Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance 9783111157368, 9783111154770

Table of contents :
Series Editors’ Preface
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Thinking “Slantwise”: Context for the Book and Definitions of Terms
Chapter 2: The Alchemical Imagination
Chapter 3: Metaphors of substance
Chapter 4: Life distilled
Chapter 5: Fire
Chapter 6: Red Sulphur
Chapter 7: Green Sulphur
Chapter 8: Salt
Chapter 9: Transference Part I
Chapter 10: Transference Part II
Chapter 11: Operations
References
Index

Citation preview

Alan Bleakley Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance

Medical & Health Humanities

Aesthetics, Analyses, Approaches Edited by Mita Banerjee, Monika Pietrzak-Franger and Anita Wohlmann Advisory Board Elisabeth Dietrich-Daum, Marie-Theres Federhofer, Arthur W. Frank, Ericka Johnson, Erin Gentry Lamb, Jane Mcnaughton, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach, Jens Temmen, Kirsten Zeiler

Volume 1

Alan Bleakley

Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance

ISBN 978-3-11-115477-0 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-115736-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-115990-4 ISSN 2940-9632 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023934980 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: “The ouroboric dragon” by Susan Bleakley Frontispiece: “Lady Alchymia” by Susan Bleakley Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Series Editors’ Preface Over the last decades, the medical and health humanities have established themselves as vibrant interdisciplinary fields. Responding to these developments, the series seeks to encourage further innovation by stressing three points. First, in looking at health and illness as a spectrum of cultural practices, it sets out to spotlight both individual and collective experiences. With that, it draws attention to the questions of inequality and social justice and expands the purview of current research to include more-than-human subjects, entanglements, and perspectives. Second, it aims to broaden the current cultural and geographical scope beyond Western cultures and Western medicine to address different cultural and medical imaginaries as they can be found, for instance, in the Global South and Eastern Europe. Third, it emphasizes the historical and aesthetic dimensions of the expression of illness experience. With this, it draws attention to a variety of forms and media used in this context and decidedly goes beyond the narrow focus on illness narratives. This attention to the aesthetic dimension of medical and health humanities has significant consequences on the methodological level, since it opens up new spaces for conversations between media analysis, artistic practice, and empirical research. Encompassing monographs, edited collections, and critical explorations either in English or German, the peer-reviewed series offers ground-breaking interventions into the field, well-focused multidisciplinary dialogues as well as in-depth, methodologically and theoretically innovative studies.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-001

Table of Contents Acknowledgements

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Chapter 1: Thinking “Slantwise”: Context for the Book and Definitions of Terms 1 How this book contributes to De Gruyter’s series Medical and Health 1 Humanities: Aesthetics, Analyses, Approaches What are the medical and health humanities? 2 Embodied metaphors 8 8 What is psychodynamic psychotherapy? What is alchemy? 10 Poetic and narrative approaches to psychotherapy 11 Chapter 2: The Alchemical Imagination 13 I Only Came to Use the Phone 14 15 Here, the Father devours the Son Consuming your own venom 18 Reading alchemy through different lenses

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Chapter 3: Metaphors of substance 26 Primary sources: how alchemy was recovered for psychotherapy 26 Symbols, signs, images, metaphors: the apparatus of therapy 30 32 Alchemy leads to science: what’s the matter with matter? Science can strip natural phenomena of meaning through explanation 33 Where Jung revives alchemy as a symbol system, Hillman and others see alchemy as a system of signs 34 Kekulé’s vision: science’s head eats alchemy’s tail 35 From symbol to sign, image and metaphor: what we can learn from 37 postmodernism A moment on the couch 38 Why metaphors of substance? 41 James Hillman’s alchemical imagination 42 Towards a world soul: the Green Lion eats the Sun 45 49 Chapter 4: Life distilled Alchemy – the softening of stones 49 The death of alchemy and the birth of chemistry revisited

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Are we worth our salt? 55 57 Challenging the god term “mental health” What is the matter? 59 Paradigms lost 62 Illustrative examples: mania as “sulphur”, depression as “lead” 73 The literal and the metaphorical Alchemy and poetry 77 79 Metaphor multiplication Update: the book’s topics 80 Chapter 5: Fire 82 Book-ended by fire 82 Alchemical flames: calcination 86 Fire loosens The world’s on fire 88 The secret fire 89 92 Norton’s menu of fires The four fires 94 Labourers in fire 98 The outcomes of calcination 101 Dangers in calcination Repeated themes 103

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Chapter 6: Red Sulphur 106 The Love of War 106 At the volcano’s rim 110 The violent claims of red sulphur 111 Impulse and its discontents 114 A fire inside 121 Staying at the flame while embracing cool reflection Sticky black sulphur 132

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Chapter 7: Green Sulphur 134 Fat and fecund earth 134 Green sulphur and the child archetype 141 Nature, red in tooth and claw, but raw green in appearance An underworld of green 148 Chapter 8: Salt 155 Salt’s song: fierce, compact, brilliant and cruel

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Memory 159 165 Obsessions Above and below the salt Dosage 170 Salt’s vigour: a secret fire

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Chapter 9: Transference Part I 174 Dialectic and the chymical marriage The resurrected body 183 Bodies in the Rose Garden 190

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Chapter 10: Transference Part II 196 The sublime body – are you out of your mind? 200 Those women Does Jung abandon the left-hand path? 204 Praxis: transference is everyday 207 Chapter 11: Operations 211 The return of the vile sulphurous thief Psychoanalysis as a metaphor hoard 216 Operations on “substances” Coniunctio and separatio 217 Dissolution 221 228 Cibation References Index

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Acknowledgements My interest in the relationships between Medieval and Renaissance (Early Modern) alchemy, modern readings of alchemy, chemistry and psychodynamic psychotherapy can be traced back to my schooldays when I studied for Zoology, Botany and Chemistry “A” levels, spanning my 16th and 17th birthdays. Even before then, my parents had bought my older brother and myself chemistry sets as Christmas presents. My brother went on to study chemistry and became an organic chemist working with experimental coatings for fine quality papers. My Zoology teacher at school became a famous crime writer and managed to imbue his lessons with an air of both mystery and surprise. Under the guidance of my school Botany teacher, I started to read Freud and wrote a 6th form project on the basics of Psychoanalysis. Already, there was something brewing around what would later become a disciplines-entangled interest in alchemical psychotherapy. I went on to study Zoology, Physiology and Biochemistry and Psychology at University. In time, I gained a doctorate that compared and contrasted the uses of animal imagery in ancient shamanism and modern psychotherapy, all the while reading more about alchemy. My doctoral supervisor, Professor Brian Bates, was instrumental in encouraging my wild inter-disciplinary tendencies, rather than containing them. In time, I trained as a psychotherapist in psychodynamic approaches, where my primary influences were James Hillman and the poet and writer Peter Redgrove. Hillman was initially influenced by Carl Jung, but departed radically from Jung’s symbolic approach to craft an image- and metaphor-based “archetypal” psychology, grounded in the poetic imagination (Hillman had once been a literary scholar). Redgrove had been in analysis with the celebrated anthropologist John Layard, who in turn had been analysed by Jung. I was in therapy with Redgrove, who based the entire psychological work on learning how to write poetry, explicitly avoiding issues of “personal growth”, but rather working towards explication of beauty in language through invention of metaphor. Hillman too came to exhort a worldly psychotherapy in which we eschew “personal” therapy for attention to worldly symptoms (for example, not eating disorders but rather food disorders; not personal hot-headedness but rather rising global temperatures). In this, he was influenced more by Alfred Adler’s community psychology than Freud’s individualistic model. In my own academic career, I established psychotherapy training courses at postgraduate level in which alchemical psychology, as developed particularly by James Hillman, was core to learning. Across my academic and psychotherapeutic career, I had worked often with doctors, especially psychiatrists. In my later career, I worked exclusively in medical education and here pioneered innovations in the application of the medical huhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-002

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Acknowledgements

manities to medical education – here, the arts, humanities and qualitative social sciences are used to raise the quality of medical practice and medical education, often bound to instrumental, reductive approaches, where aesthetic, ethical, political and spiritual values can be embraced. Over time, I have written many books and articles in medical education and the medical humanities, but my early interest in alchemical psychology lay dormant. Invited to contribute to this De Gruyter medical and health humanities series, I jumped at the opportunity to bring into focus and into one volume my long association with links between ancient alchemy and modern psychodynamic psychotherapy, under a medical humanities umbrella. In doing this, I wanted to venture out of the comfort zone of current, but standard, work on the critical and translational medical humanities to “think slantwise” (to draw on the poet Emily Dickinson’s beautiful metaphor) about these topics. Alchemy has provided my prism. I want to thank Anita Wohlmann for inviting me to contribute to this book series. We share a common interest in, indeed a love for, the process of embodied metaphor production. Thanks also to Mita Banerjee, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Katja Lehming and Florian Ruppenstein from De Gruyter. My main thanks go to my wife Sue, a visual artist, who shares with me a love of alchemy. Indeed, our relationship has been a long alchemical experiment in which her love of image and colour and my love of words have developed into deep and intense conversation. Within this alembic, our household flask, we have been supported and nourished by our family, all of whom are to be thanked for their continuing love.

Chapter 1 Thinking “Slantwise”: Context for the Book and Definitions of Terms

Figure .: “Here the Father Devours the Son”

How this book contributes to De Gruyter’s series Medical and Health Humanities: Aesthetics, Analyses, Approaches In this introductory chapter, I set out my understanding of the main players in this book: psychodynamic psychotherapy (also described as “depth psychology” because of an assumption that there is an unconscious at work), alchemy and metaphor. I will define terms and provide a road map for the remainder of the text. This book can be taken as an example of thinking “slantwise” about the medical and health humanities. The celebrated American poet Emily Dickinson described poetry’s task as telling it “slant”. By this, she meant approaching phenomena from unusual angles, or revealing unexpected ways of sensing and appreciating things. Dickinson urges us to “Tell all the truth but tell it slant”, where “Success in Circuit lies”. More, “The Truth must dazzle gradually” (Bleakley and Neilson 2021: 139). Here, I “approach without approaching” the medical and health humanities by https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-003

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Chapter 1. Thinking “Slantwise”: Context for the Book and Definitions of Terms

concentrating entirely on a parallel topic – how contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapy (a key aspect of healthcare) can be informed by ancient alchemy, or the persistent alchemical imagination. Psychodynamic Psychotherapy and the Alchemical Imagination: Metaphors of Substance then suggests a new reading of modern psychodynamic (depth) psychotherapy through an ancient lens – that of Medieval and Renaissance (Early Modern) alchemy (that I term “the alchemical imagination”). Surely this has been done before, most notably by Carl Jung (1967, 1968a)? Here, I take a critical approach to Jung’s view where he turns a material-based alchemy into symbols, as radical abstractions of matter. In contrast, I maintain alchemy’s patent interest in the power of matter, linking this to psychodynamic psychotherapy’s interest in embodiment, as the suffering of fleshly being, or psychosomatic symptomising. I do this through emphasis upon the central role that embodied metaphors play in language. I draw more on Freud (who had no apparent interest in alchemy) and his legacy, and post-Jungian revisionists such as James Hillman (2014), rather than on Jung himself.

What are the medical and health humanities? The collective terms “medical and health humanities” cover a broad spectrum of approaches to the intersections between medicine/healthcare and the complex fields of the arts, humanities and qualitative social sciences. The terms embrace theory, practice and inquiry or research. The medical and health humanities – particularly in medical education, and extended to psychotherapy – can be viewed as transformative and prismatic media that refract the light of reductive, instrumental biomedical science. This produces multiple rays – that transcend the quantitative orthodoxy of bioscience – as aesthetic, ethical, political and spiritual qualities, intensities and complexities. We can think of such rays of possibilities as potentials within biomedical science, bringing Dickinson’s “slant” metaphor into play. Drawing on the poet T. S. Eliot’s (1934) The Rock, this display of potential moves against reduction to mere information (bottom-line biomedical science), potentially restoring “the wisdom we have lost in knowledge” and “the knowledge we have lost in information”. The origins of the medical and health humanities can be traced back to Florence Nightingale (1860), who noted that “beautiful objects” can have a therapeutic effect: “The effect in sickness of (exposure to) beautiful objects, of variety of objects, and especially of brilliancy of colours is hardly at all appreciated … People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing. The effect is on the body too. … Variety of form and brilliancy of colour in the objects presented to patients

What are the medical and health humanities?

