Leslie Stein, J.D., is a Jungian psychoanalyst (and a former attorney, law professor and judge) in private practice in Sydney, Australia.

He was born in New York City, and attended the State University of New York where he earned a degree in sociology and psychology, and then went on to law school in Toronto, later becoming a law professor and, for 10 years, served as a judge in disputes involving multimillion dollar commercial transactions.

In the mid 1980s, he trained as a Jungian psychoanalyst in Australia with Rix Weaver, one of Jung’s students in Zürich, attended the C.G. Jung Institute of New York and started a private practice but left it behind to pursue his particular specialty of devising and implementing legal mechanisms to improve mental health in urban areas. He completed a master’s degree in law on this subject at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and thereafter has been a professor at law schools and urban planning schools in Canada, the U.S., England, Australia, and India. He also practiced law as a senior trial attorney and was retained as a negotiator on large infrastructure projects in Russia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, and London.

He has written five books on how to make our decaying cities liveable. This has resulted in him being sought out as a consultant to the United Nations and governments around the world on managing urban blight, homelessness, the effects of climate change, and the inclusion of mental health in strategic planning. His work on strategic planning for neighborhoods was given an award by the United States Congress of New Urbanism and he was, among other appointments, invited to be the Visiting Scholar at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University and then Senior Fellow for four years at the Global Center for Environmental Legal Studies in New York. He is now a member of the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney.

It was on a trip to India for the UN on the urban planning of Varanasi that his interest in mysticism was awakened and he then returned full time to practice as an analyst, spending long months in India and enrolling at the C.G. Jung Institute in New York to refresh his work. Since then, he has written or edited six books on Jungian thought reflecting that interest, including, Working with Mystical Experiences in Psychoanalysis, The Self in Jungian Psychology, which was awarded the prize of Best Theoretical Book of 2022 by the International Association of Jungian Studies, Becoming Whole: Jung’s Equation for Realizing God, and his first novel The Journey of Adam Kadmon – all of which were discussed in Episode 113.

He was also editor and contributor of Eastern Practices and Individuation: Essays by Jungian Analysts, co-editor with the late Jungian analyst Lionel Corbett, M.D., of Psychedelics and Individuation: Essays By Jungian Analysts, co-editor with physicist Dean Rickles, Ph.D., of Varieties of Nothingness, and editor of a new book coming later this year titled Integration of Psychedelic Experiences: Essays by Jungian Analysts, all published by Chiron.

His last novel titled The Psychoanalysis of Dr. Seele, the subject of Episode 143, was published two years ago by Arcade, the imprint that first published Samuel Beckett, Kurt Vonnegut, and Mo Yan who won the Nobel Prize. The option to acquire the rights to this novel was picked up by a media company in the U.S. to make it into a television series. Professor Stein has just completed the third and final novel of his trilogy looking at the end product, the goal of individuation, called Character: A Novel and this is its launch on Speaking of Jung, as it published today by Chiron and is the subject of this episode.

This video interview was recorded on Wednesday, October 28, 2026. It’s 01:02:51 long and 60.3 MB. You can listen to it right here in your browser (click the play button in the bar below) or download it directly to your computer. You can also watch the video edition on our YouTube channel.

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SHOW NOTES

Irene Rix Weaver: History & Vision C.G. Jung Society of Washington (article)

Speaking of Jung, Ep. 164: Individuation – East & West with Murray Stein and Leslie Stein (I mistakenly said “Episode 165” 🫢)

“Red Sun” from Splendor Solis by Salomon Trismosin Cover image for Character: A Novel (The Wikipedia page seems to be the best free resource for these images.)

Faust: A Tragedy, Parts One and Two, Fully Revised by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church claimed to contain the Ark of the Covenant

Orthodox Tewahedo Biblical Canon Wikipedia page on the Ethiopian Bible

Laura’s Twitter Post from Becoming Whole

The Hustler Film starring Robert Redford and Jackie Gleason (Wikipedia page)

Eddie says no. The Hustler (YouTube clip)

Neo says “No.” The Matrix (YouTube clip)

Diogenes the Cynic Wikipedia again

Aion: Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 9ii

Shanta Durga Temple Goa, India

Memories, Dreams, Reflections Including “Septem Sermones ad Mortuos” (“Seven Sermons to the Dead”)

Answer to Job Extract from the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 11