perhaps why I could postpone it so long. I prayed, sincerely, grant me chastity, Lord, but not yet. What I did not understand, what took me the longest to accept, was that it was not only my behavior that needed to die, it was my wanting. I had practiced wanting the wrong things until the wanting had become me. The will does not simply choose. It becomes what it chooses, again and again, until there is no choosing left, only the momentum of old desire. What Chef has shown us is not shocking to me. What is shocking is how long a man can stand in the slaughterhouse and find reasons to believe he is somewhere else. MODERATOR: It seems like everyone agrees but Prochaska and Diclemente, who seems to think the analogy to slaughter is a bit of hyperbole. PROCHASKA and DICLEMENTE: With respect to the chef, and to my colleagues here, I think we’re letting a dramatic image do more work than the evidence supports. The vast majority of the people we studied did not describe their experience as a death. They described it as a growing unease. The most dangerous idea in behavior change is the notion that you have to hit bottom first. AUGUSTINE: I hear what you are saying, and I do not dismiss it. But you are measuring behavior change. I am describing something else entirely. I changed my behavior many times before I was transformed. I could stop, for a while. I could moderate, for a while. What I could not do was become someone for whom the stopping was natural, someone whose loves were rightly ordered. That required something that felt, from the inside, exactly like dying. Your data may be right that most people do not need to hit the bottom of the well. But I would ask how many of those people, five years later, had been changed all the way down, and how many had simply changed their behavior and were still, quietly, the same person doing different things? JUNG: The Contemplation Stage your model describes, the growing unease, the slow accumulation, that is not the absence of the nigredo. That is the nigredo arriving quietly rather than all at once. The darkness does not always fall like a blade. Sometimes it seeps in over years, but it is still darkness. And until the patient has been in it, truly in it, the gold does not come. PROCHASKA AND DICLEMENTE: What concerns me about your nigredo, Dr. Jung, is that it is unfalsifiable. How would anyone know whether they had been through it? You cannot measure a blackening of the soul. You cannot compare one patient’s dissolution to another’s. You are describing something that can mean everything or nothing depending on how the therapist interprets it, and the therapist’s interpretation is also unfalsifiable. That is not a small problem. JUNG: You are describing a thermometer and telling me it is superior to a human hand because it gives you a number. The number is precise. It is also, in certain cases, entirely beside the point. I have sat with patients for whom every observable behavior had changed and who were, unmistakably, the same person doing different things in a tidier room. Your instruments could not detect this. Mine could. PROCHASKA AND DICLEMENTE: And how do you know your instruments were not simply detecting your own projections? That is the precise danger of a framework that cannot be tested. It becomes a mirror that shows the therapist exactly what the therapist believes. JUNG: I would ask you the same question about your own framework. You believe that behavior change, reliably observed and replicated, is the phenomenon worth studying. That belief is not derived from the data. It precedes the data. You chose to measure behavior because behavior can be measured. That is not objectivity. That is a philosophical commitment dressed in a laboratory coat. PROCHASKA AND DICLEMENTE: We would rather have a philosophy that produces outcomes we can verify than one that produces insights we cannot. JUNG: And I would rather have insights that reach the thing itself than outcomes that measure its shadow on the wall. MODERATOR: (Whispered, aside, to the audience) I find myself thinking that they are both right, which means neither of them is entirely right. Prochaska and DiClemente have spent their careers measuring what can be measured, and they have done it with exemplary rigor. Jung spent his measuring what cannot be measured, and was willing to look foolish doing it. The question they are really arguing about is not methodology, it is ontology. What kind of thing is a person? If a person is primarily a bundle of behaviors, Prochaska and DiClemente have given us the best available map. If a person is something that behaviors point toward but cannot contain, we need Jung as well. I have sat with enough people to believe, without being able to prove it, that both things are true and that the second matters more. MODERATOR: (Aloud, to the panel) There’s a difference between a change in behavior and a change in identity. An alcoholic stops drinking the moment he sets down the glass, but he won’t become a non-drinker until later, when not drinking is as natural for him as drinking was before. I’m interested in how identity is changed, including, but not just behavior. I think it’s fair to say that the old identity has got to go. What Beef Bourguignon Can Tell You About Personal Transformation is a four part series. A new installment will be published once a week. However, paid subscribers can read the whole piece right now. Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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