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is an actual means of recovery”. Nightingale offered a prescient voice. A firmer origin story for medical and health humanities is in the birth of art therapy in 1945 in the UK. Adrian Hill, a celebrated English war artist, contracted tuberculosis in the mid-1940’s, spending some time in a sanatorium. Hill decided to experiment with drawing and painting to aid his own recovery. As he describes in his 1945 book Art vs Illness: A Story of Art Therapy, finding that visual art was therapeutic for him, Hill was given licence to work formally with other patients, with tangible results. Art therapy evolved globally into a professionalised movement treating patients in parallel with medicine and healthcare, but not engaging medical pedagogy such as the initial education of medical students. As medicine after WWII became increasingly scientifically-oriented and technological, so the humane side of patient care suffered. On one hand, the almost exclusive focus on science in medicine stimulated a twin counter-move: first, a growing concern with bioethics, and second a call for a re-humanising of technical medicine through medical education. E. E. Reinke (1937) – based at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville – called for “leavening technical (medical) training with a liberal education”, where once doctors would be expected to be “rounded” with a classical education. But by the 1930s medicine was in the grip of a scientific revolution where biomedical inquiry was already occluding traditions of bedside medicine so that patients became objectified, seen for their symptoms in isolation from their lives. The first known use of the term “medical humanities” in print was in 1948. The Belgian born American historian of science George Sarton used the term in a book review of, and obituary for, a linguist and historian colleague, where “His death at the early age of 48 is a sad blow to the medical humanities, for very much could have been expected of him” (Sarton and Siegel 1949). Via inclusion in particular of bioethics, history and philosophy of medicine and narrative-based medicine in undergraduate curricula (usually as elective study), by the 21st century, the medical and health humanities culture had matured. Three distinct strands emerged. First, following the establishment of arts therapies, a radically democratised version of “health humanities” was established in which the arts can act as therapeutic media for all medical, health and social care professionals as well as patients, carers and the lay public. Here, the quality and meaning of the art (for example as a primary critique of normative behaviour and values) is secondary to its therapeutic potential. The health humanities culture generally sees the potential of arts and humanities as increasing “wellbeing”, rather than taking a critical approach to what we might mean by “health” as a relative term (Crawford, Brown and Charise 2020). This movement has served to de-professionalise, and in the process to radically democratise, arts therapies. The arts are not viewed as specialist but are democratised as “available arts”. Painting, sculpture, music making, drumming, move-

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Chapter 1. Thinking “Slantwise”: Context for the Book and Definitions of Terms

ment, dance, drama, creative writing, poetry and so forth are seen as non-specialist media available to all for therapeutic purposes. In the process, lay members of the public such as unpaid carers and volunteers are given as much credibility for their healthcare interventions and work as specialists and professionals where they have access to available arts for therapeutic means. A summary of the project and history of the health humanities is provided by Paul Crawford and colleagues (2015), while an extended set of essays appears as the Routledge Companion to the Health Humanities, edited by Paul Crawford, Brian Brown and Andrea Charise (2020). “Health humanities” is an awkward term. Since 1948, the World Health Organization (WHO) has defined health as, “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”, a definition that has long been criticised for its idealism. For example, Marianna Nobile (2014: 33) suggests a radical revision of the WHO definition, where health is viewed as “the ability to adapt and self-manage in face of social, physical, and emotional challenges”. This, in turn, depends on clarifying “how health is necessarily linked to socio-economic and environmental policies, paying attention to the procedure to be followed in order to pass from what ought to be to what is”. In light of this relativistic rather than absolutist thinking (from which the original WHO definition suffers), a more critical strand of health humanities has emerged. This is pluralistic and inclusive, noting developments across professions beyond medicine, such as dentistry, nursing, physiotherapy and social care; and in pre-med undergraduate study. An emphasis is placed upon social determinants of health such as health inequities and inequalities, and more recently, health outcomes of the climate crisis. In parallel with the rise of the health humanities, two strands of medical humanities have emerged, one theoretical, the other applied. The theoretical strand is the disciplinary and inter-disciplinary academic study of medical cultures and artefacts, such as theoretical bioethics, the philosophy and history of medicine and medical anthropology. The applied strand includes applied bioethics and medical humanities in medical education (Bleakley 2015). We can get a good sense of the current state of medical and health humanities cultures from the key synoptic texts of the past decade or less. In what is called by its authors “the first textbook in medical humanities”, Tom Cole, Nathan Carlin and Ronald Carson (2015: 1) provide a simple rationale for the medical humanities – to provide a counterweight to the progressive “dehumanizing tendencies created by the unprecedented success of modern medicine and the commercialization of the healthcare system”. Central to this perceived dehumanising is “biomedical reductionism”. This rationale has become a standard apologia for the medical humanities. Cole and co-authors (notably an all-male team, and North-American biased) describe curriculum compensation for biomedical reductionism based on inter-

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ventions from history, literature and the arts, philosophy and religion. While the best care of patients is at the centre of this model of the medical humanities, what if the institution and culture of medicine and its doctors are also in distress – suffering and symptomising? The premise of the text needed to be developed. There was an assumption that modern medicine had developed unfortunate dehumanizing tendencies, but this was laid at the door of biomedical reductionism rather than suggesting that medical culture itself may be sick and in need of therapy, and that the medical humanities could provide such therapy (Bleakley 2023 forthcoming). Cole and colleagues were also hasty in their claim of primacy in the field, for Tess Jones, Delese Wear and Lester Friedman’s Health Humanities Reader advertises a publication date of 2014, and was bold enough to claim that “the health humanities (were) previously called the medical humanities”. This collection, while again displaying unacknowledged North American-centrism, embraced cuttingedge issues of health inequities and inequalities, including disability studies; race, class and gender, and mental illness. It was altogether way more radical in its positioning than the Cole and colleagues’ collection. The authors call for the health humanities – explicitly a term of inclusivity – as a moral necessity, a responsible counterweight to biomedicine obsessed with its extraordinary potency, while stripped of proper ethical concern and insensitive when it comes to issues of social justice. Thus, reductive biomedical science does not just dehumanise the individual, but de-powers the economically less fortunate, who are also the most in need of care. In 2016 a third synoptic text joined the two above: The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, edited by Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods, and showing a distinct UK-bias. The text advertises the kind of medical humanities that have developed away from clinical contexts, as the academic study of medicine and its artefacts, based in university departments. This approach claims to have invented a “second wave” or “critical” medical humanities that eclipses “first wave” medical humanities as handmaiden to medicine or as light relief/distraction from clinical concerns. In this text, there is an explicit rejection of any practical pedagogical interests for the medical humanities within medical education. Rather, there is a concern to grasp how medical cultures are historically and socially produced and regulated, as discourses. In an effort to challenge North American-centric and UK-centric biases, my own edited volume, the Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities (Bleakley 2020) placed pedagogical issues at the centre of the medical humanities with a rejection of “first wave” interests in medical humanities. At worse, such interests are tissue-strength, as light relief from a reductive biomedicine; and, at best and more robust, compensatory for biomedical science. While embracing a “critical” medical

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humanities approach, the overall text advertises rather a “translational” position, where the medical humanities act as intermediary between biomedical science and the arts in raising the quality, intensity and complexity of each position. Just as there is instrumental, reductive bioscience, so there are instrumental, reductive arts, humanities and qualitative social sciences. All must raise their game. As Julia Kristeva and colleagues (2020) argue in Bleakley’s edited text, the medical humanities might be taken as a bi-directional conversation between science and arts, impinging on medicine, that raises the qualities of each enterprise through innovations in translations, addressing ethical, aesthetic, political and spiritual imperatives. An illustrative example of a translational medical humanities at work is offered in a re-reading of J.D. Wassersug’s (1987) early critique of medical humanities in medical education. A physician, Wassersug argued that, “real medical progress has not been made by humanitarians but by doctors equipped with microscopes, scalpels, dyes, catheters, rays, test tubes, and culture plates”. But the opposition between object-led/objective science and the humanities is in Wassersug’s mind and prejudiced attitude – shaped by an oppositional and reductive model of “arts vs sciences”. His statement deconstructs itself: while outwardly dismissive, Wassersug’s very sentence here is, ironically, surprisingly poetic. It benefits from the hard “s” plural consonance. It has rhythm. And while all the objects listed are – in a functional worldview – instruments used instrumentally, they can also be read as both media for beauty and form and for political machinations. So, these pieces of equipment glow and give off presence. They are animated artefacts as extensions of the flesh of persons who use them, such as surgeons. Everyday pieces of surgical equipment can be treated expansively and poetically rather than reductively and instrumentally: “grasping forceps”, “skin hooks”, “needle holders”, “tapered needles”, “locking forceps”, “rake retractors”. These become metaphors (if a little creepy or sadistic for their implied bodily hurt) rather than literal descriptors in the eyes of somebody attuned to the aesthetic in medicine and surgery. In his rush to oppose humanities and science, and then to excise the humanities from the body of biomedicine, Wassersug’s tactic backfires by failing to recognise the art and humanity already present in his “hard” science, particularly as a presence of metaphor that he cannot excise and of which he appears ignorant. As noted, equipment such as surgical objects provide a ready-made poetics in their physical designs, and a feast of tough metaphors in their linguistic descriptors: again, “grasping forceps”, “skin hooks”, “locking forceps” and so forth. Just voicing these descriptors rolls them around round in the mouth giving them presence and texture. Applying them in sentences introduces metaphorical thinking, rapidly ex-

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panding possibilities of language and sailing far away from the safe harbour of the instrumental or functional (embracing the economic). Such “thinking with objects” – conjuring objects by performing them verbally – is a key factor in Plato’s and Aristotle’s view of ekphrasis (the expanded, vivid description of objects, often rhetorical, moving away from literalism to the metaphoric and then poetic). Here, objects attain an ontological status, or a state of being, where the object is an extension of the senses, or an intention upon the senses (Harman 2018). Or, object and person are identified in animation. Biomedicine can then be metaphor-rich and poetic rather than literal and mechanistic-reductive. Such reductive medical language works against novel metaphor coinage and usage through standardisation and reduction to abstract terms. Thus, vomiting blood becomes “haematemesis”; panting for breath “tachypnoea” (tak-ip-nee-uh); a black, tarry stool which is caused by upper gastrointestinal tract bleeding “melaena”. Sometimes a historical, beautiful, elegant metaphor is reduced over time to a blunt and rather ugly instrumental term, such as “protoplasmic kisses” morphing into “synapses” – a literalism from the Greek sunapsis meaning “joining together” (Colón-Ramos 2016). Again, these vernacular poetic descriptors (pitted against reductive, technical biomedical terms that serve to bind a community of practice such as medicine) can be tested from your armchair for the way in which they raise value or increase quality. Utter “panting for breath” and the phrase imitates the activity as it pants out of the mouth. Try saying “vomiting blood” – the speech imitates the act. It is embodied and has common ownership across lay patients. While the technical term “haematemesis” has a closed, professional ownership (which is fine – technical terms are useful), it fails to bridge to patients and their felt symptoms in the same way that “vomiting blood” does, spectacularly. The medical humanities can act therapeutically in medical education, addressing long-standing, historically acquired debilitating symptoms. I have already described one such therapeutic intervention: the shift from an instrumental outlook to one celebrating multiple values – for example exploring the intrinsic beauty and form of the body through biomedicine. Here, medicine is deepened beyond the biomedical and the objectifying. A medicine of qualities, or a lyric medicine, can transcend a mundane medicine. Where a mundane or sour medicine might be blunt, uninspired, ugly, unimaginative, flat, ungracious, clumsy, insensitive, numbing, ordinary, dull and restricted, a lyrical medicine can be elegant, inspiring, beautiful, imaginative, animated, dignified, graceful, sensitive, sensible, distinctive, passionate and expressive. It is a rather crude oppositional list, but which would you prefer? Where Anton Chekhov said: “The task of a writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly”, we might transpose this to my suggestion above

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that medicine and medical education display unacknowledged symptoms. Stating these symptoms correctly is the greater part of the medical humanities’ collective role as therapeutic media. A correct diagnosis is a large part of the cure.

Embodied metaphors Within the wider fields of the medical and health humanities summarised above, this book claims a particular territory: the entanglements between psychotherapy, the alchemical imagination and metaphor. What does it mean to read psychological phenomena in a therapeutic setting as metaphors, and more as “embodied” metaphors (Casasanto and Gijssels 2015)? Metaphors are figures of speech that are used for rhetorical effect – to persuade, or enhance language such that events turn into experiences – a deepening in quality, intensity and complexity (Bleakley 2019). In the arts, lyric poetry is the ur-example of the use of metaphor for effect: for example, Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” (from As You Like It). I show how psychodynamic psychotherapy can draw on a rich field of substantial metaphors derived from ancient alchemy, as the matters of salt, mercury, sulphur, lead and so forth can be read as material metaphors rather than symbols. They do not “stand for” something other than themselves, but re-present themselves in greater intensity, depth and complexity. Such metaphors do linguistic work that has psychological implications and impact, but within their own (expanded) natures. They shift thinking sideways or slant, so that phenomena are seen afresh. This is the case not just for these mercurial material-immaterial substances, but also for operations on substances such as heating (intensification), dissolving (releasing, dispersing) and coagulating (fixing) that act as metaphors for psychotherapeutic interventions.

What is psychodynamic psychotherapy? My concern here is with longer, deeper forms of psychotherapy than the currently popular brief forms such as cognitive-behavioural therapy or short-term counselling, or humanistic therapies such as Rogerian, gestalt, co-counselling, biodynamics and so forth that do not engage with ideas of unconscious process. The term “psychodynamic” covers a range of depth-psychological theory and practical therapies derived from Freud’s psychoanalysis but offering less intensive exposure. Psychodynamic approaches have four main principles: symptoms (such as chronic anxiety and depression) are taken to have their origins in repressed or displaced psychic matter that is too disturbing to face head-on; there is an unconscious at work

What is psychodynamic psychotherapy?

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and this can be “read” through a variety of lenses; key to the therapy are transference and resistance effects; and the therapy will involve regression and recovery of significant developmental episodes such as childhood trauma (Freud 1910/1962). Importantly, symptoms can include lack of fulfilment in life, or a sense of anomie, emptiness or lack of creative impulse. In this sense, psychotherapy can be educational and restorative. Therapy does not have to be personal – it can reach out to symptomising institutions (such as medical culture) or to public and worldly catastrophes such as the climate crisis. Here, the “unconscious” operates at a collective level as an eco-logical rather than an ego-logical issue. As an example, while psychotherapies treat personal eating disorders, an ecological therapy might address food disorders (for example cultural origins for eating disorders resting with expectations of particular body shapes and sizes) (Bleakley 1996). Psycho-therapy comes from the Greek psyche meaning “soul” and “mind”, and therapeia meaning “attending to another”. “Therapy” entered the English language as a medical term only in 1846, meaning “the treatment of disease”. The term “psychotherapy” is credited to the Dutch psychiatrist and writer Frederik Willem van Eeden. In 1892, he and Albert Willem van Renterghem, a rural family doctor, presented an account of their “psycho-therapeutic” clinic at a congress of experimental psychology held in London with the definition “the art of curing mental diseases”. Note “art” rather than “science”. The term psychothérapie had already been coined in France to describe the use of hypnotism as a cure for “hysterical” disorders. Van Eeden later moved away from psychiatry to embrace religion and a mystical approach to psychology, where van Rentherghem deepened his study of formal psychoanalysis, introducing Freud’s work to a Dutch audience (Bulhof 1981). In Vienna, Sigmund Freud developed psychoanalysis in conjunction with his mentor Josef Breuer in the early 1890s, coining the term in 1896. Freud had studied with the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris in 1885, learning techniques of hypnosis, that he later abandoned for deep relaxation and reverie to encourage a mood of relaxed free-floating attention aimed at recovering unconscious content and repressed childhood memories. Charcot had told him that all neuroses had origins in unresolved issues of sexuality, using the term literally. Freud extended sexuality metaphorically, tracing neuroses to unresolved childhood traumas now repressed and held as latent, unconscious content. Freud was aware that such recovered memories were necessarily metaphorical or “screen memories” acting as triggers for abreaction (Freud 1933/1957). Psychoanalysis, after initial deep resistance from the medical community, became the primary form of psychotherapy, developing along five different lines. Acolytes, such as the English psychiatrist Ernest Jones, followed an orthodox Freudian line. Sharp diversions from Freudian orthodoxy occurred through Otto Rank claiming that neuroses were grounded in pre-Oedipal birth traumas. Wilhelm

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Chapter 1. Thinking “Slantwise”: Context for the Book and Definitions of Terms

Reich literalised Freud’s more metaphorical approach to sexuality, grounding neuroses in internalised sexual oppressions configured as restricted orgasm. Alfred Adler claimed that neuroses were grounded not in individual development but were a product of structural inequities and inequalities. And Carl Jung shifted emphasis from the mundane to the spiritual, claiming that neuroses were grounded in mundanity itself, as chronic lack of meaning. For Jung, beyond Freud’s humane individualism and Adler’s call for a democratic humanity, the individual was formed through a much grander force of collective or cultural mythology that served the purpose of providing meaning. This was lost to secular and materialist cultures. Where, as curative forms, Freud stressed the value of talk as a therapeutic medium, Rank the value of regression to birth, Reich the recovery of grounding in body and instinct rather than mind, and Adler the establishment of social justice, Jung stressed the importance of recovering symbols transcending the mundane. Where Freud saw dreams as a royal road to a personal unconscious as repressed desires, Jung saw dreams as recovery of a collective unconscious mapped in mythologies and symbol systems such as alchemy.

What is alchemy? The word “alchemy” has roots in Ancient Greek and Arabic terms referring to “fluidity”, referencing the act of heating, alloying and pouring metals. Alchemy can be seen as the art of turning the apparently hard and immoveable into the soft and malleable, a good description of psychotherapeutic work in transforming defences and resistances that feed neuroses into healthier flexibility and adaptability. While alchemy flourished from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, it was considered illegal in many European countries where a gnostic worldview that animated earthly matter such as naturally-occurring metals was anathema to the High Church. Such rulings were partly motivated by a fear on the part of the authorities that if alchemy could make gold from base metals this would devalue currency. Fearing prosecution, the alchemists went to extreme lengths to conceal their “secrets” through gnomic written texts and a wealth of abstruse illustrations. Alchemy is commonly now viewed as either a precursor to modern chemistry, or, after Jung, a proto-psychology focused on symbols as expression of the numinous. This book describes an innovative “third way” for both the education and exercise of an alchemical imagination that embraces both material matters and psychological insight: alchemy as lyrical poetics, or the intensive production of embodied metaphor. Alchemy here is viewed as an immanent set of metaphordriven “best practices” for indwelling complex and contradictory earthly matters

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in a sensual, artistic and humane manner. Or, again, it describes best psychotherapeutic practice. Alchemy is read not as a medium for “personal growth”, but optimal co-existence with the natural world. It is an eco-logical rather than ego-logical project with deep aesthetic concerns (education of the senses in close noticing) and political intentions (a democracy of worldly things). The book critically addresses Jungian approaches while it echoes post-Freudian developments in psychoanalysis, such as the work of Jacques Lacan, that avoid the mysticism of symbol systems to work rather with everyday signs and linguistic registers, keeping the focus on known and sensed phenomena rather than abstractions. I then turn back to more orthodox Freudian psychoanalysis and re-read this approach through the lens of alchemy, suggesting that in many ways this ancient tradition was misappropriated by Jung, who turned it into a mystical system rather than reading it as embodied or sensual. Keeping close to substance, later chapters are dedicated to specific “substances” (again as embodied metaphors) such as alchemical “fire”, “red sulphur”, “green sulphur” and “salt”, read as metaphors for experiences such as impulse, compulsion, optimism and regret common to human exchanges, as these come to be symptomatic of emotional disturbances. Such symptoms are given a voice, allowed to speak their minds. The key psychotherapeutic process of transference is considered against the background of alchemical “operations” on substances, based in cycles of analysis and synthesis as Hegelian dialectic. Brief case studies are offered to illustrate how such an approach works. Such transformation, however, is not limited to the personal realm. Rather, an emphasis is placed on how psychotherapeutic values and practices can be extended to worldly contexts such as engaging with democracy and the climate crisis. Throughout, alchemy is not treated as an archaeological artefact to be excavated, removed intact and examined. Rather, the alchemical imagination is taken as a developing, living medium through which contemporary phenomena can be re-examined psychotherapeutically. Jung’s reading of alchemy as quest for meaning is critically reexamined and reconfigured as an education into tolerance of ambiguity, the basis for democratic habits. The search for meaning is perhaps a search for everyday beauty where alchemy provides the colour palette.

Poetic and narrative approaches to psychotherapy Psychodynamic psychotherapy embraces life histories and can be seen as centrally involving telling stories. However, narrative approaches have come to dominate medical and health humanities and psychotherapies to the detriment of alternative perspectives such as that of lyric poetry (Bleakley and Neilson 2021). Where narra-

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Chapter 1. Thinking “Slantwise”: Context for the Book and Definitions of Terms

tive-based medicine focuses on plot and therefore on time, lyric poetry focuses on space and object description (ekphrasis) without the necessity for plot. Rather, emplotment gives way to “field”, where the poem is placed in space (Casey 2013). More, the poetic imagination is fundamentally a metaphor innovation process, where narrative depends less on metaphor and more on issues such as character development. In this book, I make an argument for the value of the lyric poetic imagination in psychodynamic psychotherapy, as this is fed by an alchemical imagination grounded, again, in embodied metaphor. There is a (hi)story of alchemy – a literal history – but alchemy is employed here out of the context of its (hi)story, for its long-stored metaphors. In employing a poetic imagination, my argument for the value of an alchemical imagination for contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapy is associative rather than rational or logical. The Medieval and Renaissance alchemical imagination purposefully upsets the logic and rationality associated with science. While alchemy is often read as a precursor to Enlightenment science (as discussed later), it is in fact a parallel discourse that works by undermining rationality, partly as a disguise lest it be prosecuted for heresy. Alchemy was always an heretical and irritant discourse, heavily coded and disguised to appear irrational. Again, while there is an explicit history of alchemy, there is a parallel underground or unconscious historical flow, one that mirrors the personal unconscious characterised as repressed, disguised and displaced. In other words, a metaphor horde.

Chapter 2 The Alchemical Imagination

Figure .: Lady Alchymia

In this chapter, through a series of illustrative examples, we see how ancient alchemy “works” for the contemporary world. It offers potent embodied metaphors that provide a medium through which ordinary life can be enhanced. This opportunity has been taken up in the extraordinary work of psychodynamic psychotherapy that affords a new kind of alchemical imagination, powered by a poetic imagination as well as by the conventions of narrative. The reader here is purposefully plunged straight in to the world of alchemical imagining through visual illustration as well as text, while subsequent chapters will meticulously pick apart some of the complexity encountered here. But the reader is shown how to decipher outwardly abstruse alchemy. Let us begin with a story.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-004

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I Only Came to Use the Phone In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 1978 short story “I Only Came to Use the Phone”, en route to Barcelona and during a rainstorm, a woman’s car breaks down. A bus driver picks her up. The bus is full of inmates bound for a psychiatric institution. The woman, only 26 years old, asks if she can use the phone to call her husband. However, she is mistaken for a patient and, despite her protestations, is taken into the hospital’s bowels where she is assigned to a bed and then will be incarcerated for life. The more she protests, the more this is seen as a symptom of mental illness – all the more reason she should be detained and treated. She becomes subject to “total institutionalisation”, to draw on Erving Goffman’s (1956) term for organised separation from the public sphere. The institution becomes her home. She settles into its routines. Anyone who enters the world of medieval and Renaissance alchemy – with its twisted and gnomic texts and often grotesque Escher-like illustrations, false leads and dead ends, multiple ambiguities and exasperating contradictions – may feel that they too have entered a house for the deranged, a hall of mirrors, a world inverted. But this world soon casts a spell, a strange fascination and uncanny familiarity, as a fold or quirk in history that to the modern mind can seem odd but utterly compelling. It is a dream world made concrete. In other words, a world of the poetic imagination, replete with inventive metaphorical possibility. A newcomer to this world, with no guidebook, will be perplexed, may indeed go un poco loco. But they won’t want to leave; fascination will prevail. They will be mistaken for alchemical adepts, somewhat mad. The lure is sure to work its magic. Putting earthly matter on the same plane as humanity would have been sacrilege to the late medieval and Renaissance High Church and so alchemy existed as a parallel “gnostic” and partly underground strand to religious orthodoxies. Indeed, alchemy was considered illegal in many European countries from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and the early modern period. It was an underground activity, becoming heavily coded. Such rulings were partly motivated by a fear on the part of the authorities that alchemy might actually make gold from base metals and would devalue gold-based currency. Fearing actual prosecution and religious persecution, the alchemists then went to extreme lengths to conceal their secrets through gnomic written texts and a wealth of abstruse illustrations. But some of these texts are easy enough to decipher. One must approach them with a poetic imagination rather than simply as a proto-science (a common historical approach to alchemy).

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Here, the Father devours the Son For example, what do we moderns make of the short excerpt below – “Here, the Father devours the Son” – from a 1625 alchemical text “The Book of Lambspring”? (The illustration that also heads the previous chapter 1). This is attributed to a German philosopher Lambsprinck, rendered from German verse into Latin by Nicolaus Barnaud of Dauphiné, described as “physician”. An original of the poetic text without the illustrations had previously been published at Leiden in 1599. It is an allegory about continuity of life (described in purely patrilineal fashion as the succession of an ageing and sickening Father King by a virile Son). To the late medieval and Renaissance mind, alchemy was surely about bringing natural matter to its full display, or realising its qualities or value, as a kind of midwifery and tending. It was above all an aesthetic adventure, as a revelation of qualities; and, moreover, a moral duty. This applies also to realising the qualities and value of human character; it is a moral duty to care for another such that it raises the quality of life. It matters that we elevate the matter of others, and this too is the purpose of the arts – both “high” and “popular”. Not only the arts, but psychotherapy too promises such elevation. Psychotherapy is not just about addressing symptoms – neuroses such as phobias, anxiety, depression, eating disorders, body dysmorphia and so forth – but also an education into deepening the quality of life, to give intensity and complexity to experience. This can be thought of as a widening of what is valued from the base instrumental or functional to the ethical, aesthetic, political and spiritual. This too may lift a person out of everyday anomie and a pedestrian world into one of creativity. But this education, importantly, is not one of high-flown idealism. It is bitterly realist, accepting that life is pathologised. There is personal and worldly suffering and terror to be faced, and named. There is identity with a complex world that seeks to address its intrinsic crooked timber – not to straighten it (false idealism) but to better understand its meanings. The King undergoes many transformations in the Lambspring text, but the inevitability of his son succeeding him is finally realised (contra the myth of Chronos who devours his offspring lest they usurp his authority) because this is a gain in value, a notch up in quality. The virile and ambitious replaces the tired and staid. In resisting this inevitability and hanging on to his status despite his waning powers, one of the emblems shows the King devouring his son as a way to block the latter’s rise in status. This illustration follows the Chronos/Saturn myth discussed below (figure 2.2). The text shows the King’s trickery:

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Figure 2.2: “Here the Father devours the Son” My Son, I was dead without thee And lived in great danger of my life. I revive at thy return, And it fills my breast with joy. But when the Son entered the Father’s house, The Father took him to his heart, And swallowed him out of excessive joy, And that with his own mouth. The great exertion makes the father sweat.

“Excessive joy” may be read as “self-protection”. In the next illustration in the series, the father becomes fevered and must take to his bed with sweats as he faces his fears born from eating his son. His symptoms of guilt rise to the surface. He is hot and bothered (figure 2.3). His symptoms of sweating are what Freud referred to as “the return of the repressed” – as Saturn refuses to see that swallowing his children only produces harm in the form of increasing melancholia, because he is blocking progress, so his condition worsens. The king is sweating out his melancholia amidst a fevered recognition of his stubbornness. There is a thundercloud outside, seen through the window, another signifier for an overcast or melancholic state. The clouds sweat rain. The modern, rational, scientific mind says: “so, let’s forget all this arcane nonsense about sweating kings”. Alchemy was obviously a house for the insane and illfitted. But wait a moment. Surely, as noted, this is simply a recapping of the Greek

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Figure 2.3: The King sweats in his bed

myth of Chronos (Roman Saturn) devouring his offspring lest they challenge and replace his authority? When Rhea gave birth to Zeus, to prevent Chronos devouring him, she wrapped a stone in cloth pretending this was her new-born son, and Chronos swallowed this instead unaware that Zeus was being hidden from sight and would grow up to usurp him. In the subsequent overthrow of the Titans, Zeus leads the gods of the new order who defeat the old order. This is where we get the metaphor “titanic struggle”. Chronos (time: chronometer, chronic) represents stability, tradition and solid grounding. He is also the emblem of saturnine melancholia or depression, an inability to gather energy for change: days on end when getting out of bed is hard work, the head droops, limbs are leaden and feet shuffle. Mood sinks and stinks. Leaden melancholia, says Freud (1918), is understandable as an act of mourning, but under other circumstances might it be repressed desire, unfulfilled impulse? The king sweats, the frustrated pent-up impulse slowly releasing in symptoms of fever. So here, at least, the alchemical emblem is in a tradition of symbolism and iconography that is easy to decipher. This is the melancholic king stuck in his dull and heavy leaden ways resisting change. The son, about to usurp his authority, is new blood or change. At first, the king eats the son to maintain tradition, but this makes him sick, feverish. He cannot now stomach what he has done. In the subsequent emblem, as noted, the king takes to his bed and sweats profusely as the gloomy clouds sweat rain, seen through the window of the king’s room (figure 2.3). As above, so below. This is the exercise of a salty wisdom amongst the emer-

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gence of a fire in the body that gives new vigour and impulse as the king accepts his fate. The king realises that he must make way for succession and this acceptance is strangely energising. Something better is coming behind him. Change is inevitable. The final emblem in the series shows the king and his son meeting on equal terms. A pact has been made that the son will take over the reins (and reign) when the king expires, which is soon. The sullen, melancholic substance of lead – a dense metaphor – will give way to a more vibrant state of matter. So, alchemy is no sweat at all. The emblems can be quite easy to read. Well, this one is. Others are far more complex and lead us into a hall of mirrors. For those sweating over this being another example of patrilineal dominance, please return to the illustration that heads this Preface: that of “Lady Alchymya”. She represents the feminine principle that oversees alchemy; for the process, literal or metaphorical, is based in giving birth.

Consuming your own venom Alchemy’s promise, and psychodynamic psychotherapy too, is to register experience at a more intense level, as a re-birth. For this, you must swallow and digest your own poisons, or symptoms. This can plainly be uncomfortable even as it promises greater depth of experience and insight as self-reflexivity. Figure 2.4 shows the uroboros, the snake or dragon eating its own tail. This is repeated throughout alchemical texts. In Lambspring, introduced above, the “venomous dragon” is a familiar symbol of renewal or re-birth (the snake sheds its skin), but more, it consumes its own poison as a kind of homeopathic gesture. In other words, we must devour our own poisonous natures – face our fears, look to our failings, meet with our shadow, or engage our presenting symptoms however fearful or shameful. In the prime-time of alchemy this would be confession within the formal Church structures. In secular settings, this is Psychotherapy 101, first step in analysis. Also, for a late medieval and Renaissance mind, this is the bottom-line moral and existential question: “am I basically a decent person?” “Can I live with myself and can others live with me?” “Where will my soul land after death?” The Lambspring text describes the scene: A savage dragon lives in the forest, Most venomous he is … His venom becomes the great Medicine, He quickly consumes his venom, For he devours his poisonous tail, All this is performed on his own body,

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Figure 2.4: The poisonous dragon eats itself from the tail From which flows forth glorious Balm With all its miraculous virtues …

So, alchemy again isn’t so gnomic – it makes a lot of sense to consume your own venom (rather than letting it out on other people). But can you stomach your own poisons? Psychotherapy is largely not about beefing up your positives (what could be more egotistical?) but about facing your symptoms, what drives other people crazy about your behaviour, looking for reasons why this happens and making some key changes. Devour your poisonous tail and then the “glorious Balm” may flow. The point here is that the metaphors make sense. There is no symbol system at work pointing to the numinous or the transcendental. This is about immanence, here and now dwelling, emotional flux and consideration of held values as these affect those close to you. The image is specific – the ouroboros or poisonous dragon turns into its opposite (“His venom becomes the great Medicine”), where symptom has value, for in the enantiodromia, the turning-into-opposite, symptom becomes a gift. You don’t reinforce symptom, but you follow its course and see its effects. In the face of this, change occurs. For moderns, this is the pharmakon or “healing poison” as an example of a logical contradiction in language. Suffering, or holding, such contradictions is a mark of tolerance of ambiguity, the psychological state that is, in turn, the primary democratic gesture, the anti-authoritarian stance. Again, “am I basically a decent person?” – but this free from piety. So, a primary function of contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapy, as it looks

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into the mirror of ancient alchemy, is to educate the client into tolerance of ambiguity or uncertainty. This is respect for the Other. At the height of the European alchemical boom in the 16th and 17th centuries, notions of psychotherapeutic “self-insight” would have been alien. Rather, characters would have been judged against moral standards laid down by the autocracies of the Church and the aristocracy. Confession preceded “the talking cure”, but the formality of forgiveness is not equivalent to the modern notion of self-insight as self-improvement. Immanuel Kant’s (1784) “What is Enlightenment?” is often taken as the historical marker for the transition from a Church- and aristocracy-governed mentality and identity to a modern sense of “self ” that is the prelude to secular humanism. This is the birth of “critique” and “reflexivity”. Here, behaviour is judged not by an external moral code but rather by reflection on one’s actions according to context, a situational rather than universal ethics, or “casuistry” (case/context-based ethics). We cannot return to alchemical texts for direct psychological guidance because that does not represent the historically-contingent ethical formulations that these texts set out. However, we can take the imagery and metaphorical richness of these texts and mine this for modern applications. This is why I am careful to distinguish between “alchemy” as the historical event – and precursor to chemistry (Pattison Muir 1902) – and the “alchemical imagination” as resonance, residue and lasting stain of that history (transcending chemistry). It is the latter that interests me. This book is not a history of alchemy, certainly does not set out to romanticise alchemy and refuses to take alchemy literally. Rather, I take alchemy seriously and materially, as sensual guide to forming an imagination of what matters and of matter itself – a key formulation in an age where our relationship to the matter of the world has led to a conflagration of matter leading to a climate crisis. As noted in chapter 1, the psychotherapeutic imagination must be turned to the face of the world, to collective phenomena and not stereotyped as “personal”. This shifts us from an ego-centric to an eco-centric view. Without such collective therapeutic effort how will we address the climate crisis? The neurosis we face is a stubborn fixity upon fossil fuel use that psychoanalytically can be seen as regression to, and fixation upon, an anal stage of development. The embodied metaphor here is fascination with our faeces – easily translated into “filthy lucre”. This in turn spawns a host of defence mechanisms by which this arrogant free-market capitalist mentality is rationalised, just as the school bully rationalises his actions as “in the jungle, the strong will survive”. At the root of such selfishness is intolerance of ambiguity and uncertainty, the latter embodied in radical change and innovation. A will-to-stability trumps a desire for innovation. Such a position is unthinking in terms of potential democratic futures, couched in classic

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psychoanalysis as the metaphorical shift from anality to genitality, or adult sharing and tolerance. To be stuck in alchemy historically is to miss its resonance for the present. As an illustrative example, let us return to the ouroboros again – not as a symbol pointing to the unknown, but as an image of longstanding events and a metaphor, a raising of phenomena to higher levels of meaning, complexity and intensity – drawing on James Joyce’s experimental novel Finnegan’s Wake, originally published in 1939. The novel opens: “riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay … “ and finishes: “A way a lone a lost a last a loved a long the”. The snake or dragon bites its tail – the final sentence leads into the opening sentence, completing the circle. The mouth joined to tail is a potted history of humankind: “way, lone, lost, last, loved, long riverrun past Eve and Adam’s” – Eve and Adam’s what? Their gaze? Their house, or madhouse (dictionary definition: “a scene of extreme confusion”)? Joyce sees history as cyclical, as forming repeating patterns in which characters come to re-examine what bugs them time and time again, picking at the wounds and scabs, rubbing at the same spot or stain over and over, but gaining new perspectives on each round. Our return to examine the alchemical imagination is not one of confirmation of the known, but of recognition of familiar territories that on a fresh visit throw up unexpected gifts, previously unexamined images, or “re-usable metaphors” to borrow a term from Anita Wohlmann (2022). Thus, following Wohlmann’s notion that metaphors do not necessarily get “tired” or suffer from burnout – so over-used that their meanings are extinguished – rather they can be re-cycled, refreshed. And this too is psychotherapy’s central aim within an “eternal return” myth cycle. Rather than linear, incremental improvement, the cyclical view suggests that we can return to old wounds regularly to re-connect with them in different, productive ways just as metaphors can be refreshed. We are, in effect re-embodied but without the idealism of “cure”.

Reading alchemy through different lenses We can inhabit alchemy as Joyce inhabits Dublin in Ulysses in the round of one day – by transforming this short period into a mythical eternity. We can bask in the equivalent of the brief moment of the “little death” of orgasm in which time is suspended. The English poet Peter Redgrove called this briefest moment of opportunity a “hole-in-the-day” punning on “holiday”. It is the spark of contemplation, the moment of insight. And the alchemical imagination at its best. We return to familiar landmarks to see them afresh through the alchemical imagination. This, rather than cataloguing alchemy as a fixed code for psychotherapy (“sulphur” = mania, “lead” = depression, “mercury” = reflective insight, “salt” = memory and remorse

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and so forth), the trap into which many Jungians seem to fall. Such correspondences are useful, but we must outwit their codifications as scripture or fixed symbology, familiar from many popular books on what alchemy “means”. Alchemy, popularised, has become, like astrology, a symbol system with standardised meanings and chains of correspondences. An engineering manual. In this book, alchemy is read not as a symbol system, but a sign system, where matter acts as embodied metaphor always pointing to something but in a different register, raising its value. Alchemy read as pre-chemistry certainly sits well with people who have little truck with either symbols or embodied metaphors, fitting with a predetermined framework of “progress” or linear improvement. Just now, I suggested that this is an inappropriate model for psychodynamic psychotherapy that prefers cyclical reformulations. For the contemporary scientific mind, embracing biomedicine, literally turning base metal into gold doesn’t wash. This is tomfoolery, trickery. These are gangsters and sharks, tricksters and hucksters at work, the “puffers” of old (a derogatory term for laboratory-based rather than library-based alchemists, lampooned for example in Ben Jonson’s comedy play “The Alchemist”, first performed in 1610). In contrast, the post-Jungian psychologically-sensitive person sees something different going on in alchemy, and was never interested in the process of literalising. The psyche here is embodied but neither literal nor literalising – it is not brain matter, but the matter of the brain as embodied metaphor. In this view of post-Freudian and post-Jungian psychotherapy, what drives persons is fantasy, wish, imagination, and not literalism. In Lacan’s (2004) model of psychotherapy for example, it is language that provides the context for consciousness and meaning, or thinking and reflecting (imagining). And language’s higher order is metaphor, while its most expressive form is poetry and the poetic imagination. Language precedes humans, who are born into it. Neurotic symptoms, both personally and institutionally or culturally, are often products of reduction of language to technical, instrumental terms in the name of efficiency, stripping language of its values as aesthetic, political, ethical and spiritual forms. Psychotic symptoms, on the other hand, representing an unhinging from reality, cultivate a florid language that is dis-embodied. Metaphors float free from sensual life, as abstractions. Such utterances are far from poetry. To return to alchemy, historically the system merely hid behind its material descriptions of the transformation of matter where it formed a complex sign system for the transformation of the psyche. Not a transformation of matter – but mind, spirit and imagination as transformative media. Alchemy pointed to profound truths that could not be uttered within hearing distance of the finger-wagging Church – that a mystery system existed reaching back to the ancient Egyptians’ view of the transmigration of the soul after death. This mystery system taught that humans could achieve identification with the numinous through

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study of an unbroken tradition of both sign and symbol systems (in text and illustrations) without identifying with a single, religious perspective such as Christianity or Islam. This of course was heretical to the Christian and Islamic traditions that demanded obedience to scripture, and so alchemy remained an underground “mystery cult” and had to resort to complex obfuscation and codes. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl gustav Jung had a singular dream in 1926 that he was being held captive, specifically in the 17th century. Up to this point Jung had been a traditional Freudian analyst and was seen as Freud’s successor. But this dream convinced Jung that Freud’s idea of the personal “unconscious” must be expanded significantly to include a deeper “collective unconscious” as a storehouse of global myth and symbol, pointing to the numinous. Coincidentally discovering that the 17th century was the period of the height of the European alchemical tradition (that swiftly declined as mystical alchemy gave way to scientific chemistry), Jung saw alchemy as a ready-made symbol system to both explore and explain the workings of the collective unconscious as a network of symbols feeding humanity’s search for meaning. In an age of growing secular humanism, Jung saw a desire for reconnection with older spiritual traditions. Modern humanism was read as a symptom of lack or loss, where the human search for meaning is a common existential urge. Jung single-handedly collected and meticulously researched a wealth of alchemical texts to produce four major volumes linking modern psychology and premodern alchemy. In the process, Jung developed a psychotherapeutic method. He offered a wealth of idiosyncratic linkages between the modern mind and an unbroken tradition of a universal unconscious based on symbol (and primarily “revealed” in dreams and in the technique of “active imagination” or meditative daydreaming, similar to Freud’s “free association” or reverie on the couch). For Jung, everyday neuroses were not necessarily linked to family dynamics or childhood experiences, as Freud had suggested, but to levels of impoverishment of the individual psyche where we had lost touch with a collective pool of symbols and myth (or “meaning”). Through psychotherapy, a new language was learned that would address this lack of meaning. Alchemy read literally, as the search for a means to make gold out of base metal, is of course a cul-de-sac. But we must not throw out the baby with the bathwater – messing around in the laboratory exploring how substances interact with each other under different grades of heat, as liquids are concentrated, metals dryroasted until they powder, solutions purified and so forth, led to some very important early chemical discoveries and thus stimulated cultural development. The Swiss 16th century Renaissance scholar Paracelsus brought a number of chemical innovations to medicine, such as the use of laudanum, or tincture of opium, as a painkiller. This, while he was busy writing obscure alchemical texts that might

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be taken as literary forerunners of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or Gil Orlovitz’s 1967 opus Milkbottle H. Well over a century after Paracelsus, Isaac Newton wrote extensively on alchemical topics as he was establishing classical mechanics – how things move in space – through physics and mathematics. It is clear from the respective writings of Paracelsus and Newton that alchemy provided a kind of meditation, prayer and spiritual study for the men who were paving the way for materialist science and medicine. Alchemy read symbolically, as human search for meaning in Jung’s model, is I believe ultimately a cul-de-sac. For here, the symbol pointing to the numinous leads us away from the material stuff and texture of everyday life – sensible contact with a world of things and live phenomena: storms, water currents, a majestic heron taking flight, a tree falling, granite underfoot, the smell of a wild rose. These are not “symbols” (although of course they can be taken as such) but actual, sensate phenomena. They do not “stand” for anything other than their own self-display or efflorescence. However, this materiality is at once metaphorical, for the sensuous world, as Kant suggested, is grounded in the numinous or transcendent. Sensory experience is not baseline – instrumental and reductive. Rather, it is potentially transformative, deep, intense and complex. Indeed, we have to work hard to reduce the sensual to the ordinary, or as T. S. Eliot (1934) suggested, to reduce wisdom to knowledge and then knowledge to information. But this has been the project of Enlightenment science as it gives primacy to quantitative measurement over complex qualities. What sensory experience takes on, in being re-described and re-inscribed through conversation, writing, painting, evocative music and so forth, is the form of the “image” rather than the symbol. The image does not point to the numinous but rather gives an alternate face or appearance for the phenomenon. It is a re-presentation, a new register. Images in language relating to embodied things or experiences can be expressed as tropes – metaphors, analogies and metonyms for example. The rain falls and is experienced, but in re-inscribing the embodied experience we may use an embodied metaphor: “raining cats and dogs”. Or a simile: “as right as rain”, or “sheet rain”. Or a metonym: the “smell” of rain, “showers”, “pissing down”. The Scottish poet Don Paterson (2009) says, in the poem “Rain”: I love all films that start with rain: / Rain, braiding a windowpane / Or darkening a hung-out dress / Or streaming down her upturned face”. This is not a narrative, but an evocation of rain’s beauty as it brilliantly highlights human life (film, windowpane, dress, face), turning the ordinary into the extraordinary and the literal into the embodied metaphorical through a variety of alchemical operations expressed as verbs (start, braiding, darkening, streaming). The poem is a celebration of the hidden world revealed by rain and is alchemical. Paterson’s (2018) dense but

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rewarding poetry criticism affords a similar beauty; is alchemical, although Paterson never mentions alchemical frames for poetic inspiration. Focusing on neither literal search for transformation of matter (the material fallacy), nor symbolic initiation (the transubstantiation fallacy), alchemy in the book you are now reading is, again, taken as an “alchemical imagination” grounded in embodied metaphors. Or, it is a form of lyric poetry (Bleakley and Neilson 2021) as illustrated by Don Paterson’s “Rain” above. This book takes you, the reader, through how such a perspective can give value to, inform, and shape psychodynamic psychotherapeutic practices. The latter are read not as “personal growth” (the post-Jungian fallacy) but as an education into how to live meaningfully in a world of objects and phenomena, many of which create existential threats such as “climate crisis”. Such meaningful living is first and foremost aesthetic – pressing us to explicate what we find of value and why, particularly what is of beauty, and how we find love. The alchemical imagination will not make you money or open the door to the infinite. It will, however, make you notice and appreciate the world. Alchemy can tell meaningful stories, but more importantly it will give you a poetic and lyrical language to describe close noticing and feeling. I take that as an invaluable gift. This is not to idealise alchemy, but rather to acknowledge its substantial legacy.

Chapter 3 Metaphors of substance Alchemy works through associative rather than logical reasoning. The façade of literal alchemical laboratory work – the search for making gold from base metals – disguised a system for transformation of the human psyche from restricted outlook to creative engagement with matter. This is what we now appreciate as psychodynamic psychotherapy’s educational purpose. This system works through serendipities and associations in transformative cycles that mythographers refer to as the “eternal return” (Eliade 1954/2005). A logical approach to the world is illustrated in the Old Testament’s creation myth of seven days of development with humans as crown of creation. An associative approach is illustrated in another creation myth in the Old Testament, conceived earlier in history than the seven days myth. This is the Garden of Eden myth in which everything is created equally in the round and the challenge is to tend the garden. There is no time-based “development” (the myth of narrative) in the Garden, rather there is space- and placebased poetic utterance – one thing associating with another.

Primary sources: how alchemy was recovered for psychotherapy Drawing on alchemy to inform and shape psychotherapy was then pioneered by Carl Gustav Jung (1953 / 2nd ed. 1968, 1954 / 2nd ed. 1966, 1963 / 2nd ed. 1970, 1967) in four texts (CW 12, 13, 14, 16). This extraordinary body of work would constitute in its own right a major contribution to historical scholarship, but more, as a psychiatrist Jung translates premodern alchemy into a modern imagination of the psyche and of psychotherapy, or work on psychological and psychosomatic symptom. The work embraces mythology and religious studies. Marie-Louise von Franz was Jung’s collaborator and an Analytical psychotherapist. She gave a series of lectures on alchemical psychology at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich in 1959 and these were transcribed at the time but not published until 1980. Von Franz (1980) follows Jung’s therapeutic technique of active imagination, seeing the often wild, free-ranging descriptions and illustrations of the alchemists as exercises in active imagination, or giving free rein to a “waking unconscious”. Jung developed such a technique from Freud’s “free association” where patients, relaxed on the couch and perhaps in a hypnagogic state between sleep and waking, were given freedom to follow their thoughts and feelings as these arose spontaneously, where the irrational unconscious may break through to suddenly speak, unfolding its riches ripe for https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-005

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interpretation. Jung’s method was an extension of this, often extended to encouraging patients to draw their fantasies as in arts therapies. In the tradition of Jung’s quasi-spiritual reading of alchemy as a symbol system are (amongst others) seminal accounts by John Trinick (1967), Edward Edinger (1991), Matthew Mather (2014) and Stanton Marlan (2020). Jung’s system, as noted above, is symbolic and not semiotic. Again, where signs (semiotics) point to something known, a symbol points to the unknown or, by definition, the un-nameable and ineffable. The latter are mysteries, archetypal forms that shape consciousness but are not of consciousness. The pantheon of the Greek deities is symbolic, but the fallout from them are signifiers, such as Zeus’ lightning bolt as inspiration, or Aphrodite’s sensuality as the erotic register. Again, Jung approached alchemy as a symbolic system pointing to “higher” mysteries such as a sacred conjunction of the sexes, but I prefer to see it as a system of signs or metaphors. Archetypes can readily become stereotypes (the notions of an archetypal “male” and “female” so central to Jung’s work is readily muddied and complexified by the sign systems of current gender fluidity and multiple identifications). While Jung, in a sense, translates early modern alchemy backwards into classical archetypes, I want to move alchemy forward into areas such as Lacanian language knots or semiotic slipperiness, a feature of the post-human era. I want the Stone to be soft and pliable. Noted above, the best Jungian commentary on Jung’s alchemical work may be John Trinick’s (1967) The Fire-Tried Stone. Other authors have departed from a traditional Jungian line. In the wake of Jung’s Analytical Psychology, as described earlier James Hillman developed an Archetypal Psychology and associated psychotherapy that radically re-conceived Jung’s personalistic bias to form a psychology oriented to worldly phenomena. Hillman’s (2014) papers on alchemical themes have been collected as Volume 5 of the Uniform Edition of his writings. Within the archetypal psychology tradition other works of note include Charles Poncé’s (1983) Alchemy: Papers Towards a Radical Metaphysics and Robert Romanyshyn (2020) The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind that challenges positivist and empiricist research paradigms through a poetics of research, in which Romanyshyn draws on alchemical-metaphorical paradigms as an alternative frame. Ralph Metzner (2020) has been writing about alchemy for many years within a “new consciousness” framework that aligns itself with both the new sciences of complexity and chaos and New Age musings. His early writing embraced the “new consciousness” movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s that uncritically fused Eastern and Western thinking for techniques of “inner transformation”. Thus, he writes of “esoteric systems” for a new age in which a hotchpotch of ancient alchemy and eastern mysticism are fused with western approaches, including

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the political. Metzner, importantly, notes that early alchemy was necessarily a fringe and resistance movement as it illustrated radical readings of Christianity and was met with suspicion by the High Church. Alchemists freely used Christian iconography amongst magical symbolism and frankly erotic representations. Hence, some of the alchemical imagery constitutes a secret code amongst adepts to keep its revolutionary meanings under cover. For Metzner, alchemy was a radical reading of Christianity as a mystery religion in an unbroken tradition from earlier mystical outlooks such as the Egyptian and Greek and aspects of the Orthodox Church. Alchemists claimed their founder as the mythical Hermes Trismegistos in the image of the Egyptian scribe of the gods Thoth and Hermes, the messenger of the Greek gods. Alchemy was viewed as a coded or Gnostic mystery religion saturated with riddles and ambiguities, such as the 1669 anonymised text “Secrets Revealed, Or, an Open Entrance to the Closed Palace of the King”, a suitably ambiguous title. This text continues: “You must understand . . . that I have spoken metaphorically; if you take my words literally you will reap no harvest”. (“Metaphor” was first coined in the late 15th century). Within the tradition of Analytical Psychology, alchemical approaches still flourish. In 1993, the University of Kent Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies organised a day conference on “Alchemy” in a sixth annual “Jung Studies Day” series. I attended this conference and recall being roundly berated for suggesting that we could switch the focus of therapy from persons to world, giving an example that alchemical “sulphur” can just as readily be imagined as the global oil economy’s mania rather than personal manic mood. I also noted that wildfires in California (yes, they happened then!) could be seen as rampant alchemical fire on a “world soul” stage rather than thinking of alchemical fire purely in terms of human passions. A recent edited collection Alchemy and Psychotherapy: Post-Jungian Perspectives, edited by Dale Mathers (2014) brings together 15 Jungian/post-Jungian analysts in practice with ideas about how alchemy integrates with therapy, essentially updating the 1993 University of Kent meeting. The book you are now reading differs considerably in tone and content from this collection edited by Mathers, that offers a rather disappointing snapshot of the state of the art of post-Jungian therapy as it draws on alchemy. First, there is much less alchemy within the chapters than this reader would like. Often there is only cursory and ill-informed drawing on alchemical traditions. Second, Jungian and post-Jungian therapies are not treated critically, but lionised. The singular exception to my second concern with this book is a superb essay by Michael Whan (ibid.: 170 – 84) drawing on Wolfgang Giegerich’s critique of Jungian mystification of the “soul” as opposed to a logos of the soul, a rational rather than mystical understanding of soul’s internal work as a Hegelian dialectical process of world consubstantiation, in which humanity works in the shadow of the

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world soul’s machinations. (A materialist might think of this as the Earth situated as a speck in an ever-expanding cosmos dealing with the outcome of the “Big Bang” – the entire cosmos and its machinations make up the world soul of which our sentience may be a tiny part, or may be a singular, albeit temporary, apprehension). Whan argues that the analysis of an individual cannot be mistaken for the opus magnum that is individuation at the level of the cosmos. We are also not in the historical and cultural time of premodern alchemy and yet we act as though we could simply plunge into this historical bath as post-modern, indeed post-human, persons with complete grasp of the early modern (Medieval and Renaissance) worldview. Psychotherapy, even an extended analysis, is an opus parvum, a small or local work. While this can be considered against the background of the movement of world-soul, the opus magnum, it cannot be identified with it – surely an inflation, a narcissistic gesture, but more says Whan, a simulation of the Work. Conflating the personal (and gaining a sense of appreciation and meaning for one’s life) and the work of soul in the large sense is to make a basic philosophical category mistake. There are many books in the New Age genre that use alchemy as a model for personal transformation in an entirely uncritical and pick-and-mix way. I am not concerned with that literature here. Unfortunately, a number of contemporary post-Jungian texts dealing with psychotherapy veer towards New Age readings, where alchemy is disembodied and read in terms of contemporary models of personal growth, abstractions concerning “spirituality”, moving deep into the territory of individuation as an interiorised phenomenon that, at the same time as it idealises Nature, also isolates the individual within a personalistic bubble that protects from intrusion of the outside world. Further, such approaches idealise “health” at the expense of the inevitability, necessity and value of symptom. But more, I am not just concerned with Jungian and post-Jungian Analytical and Archetypal Psychology approaches here. Certainly, I am not about to valorise such approaches, treating them critically. Rather, I am as interested as much in Freudian and post-Freudian (particularly Lacanian) psychotherapeutic approaches as these embrace the value of metaphor. In short, here alchemy can be described as poetic. I follow scholars such as Roula-Maria Dib (2020) who notes not only that while Jung turns “local” alchemical metaphors and images into “big” symbols, another category mistake, Jung’s work can be read metaphorically and for personal meaning. However, Dib’s work actually adopts a central epistemological framework that is the direct opposite of the framework I use in this book.

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Symbols, signs, images, metaphors: the apparatus of therapy The majority of contemporary approaches to the alchemical imagination appear to be guided by two secular frames: first, the Darwinian, where humans are the crown of creation; and second the Protestant-Capitalist sense of a private self that must be “developed” and is treated as property (Bleakley 2021b). In an otherwise absorbing account of how three modernist writers – the poets H.D. (Hilda Doolitle) and W. B. Yeats, and the novelist James Joyce – supposedly draw on alchemical themes, Dib (2020: 48) mis-applies alchemical frames to interrogate their work. She offers a personalistic reading of Jung’s alchemical work to illustrate how “Like the alchemist, the poet needs to have an internal dialogue with the Self in order to reveal unconscious desires, thoughts, or feeling through poetry”. This personalistic turn is, for me, precisely the opposite of what alchemy and poetry are about. Alchemy and poetry may have been turned into personalconfessional practices, but I believe that their power rests in opening up the world of objects, our natural surrounds, to deeper scrutiny in acts of wonder. Alchemy, like much lyrical poetry focused on revealing the stuff of the world through close noticing, is an object-oriented ontology (Harman 2018). This is a way of being and experiencing grounding itself in contexts of worldly matter rather than withdrawing into a private self from which perspective the world is “out there”. It parallels Heidegger’s notion of “indwelling” the world or inhabiting contexts. So-called personal “development” rests in the resonance of such close attention to the stuff of the world, as I think the alchemical imagination makes plain. Self is an echo of indwelling. Dib does note that the work of alchemy is metaphorical, but then follows Jung’s model in pulling the world of metaphors into that of symbols, as these constitute the collective unconscious. Dib (2020: 49) quotes Yeats’ view of the anima mundi (world soul) as “a general storehouse of images which have ceased to be a property of any personality” and this seems to me to be closer to the nature of the alchemical imagination as I describe it in this book. It is image-based rather than symbol-based, but this in turn allows a more personal feel to the numinosity that is the poetry of alchemy. In consideration of H.D.’s use of an alchemical imagination through her poetry, Dib (2020: 54) says that “alchemy is used as a metaphor for transformation”, but here again she is describing personal transformations, rather than, say, transformations of images as these occur through metaphors, or transformations in the world that create the circumstances for human change (for example, right now, the climate crisis leading to behavioural changes). Alchemy, along traditional Jungian lines, is psychologised. I prefer to see alchemy’s metaphor system as the means by which psychology is transformed into poetics. Further, rather than language being under the control of humans for their “devel-

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opment”, I would see humans as embedded in language and always conscious of their lack and language’s surplus – that language cannot be mastered but must be inhabited, indwelt. Ultimately, I see Dib as mistaking metonym for metaphor, where one word substitutes for another, and word substitutions may form metonymic chains that can play on phonics (warm-fire-hearth-grate-majestic-kingly). H.D. uses such metonymic pun and word play, as Dib (2020: 65) shows in remarks on a poem on Venus (Aphrodite): “for suddenly we saw your name / desecrated; knaves and fools / have done you impious wrong, / Venus, for venery stands for impurity / and Venus as desire / is venereous, lascivious”. Metonymy ousts metaphor: “Venus-venery-venereous”. Venery “stands for” impurity; Venus “as desire / is venereous. These are straight metonymic substitutions and not metaphoric shifts in registers. H.D. is playing on the fact that the substitutions confer on Venus a desecration: Venus as whore. The lines also play on the hard consonance of the letter “v”, picked up also by “knaves”. Dib (2020: 95) makes much of poetry converting language into matter, but surely alchemy is the reverse of this, where the matter of the world is venerated and examined closely, with deep affection and curiosity, to be turned into the language of poetry, drawing heavily on metaphor. Let’s not make the Stone any harder, but allow the soft-palate vowels to play their part. Venereous Venus may be lustful, but this is the hiss of the snake (try it – see how the “v” is a spit from the lower lip, while the “s” is a hiss made by tongue moving to front palate). We need the snake to slip down its own gullet ouroborically, emerging with the soft vowels of the repeated “o” glossed and lilted by the “u”. But my main issue with Dib’s account, following from Jung, is its historical fallacy: that alchemy was not about crude metamorphosis of base metal into gold (on which we are in agreement), but about individuation, as Jung calls it, or the realisation of personal potential. Alchemy was a road map for turning crude self into realised self, much as New Age gurus, workshop leaders and the weekend Colour Supplements might advertise today for their “techniques” of personal growth. While Michel Foucault (2005) claims that the Romans had techniques for perfecting the “self ” that might be compared with self-help workshops or classes today, this was only for the privileged few and seen as a form of mental gymnastics rather than having a psychological-emotional focus. Further, the notion of a privatised, inward “deep” self – while it may have had its roots in the use of perspective by Renaissance painters following the discovery of the rules of perspective by the 15th century architect Filippo Brunelleschi (Romanyshyn 1989) – did not flourish until the concomitant rise of Protestantism and Capitalism. Here selfhood was thought of as a “private” subject, and a commodity that could be developed. This can be traced back to the 16th century Reformation. My point is that alchemists even up to the late 17th century would not have thought about “selfhood” and “individuation” in

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the same way that Jung did, as a psychological journey of inward discovery characteristic of the height of late modernism. Even to call it a “proto-psychology” is a stretch – trying to fit the alchemical imagination into that of contemporary models of psychological “growth”. Alchemy is simply too big, baggy and sprawling to be forced into such a container.

Alchemy leads to science: what’s the matter with matter? The illustration used as the header for this chapter is an alchemical woodcut print from Elias Ashmole’s 1652 text Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum. Such European alchemical texts were common from the early 16th century to the mid-18th century, when a significant cultural event happened that sounded the death-knell for alchemy. The 18th century Enlightenment saw the birth of applied science, spearheaded by chemistry, focused on the isolation and applications of the individual gases that make up air, such as oxygen and nitrous oxide. The alchemical approach to matter, such as naturally-occurring metals, was animistic. If a metal was weighed and then dry roasted in air to a powder or calx and weighed again, it was seen to gain weight. The alchemists explained this as a driving away, through heating, of an enlivening or lightening “spirit” of the metal called “phlogiston”, named by George Ernest Stahl around the beginning of the 18th century. As the spirit departed, so the metal – considered to be a living substance – became “depressed”, or leaden, and gained gravity accordingly (Hillman 2014). The once animated metal was effectively killed or de-animated by fire. Phlogiston (from the ancient Greek “to set on fire”) was a hypothesised principle of fire that existed in every combustible material such as wood, or metals that would melt or be reduced to calx. The phlogiston that was supposedly liberated in the burning, leaving a heavier residue, was configured by Johann Joachim Becher in 1669 as terra pinguis or “fat earth”, a wonderful substantial or embodied metaphor for a supposedly tangible substance. Scientists – such as Joseph Priestley (1733 – 1804) and Humphry Davy (1778 – 1829) in Britain, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (1743 – 94) in France, and Carl Wilhelm Scheele (1742– 86) in Germany – had abandoned alchemical thinking in adopting the emergent science of practical chemistry. On August 1st 1774, Priestley heated mercuric oxide in a pneumatic trough by focusing sunlight through a lens. A gas was emitted that allowed a mouse to live for a long period under glass, and that made a candle burn brightly. Priestley was unwilling at first to drop the phlogiston model, attempting to adapt his isolation of oxygen from mercuric oxide as a modified phlogiston theory; but later he abandoned the phlogiston explanation as the role of oxygen in oxidation became clear. This new chemistry explained why metals gained weight when dry roasted in an entirely different way from the phlo-

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giston animistic model. Burning a metal requires oxygen for maintaining heat, or for the flame to ignite and maintain intensity, at the same time as oxygen is added to the metal to form an oxide. Oxygen is matter that has weight. Indeed, all the constituents of “air” – such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide – have both volume and weight. The addition of oxygen then increases the base weight of the metal as the metallic oxide forms. And so literal laboratory alchemy went up in flames. But its metaphors survived intact. This was because alchemy was largely not a laboratory investigation of matter but an education into, and an application of, a material imagination that sought meanings for matter and its aesthetic self-display. As Gaston Bachelard – both scientist and literary scholar – shows in a series of books on the poetics of the four elements, the elements continue to stimulate a poetic appreciation (as a material imagination) as much as they stimulate scientific inquiry (for complete list see: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/8276.Gaston_Bachelard). Bachelard’s works constitute a modern alchemy, as an imagination – or poetics – of matter. They are essential reading to anyone interested in the intersection between natural sciences, philosophy of science, phenomenology, psychotherapy and poetics of matter.

Science can strip natural phenomena of meaning through explanation Gaston Bachelard reminds us that meditation on the candle flame as a hypnagogic state between waking and sleeping/dreaming is just as important to the development of human culture as the scientific uses of fire. Matter was indeed animated and resplendent and humans had a role in tending to the needs of worldly matter in appreciation of its aesthetic display (wonder) as well as its practical uses. Who would not want to see water as animated and of beauty where it was life-giving; or to animate (through imagination) plants and animals that gave food, metals that gave tools, wood and stone that gave shelter, fire that gave warmth and cooked food, weather patterns that gave a cycle to the seasons, and stars by which one could navigate? Surely these substances and phenomena were as “alive” as humans, invigorated and resplendent? They were inspirited and inspirational as palaeolithic cave paintings suggest. Nature was to be appreciated first and explained later, a mantra that science reversed. For the new wave of practical chemistry during the Enlightenment the aesthetic awe in which the natural world was held did not dissipate, but was overshadowed by the sudden leap in application of matter to human technological concerns – such as the invention of the miner’s safety lamp, street lighting, carbonation of water, the use of nitrous oxide as an anaesthetic and so forth (Bleakley 2021a).

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Where Jung revives alchemy as a symbol system, Hillman and others see alchemy as a system of signs With the advance of science and technology, Medieval and Renaissance alchemy lingered as a folk-memory in the Western imagination until it was revived as a symbolic system, or a universal psychological effect, by Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961), introduced in the previous chapters. Jung followed a path that diverged heavily from Freudian psychoanalysis where he emphasised the role in human activity of a universal collective unconscious of symbols and archetypes that shaped individual behaviour. Jung saw alchemy as a forgotten symbolic system that still appeared in dream imagery in particular but in a modern guise – speeding automobiles standing for alchemical sulphur (but also symptomatic of human impulsivity); grounded aircraft, machinery grinding to a halt, or the collapse of the stock market standing for alchemical lead (but also symptomatic of melancholic moods and depression); electrical conduction standing for alchemical mercury (but also symptomatic of a mercurial personality that could readily become inflated) and so forth. Alchemy was integrated into Jung’s Analytical Psychology as a symbolic background against which psychotherapeutic work may be conducted. A symbol points to the unknown, the unknowable or the numinous, which in Jung’s view the psyche constantly seeks to touch to give an individual’s life meaning and purpose. For Jung, many modern neuroses were a product of life without core meaning where religions had given way to secular humanism. Psychotherapy was conceived as one secular route to gain meaning, but, for Jung, it must ground itself in the sacred – in symbol systems that cross cultures and embrace history. For Jung’s successors, such as James Hillman (1926 – 2011), who first studied literature before psychology, questions were raised about Jung’s emphasis on universal symbol systems rather than local linguistic systems based on signs and signifiers. Hillman and others wanted to bring Jung back to earth in the sense of grounding in metaphor or image rather than symbol. Where a symbol points to the unknown, a sign points to something knowable. Sometimes this is straightforward, such as “red” for danger. However, signifiers can become metaphors, where one thing points to something deeper, more complex, open-ended, ambiguous or stimulating for the imagination. The sign moves one across to a deeper and more complex meaning, often through the introduction of ambiguity (Bleakley 2019). This is also the basis to lyric poetry (Bleakley and Neilson 2021). For example, a red poppy is taken to signify mass death during World War I and at this level may be taken as a symbol of universal suffering. But the poppy may also be a bleeding flower poetically and at this level is metaphorical. The poppy transfers us across from a base meaning to a more complex

Kekulé’s vision: science’s head eats alchemy’s tail

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Figure 3.1: Twin dragons – a lunar and solar entanglement

depth of appreciation. Importantly, the metaphor remains concrete or physical (embodied) as it points to a more complex meaning: “a tissue of lies”, “the money was laundered”. In both cases, we get the meaning not literally (“lies” are not “tissues”, but can take on a flimsiness), but concretely. Hillman turned our attention in psychology and psychotherapy away from the symbol and hidden meanings to the image, as it presents itself to the psyche through thinking, emoting and the imagination. We can take what Archetypal Psychology refers to as the “image” (participating in both concrete sense and immaterial imagination) as substantial metaphor. Now we could look at alchemy as image-based rather than symbolic, and as metaphoric rather than mystical. The return of alchemy was a way of enriching our language and creating innovative signs through metaphor enhancement and multiplication.

Kekulé’s vision: science’s head eats alchemy’s tail If we look at the 17th century alchemical image (figure 3.1), we see two dragons entwined such that one, reaching for the sun, ends up looking at the moon, where the other, reaching for the moon, ends up looking at the sun. They stand on what appears to be an empty disc embedded in an earth mound, but on closer inspection the disc is a snake eating its own tail – the Ouroboros, a well-known symbol of recreation out of one’s own body. August Kekulé, a German organic chemist, famously describes the moment when, in reverie, he realised the structure of the benzene molecule – that had evaded chemists up to that point – by visualising a snake eating its own tail: the Ouroboros (figure 3.2):

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I was sitting, writing at my text-book; but the work did not progress; my thoughts were elsewhere. I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by the repeated visions of the kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformation: long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.

Figure 3.2: The benzene molecule and the ring of the Ouroboros

Returning to the alchemical Ouroboros upon which the dragons perch (figure 3.1), in Nature the snake does indeed shed its skin and appears whole and renewed. The dragon is a mythical creature associated with darker forces that we may need to fight, just as the medieval knight slays the dragon to get closer to his goal of the Grail in the cavern that the dragon guards. So, we must overcome our fears and enter dark territory if we are to see what is beyond the penumbra of our neuroses. But what do the dragons want? They seem to be intent on licking the sun and the moon and, as noted, have twisted themselves one around the other so that their intentions are diverted, and perhaps they end up facing what they did not choose – another obstacle in the Quest. But here we have a fairly common and straightforward set of symbols – the meeting and inter-mingling of the sun and the moon, of masculine and feminine, of strong solar heat and light together with fluctuating, periodic cold lunar light. The former consistent and blinding, the latter rhythmic and reflective: in other words, the brilliance of the mind bending back upon itself to curb impulse and gain reflexive capacity: in modern terms, the lifting of false consciousness through dialectical thought. Such is the primary aim of psychodynamic psychotherapy: not to “cure” psychological symptoms, but rather to

From symbol to sign, image and metaphor: what we can learn from postmodernism

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mobilise them for greater reflexivity. Life becomes deeper, more intense and aesthetically charged. This can be uncomfortable.

From symbol to sign, image and metaphor: what we can learn from postmodernism By now, the reader will have gathered that symbolic readings leave us in the realm of Jung’s world and this is constraining and indeed unworldly. How, then, might we slip over to the local world of signs, signifiers and metaphors that shake off the heavy weights of universal symbolism that Jung invokes? (Precisely what Marx did to Hegel’s transcendental model of dialectics by grounding in dialectical materialism, as the fate of concrete capital). How might we become more mercurial, adaptable and focused on the local, moving away from the meta-narratives and mysticism of symbol work to a more worldly image-based psychology? Our intertwined solar and lunar alchemical dragons can be read as signifiers and metaphors, rather than symbols, through invoking the notion of “entanglement”. Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard (2016: 38 – 9) expand the metaphor: In recent years, “entanglement” a term central to twentieth-century quantum physics, has been widely used across a host of literatures in the humanities and social sciences … for example, to characterise the affective relationships and discontinuities between human bodies and other entities; to make sense of settler identities in colonial and postcolonial contexts; and to open up the relationships, similarities and intersections between human and nonhuman things.

The authors follow Karen Barad’s (2008) model of “primary ontological units” of the world: how persons, ideas and things may hang together in coherent but “entangled” ways to afford meanings, but can also be fluid and impermanent. Fitzgerald and Callard (2016: 39) further suggest that in our current inter-disciplinary thinking, “we re-enter a long history of binding, tangling and cutting”. We can see alchemy as a central part of this history with its primary duo of “operations” on substances, or metaphoric transformations: solve et coagula or “dissolve and congeal”, untie and tie, identifying again with a Hegelian dialectic of human thought and movement of worldly matter – thesis, antithesis, synthesis (which then forms a new thesis, and so forth) (see chapter 11). Thus, “entanglement” may be taken as a metaphor complex to describe our signal illustration of the entwined dragons, and as a doorway to the local imagebased and metaphor-based world rather than the universal world of Jung’s symbols and archetypes: a switch from “grand narratives” typical of premodern religious symbolism and modernist secular humanism to post-modern and hyper-

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modern “local narratives” (Lyotard 1984). A key example of this neo-alchemical way of imagining is Roland Barthes’ (2013: 3) semiotically-discursive method of “How to Live Together” that includes “idiorrhythmy” – productive forms of bringing humans and the material and conceptual worlds together in process (a harmony of rhythms) to make liveable, creative spaces. This echoes again the alchemical rhythm of solve et coagula, analysis and synthesis, undo and re-tie; and Hegelian dialectical rhythms. Barthes’ (ibid.) “method” involves a paradoxical “manner of proceeding towards a goal” that is prefaced by “a means by which we avoid going to a place”. Is this not Surrealism? No, it is “semiotics” claims Barthes, as the practical use of signs that I translate here as the continuous production of innovative metaphors. Barthes’ system is indeed a “meta-metaphor”. An example from Barthes is that there is no such thing as an “individual” except in the context of community. Self is defined by the presence of Other. Any guide to such adventures, such ways of co-habiting the Earth, suggests Barthes, must admit not what she knows but what she does not know, surely a classic Buddhist inversion and trope. What we do not know is how to live together and yet we pursue democracy as an ideal. By sharing what we lack, or are confused about, we form a platform for metaphor work as a contemporary alchemy. Our common admittance of ignorance is a form of entanglement that finds its own metre or rhythm, expanding and expounding poetically. This, as we shall see, is a blueprint for psychotherapeutic practice.

A moment on the couch Dear reader, please take a minute to pause, laid out on Freud’s couch in Hampstead, London (figure 3.3), and engage in a critical reverie – follow the text with an eagle eye as you simultaneously enter the text in close reading and allow associative material to arise and play off what you read. You can see that above Freud’s couch in his consulting room in Hampstead (now the official “Freud Museum” in London, not to be confused with the Freud Museum in Vienna), is a lithograph copy of a tableau painting by Pierre Brouillet depicting the infamous Jean-Martin Charcot (1825 – 93) inducing a hypnotic swooning state, or trance, in one of his long-term “hysterical” women patients at the PitiéSalpêtrière hospital in Paris. Among the audience of postgraduate students is George Gilles de la Tourette, who later, as a qualified doctor, first described what we now call “Tourette’s syndrome”. While he was a neurologist and anatomical pathologist, Charcot became famous for his teaching sessions for other psychiatrists focused on psychological approaches, where he demonstrated hypnotic trance as a healing medium. In supposed trance, women patients could both

A moment on the couch

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Figure 3.3: Freud’s London consulting room couch

“act out” their hysterical symptoms such as apparent epileptic seizures and suspend such symptoms, thus demonstrating “dissociation” and proving that psychosomatic symptoms had a psychological basis as they could be freed from soma. Freud attended Charcot’s demonstrations and learned hypnotic, or relaxation, methods from him. When Freud asked Charcot about the neurological basis to these women’s symptoms of hysteria, Charcot apparently answered that there was no neurological cause. It was emotional or affective and then psychological – grounded, “toujours” (“always”) said Charcot (according to Freud) in “la chose génitale” (sexuality). This supposedly seeded Freud’s notion of erotic transference in psychotherapy. However, subsequent scholarship has shown that Charcot probably did not utter this phrase to Freud and did not necessarily follow this view (Barker 2015). Rather, in an unconscious identification, or desire, Freud conjured the association with Charcot for his own interests in the convergence between repressed sexual desire and so-called “hysterical” symptoms – that Freud himself would later term a “wish fulfilment” and Lacan celebrated as the primary motive for human life – “desire”. Lacan (2015) defined desire as “a relation of being to lack”. In other words, what we don’t have but want creates a life of “wishing for”, a motive. But this is not wishing for trivia or material things. Rather it is a wishing for depth. This is the human condition, that both wishes for – and is fearful of – greater complexity, intensity and quality. The fearful remain in the zone of a will-to-stability, where the innovative step out and take risks. A neurosis is a condition of cramp that anchors in the instrumental and functional; the psychotherapeutic invitation is to embrace the depth, intensity and complexity of the aesthetic, ethical, political and spiritual.

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Returning to Charcot’s theatre, what we do know is that Charcot’s patients were consummate actresses, able to switch into role for these demonstrations of hysterical “dissociation”. The woman in this picture (figure 3.4) is Marie Wittman, a long-term patient at the hospital treated by Charcot for nearly 20 years. She was well enough, after Charcot’s death, to take a job at the hospital, training as a radiology assistant. She, tragically, had both arms amputated later in life from radiation poisoning, dying in 1913 aged 54.

Figure 3.4: Charcot “treats” Marie Wittman

This literal amputation-dissociation is a cruel reminder of Wittman’s “history” of dissociation, becoming an arch-patient of Charcot’s for clinical demonstrations best seen perhaps as performance art, as noted above. For this reason, we might see dissociative hysteria of the kind Charcot both cultivated and “treated” as bodily metaphor, or metaphors of substance. “Hysteria” outdoes its literal source as “wandering womb” to become extraordinary self-control or self-hypnosis. Charcot, as self-elected phallic ringmaster, aligns himself unconsciously with the lineage of several generations of alchemists, many of whom were also showmen at the same time as they were physicians of their age.

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Why metaphors of substance? As medicine and healthcare have become progressively more biomedically oriented and less concerned with the intricacies of the humane side of practice, so psychotherapies have followed in their wake. The clinical imagination has shrivelled in relationship to the instrumental, mirrored in drug regimes, in short-term therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and in “pop” therapies such as mindfulness. “Mindfulness” was the term coined by the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who recently died, for a waking meditation technique. But his work has been hollowed out where mindfulness is marketed purely as technique rather than philosophy; again, a reduction to the instrumental or functional, stripping away other values. A consequence of this shift to what proponents of shortterm therapies deem as “pragmatic” (a word that has become what students of metaphor call a “god term”, a taken-for-granted descriptor that conceals a multitude of difficulties) is paucity of the linguistic register. This is reflected in a shift from high and intensive use of creative metaphors to general use of literal, technical language avoiding metaphor, an unfortunate fallout from crude pragmatism (Bleakley and Neilson 2021). Here, language use is less poetic, and even starved of narrative interest, as the focus turns to literal symptom eradication or management. However, the psychotherapist Niklas Törneke (2017) has recently claimed that metaphor is regularly utilised across psychotherapies, but such usage is commonly overlooked or disregarded as trivial. His claim is that the metaphor horde is there, but it is missed or concealed. Of what consequence is the use of metaphor in psychodynamic psychotherapy? More importantly, is such psychotherapy a field of human activity in which innovation in metaphor production is common? Certainly, I will argue, such psychotherapy should offer this possibility, but how will it do so if the Well of unconscious life as a ground of metaphor has dried up, is under-utilised or neglected, or has been covered or blocked as functional, where short-term therapies gain more and more of a foothold? In an era where movements such as gender, race and disability activism are flourishing – coining a variety of metaphors such as “questioning” in gender identification and “mad studies” in reconstructions of psychiatry – it seems strange that the previously large container for understanding and working with mental health issues psychologically is reduced to the bottle’s neck as the body of the bottle is discarded. The most prominent victim here is the range of psychodynamic approaches that have their genesis in psychoanalysis. The usual objection is that long-term therapies are unsustainable in highly pressured health systems, overlooking the longstanding development of brief psychodynamic therapies.

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As noted earlier, in his reformulation of psychoanalysis based on a shared symbolic cultural memory, Jung found that motifs in early modern alchemy were echoed by his modern patients. Alchemical motifs appeared in their dreams and fantasies in a startling, direct fashion (for example, dreams of processes such as distillation), but more often in what Jung read as a disguised manner open to interpretation (for example, colours in dreams associated with alchemists’ description of colour changes in the Work; or patient’s impulses coded, such as a fast-moving and out-of-control automobile guzzling fuel – linked to alchemical descriptions of red sulphur that burns up any other matter). As Jung translated this rich alchemical material into his own system of depth psychology (Analytical Psychology), so he reduced alchemy to psychology rather than drawing on psychology to better understand alchemy (as James Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology does). In some ways the embodied metaphors of alchemy, true to their natural sources (“alchemical salt”, “red sulphur”, “green sulphur” and so forth) were disembodied or translated into Jung’s conceptual apparatus of archetypal and symbolic forms. Psychologisms such as “anima”, “animus”, and “shadow” described archetypes of power, morality and gender that seem to offer rather crude content generalisations for understanding a complex contemporary world of specific instances within diversity, now perhaps better understood through process models of gender fluidity, Foucauldian power as “capillary” or forms of resistance, and post-Nietzschean moral relativism.

James Hillman’s alchemical imagination In Jung’s wake, as noted, James Hillman (2014), the father of modern Archetypal Psychology, has been the most significant figure in reviewing Jung’s use of alchemy and developing an approach that does not reduce alchemy to psychology, but rather draws on psychology to enrich our understanding, and contemporary applications, of the premodern alchemical imagination. Hillman offers in particular three significant shifts from Jung’s work. First, that alchemical language should not be “psychologised” – translated into purely psychological understanding. Rather, Hillman exhorts us to think psychology alchemically – through an alchemical imagination. Second, and this is a radical move within depth psychology, Hillman (1977) suggests that the most “unconscious” part of the human psyche is the ego. Where Freud saw the ego as the locus for conscious struggle for a strong sense of self (now more often referred to as issues of “identification” and “identity”) in the face of the many defence mechanisms (such as denial, projection, displacement and so forth) that protect the ego from being overwhelmed, Hillman suggested

James Hillman’s alchemical imagination

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that the ego is already the most unconscious part of the psyche – where it is blinded by its own heroic brilliance. Examples of this include common neuroses of mania and narcissism, where the ego fails to recognise that it is driven and inflated. Psychotherapy then does not set out to strengthen the ego by uncovering the dynamics of its defence mechanisms; rather, it allows the ego to be challenged, bruised and tenderised so that we become less heroically self-centred. This is what alchemists call “the stone that is not a stone” which is also simultaneously, and paradoxically, both the prima materia or beginning of the Work and the goal of the Work (re-stating the origin myth of the Eternal return; the pedagogical model of a spiral curriculum where topics are re-visited and deepened on regular cycles; and the Hegelian model of humanity’s development as dialectic, where thesis and antithesis lead to synthesis as a new thesis, and so forth). The Stone can be soft and pliable. In other words, the ego (as “humanity”) is ouroboric, or constantly eats itself, cancels itself and renews – or re-stor(i)es – itself. The Work is not, as New Age interpretations would have it, about “growth”, but can be seen as a process of self-cancelling: a recognition of what we do not know, returning to Roland Barthes’ model of community life as an experiment in living with high levels of ambiguity or uncertainty. Again, the dominant value system is the search for authentic democracy. This condition can be comprehended through Jacques Derrida’s (1974, 1980) notion of “iterability” where words repeat themselves over and over, but contexts for words change and are always fresh (for “words” substitute “ego”) so that the same word takes on different tones. It is like jazz improvisation on a melody, scale and key. The melody, scale and key remain the same but the interpretation is different on each occasion. Derrida calls this an “invention of the other”. Between such repetitions (the irritable insistence of the ego) is the presence of absence, or the realisation that the stone is not a stone: we are climbing a ladder but it is against the wrong wall. Thus, we are always mourning the death of the ego, as an absent presence, or in Hillman’s terms, the most unconscious part of psyche. Because of such mourning, our basic condition is melancholic. This, following Derrida, is the realisation that totalising knowledge or life is always frustrated by “supplementarity” – there is always a horizon never reached, a “something missing”, an unknown causal factor. For Jung’s colleague Marie-Louise von Franz (1997a), melancholia is the default position for an alchemical psychotherapy. Start sessions with the assumption that alchemical lead (the depressive position) is a baseline from which aspirations to beautification, deepening and intensity may be considered. Bringing reflexivity into such a depressive position may be seen as the core of alchemical psychotherapeutic Work, known as touching substantial metaphorical-alchemical “lead” with substantial metaphorical-alchemical “mercury”, as explored in later chapters.

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Third, and following on from Hillman’s view of the ego, the de-centring of ego psychology allows for a growth of “world soul” or a world-centred psychology (Hillman and Ventura 1992). Here, the therapeutic work is not focused on strengthening the ego or on exposing the dynamics of ego defence mechanisms, but rather on switching the focus of attention of therapy from individuals to the world – for example treating “food disorders” rather than “eating disorders”, or treating the climate crisis and humanity’s narcissism rather than the overheating of egos in narcissists. In these moves, Hillman does not throw the baby out with the bathwater – he believes that personal developmental issues are important in human psychology, but he is not fixated on this, as is most of psychoanalysis, believing after Jung that, for example, the “child” as an archetype represents itself differently as symptom (as images and metaphors) in different people (here, an overbearing “innocence”, there a fixation on capital and profit in business that is sheer greed reflecting an unresolved “anality”). For Hillman, alchemy provides a rich metaphorical background against which to imagine such issues and to proceed therapeutically: “innocence” as green sulphur (see chapter 7), described by the alchemists as the force of Nature that must not be corrupted; “anality” as the congealed tars and stink of red sulphur after the impulsive and compulsive drives have had their satisfaction, burning up others in their wake (see chapter 6).

Figure 3.5: The Green Lion eats the sun

Towards a world soul: the Green Lion eats the Sun

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Towards a world soul: the Green Lion eats the Sun In alchemical symbolism, the green lion is shown “eating” the red sun that bleeds like a steak – or, Nature both consumes and treats human impulses (figure 3.5). Another interpretation says that the lion is not eating but disgorging the sun, or creating a difference between the two bodies. Either way, there is a rhythm of absorbing and separating: coagula et solve. The Green Lion that represents vegetation needs the sun for growth, but it also tempers impulse represented by solar force. Mania within cyclothymia demands not lithium or hypothymics, but rather an environment that can absorb and focus impulse (for example, a “green” gymnasium walking programme, or a “blue” gymnasium swimming and surfing programme). The “anal stink” can be treated through profit sharing with good causes, so that a therapy might be spending time with homeless people and seeing how housing programmes can offer an alternative to rough sleeping. Alchemy can be contemporary – it is a way of seeing, or defamiliarising the familiar and introducing creative, “world soul” interventions. The alchemical imagination is a metaphorrich background against which psychotherapies can be re-imagined and re-structured. Once, metals were known not by their scientific properties but by their ease of access (extraction), their hardness and malleability, their reaction to heat (smelting), their colours and their ability to combine with other metals. (Many cities developed on geological fault-lines because this is where metals are forced to close to the surface of the earth, and readily mined). These properties gave substances such as metals personalities or characters. Three modes of reacting with natural substances such as metals were described. First, humans “perfecting” metals through extraction, smelting and refining and through mixing with other metals. Second, metals were seen to “perfect” humans by expanding our capabilities (used as manufactured implements in agriculture and war in particular) and our aesthetic worlds (uses as jewellery and adornment). These were examples of substantial or embodied metaphors, where jewellery is not just adornment but can signify power through status, or expands the beauty of the wearer. Third, metals joined other natural phenomena in strings of substitutions and correspondences that we call metonymy – the sun associated with gold, silver with the moon. Metonymical and associational chains (gold-sun-yellow-straw-bright-warm) contained within them “beaded” metaphors such as lead (heavy, malleable, grey) signifying melancholia. Thus, humans were integrated into a natural world in which qualities of substances provided animation and a two-way process was imagined: humans acting as midwives to birth and then expand such qualities of substances by putting them to use, appreciating them aesthetically, or employing them in a sacred way as celebration of mystery; and substances acting as midwives to birth and then ex-

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panding qualities of humans: from hunting and scavenging to agriculture to warfare to religion to domestic architectures and to the uses of herbs and metals medicinally with all the associated cultural manifestations. From red ochre face adornment to pottery and weaving, the natural world and the human cultural worlds were in dialectical conversation. Then came the birth of science and technologies, where humans became masters over the natural world. Substances were no longer treated with awe and reverence (sacred) but were met with a technical imagination (secular and functional). Rocks and metals were rendered inanimate; plants partly animate. Curiosity of course was doubled as the workings of the natural world were understood at a natural history level, and then microscopically and finally sub-atomically, embracing discovery of gases, chemicals, bacteria and viruses. This was always fascinating. The 18thc Enlightenment imagination, providing the death-knell for an alchemical imagination as noted at the beginning of this chapter, ushered in mechanisms of control such as systems of classification (Foucault 1974). The discovery of the table of elements arranged by atomic weights – by Dimitri Mendeleev in 1869 – might have been seen as a wonder of Nature’s order, but was gradually cast as an aspect of human ingenuity as elements were discovered that fitted gaps in the periodic table. The natural world of Earth continues to be “conquered”, mapped and re-mapped as a process of de-mystification: the rainbow, once a sign of a goddess’ epiphany or a symbol of hope, becomes a literal weather phenomenon and then a spectacle “merely” caused by refraction of sunlight through water droplets. Wonder was so readily squeezed out. Darwin turned Nature into a functional struggle (“survival of the fittest”) such that every television natural history programme that you now see (particularly the David Attenborough spectaculars) cast every natural phenomenon in terms of stark competition rather than collaboration and self-expression of beauty. But one last territory of wonder is the human imagination. However much we attempt to reduce imagination to brain mechanisms, there is still a vast disjunct between the power of imaginative thinking and the firing of neurons. Besides which, cognition is not just embodied but is worldly – we imagine in the context of our embedding in environments that constantly provide us with stimulation; and our cognitions are now so strongly enhanced and distributed through artefacts such as computers. We have a number of languages that capture and express this territory of the human imagination and these are primarily the media of the arts and humanities. One phenomenon of language in particular embraces the still mysterious aspect of human imagination: metaphor (and analogy) – perhaps best expressed through poetry, a highly condensed, metaphor-rich medium. It is the injection of embodied metaphor into enacted language that stops the human imagination from capture by technological fixations driven by values of literalism

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and instrumentalism. Metaphor springs us from this jail to encourage embrace of wider values such as the aesthetic, encouraging poetic engagement with the everyday and vernacular. We also embrace poetic mystery through psychology and ethnography in particular: psychology looking at reaches of the mind and behaviour, and ethnography looking at cultural and historical variations of such behaviour. A tradition that stretches back before Freud describes an unconscious life shaping consciousness, expressed as a dual-edged sword where it is both irrational and highly productive in terms of applicable rather than vapid imagination. This is now described in cognitive psychology and linguistics as “tacit knowing” (Polanyi 1983), or a “cognitive unconscious” (Hofstadter and Sander 2013). It is in this “embodied mind” (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 2016) that metaphors are minted, reflecting and reproducing such embodiment at higher registers of intensity (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). But long before such contemporary interest in an embodied and distributed cognition – whose primary purpose is the invention of “metaphors we live by” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980) – Jung, again, had re-discovered medieval and Renaissance alchemy (primarily a Western, European version) as a premodern, prescientific system of thought describing what we now call an “extended” cognitive unconscious (embracing the matter of the world that affords perception and thought). But Jung, attempting to position the human psyche in the collective, invited a collective unconscious into the small house of the human psyche, or personalised this unconscious, where the alchemists’ worldview (as described above) was extra-personal, even impersonal, embracing the psyche of matter. As Jung’s own notorious mental breakdown indicated, one cannot force the immensity of the mythological collective and its symbol systems into the small house of a human psyche. This really is a form of madness. The alchemists, in contrast, seemed to be asking not “what is the matter with me, and can I invite in the symbolic world of myth to sort this out?”, but “what is the matter with matter (or the stuff of the world) and how might humans imagine this?” We are now so embedded in personalistic psychology and its therapeutic offshoots that it is hard to regain a position of “world soul” rather than “personal soul”, or to embed ourselves in the world around us rather than to retreat into “selfhood”. The Protestant-Capitalist tradition breeds the notion of “self ” as capital and base for “development”, against other spiritual views such as Buddhism that teach self-less-ness or transcendence of ego. Alchemy appears to provide a metaphor-rich imagination of substance whose primary purpose is neither to work out the nature of compositions and interactions of substances (later the realm of chemistry), nor to provide a means of human psychological “development” or “growth” (later the realm of Jungian psychology and its New Age aberrations), but rather to establish deep appreciation of Nature as a form of meaning. Thus, al-

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chemists were perhaps more interested in the “souls” of metals than in the souls of humans, although in the presence of the revealed souls of metals, so the human soul would be deepened by association. By “soul” here, for humans, I mean the extent of imagination.

Chapter 4 Life distilled In the wake of modern science, alchemy is seen as a historical anachronism. However, this is to read alchemy literally rather than figuratively and then to miss that the alchemical imagination has much to offer contemporary psychiatry and psychotherapy, particularly as a source of inventive image and metaphor that allows us, for example, to think mental healthcare more imaginatively. Alchemical thinking invites a poetic imagination into an otherwise reductive biomedical and behavioural psychology to stimulate “thinking otherwise” about habitual practices. In this chapter I show how psychotherapy can be configured as work of embodied metaphor application and appreciation drawing on a poetic imagination. This challenges the dominant view of psychotherapy that is mechanical and tending more and more towards a reductive model of brain science. The curative fantasies here are shaped by engineering metaphors and strategies (“let’s fix you”). There is nothing wrong with exploring mental health phenomena at this level of explanation if complexity is retained; the danger is exclusivity – there are personal, social and cultural levels of explanation too. Life distilled to singular explanatory models goes against the grain and spirit of an alchemical imagination that is inclusive, embracing and polyphonic.

Alchemy – the softening of stones The modern word “alchemy” is derived from the Arabic kimiya or al-kīmiyāʾ (“al” means “the”). In turn the Arabic is derived from the Ancient Greek χημία, khēmia, or χημεία, khēmeia, referring to the “art of alloying metals”. This is cognate with χύμα (khúma, “fluid”), from χέω (khéō, “I pour”). Alchemy is then grounded in practices of metallurgy such as smelting (meaning “melting”): the softening of stones. The biggest early technological leaps for humankind were based in discovery of the earth’s ores and means of extraction. Amongst his medical, alchemical and chemical texts, Paracelsus also wrote a book on metallurgy and mining. There was already an “elemental imagination” at work when Lucretius (99 – 55 BC), a Roman philosopher and poet, wrote his only surviving work De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). The poem describes the birth of early technologies, or how humanity utilised natural materials for cultural development (such as toolmaking), presciently speculating that all matter is made up from fundamental “atoms”. This imagination is retained in Georgius Agricola’s (1556) De Re Metallica (On the Nature of Metals (Minerals)), the first book on mining based on field rehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-006

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search and observation. Agricola’s book could easily be mistaken for an alchemical text – particularly the woodcuts illustrating furnaces, because, as we see in the following chapter, maintaining the “fire” is the bedrock of alchemical work (where “fire” extends beyond literal flame to include metaphoric heats, the warmth and passions of human relations, and the intensities of desires, enthusiasms and interests). And this provides an important grounding for us in considering mental health – first, do not stray from the natural, physical expression through too much conceptual frame; but, second, do not reduce the multiple expressions of psychological states purely to the bottom line of brain chemistry. Further, therapy is built on maintaining human warmth, or restoring natural conviviality to its symptomatic interruption. Alchemy is often read as the “perfecting” of Nature. For example, Stanislas Klossowski de Rola (2013) describes alchemy as a mystical system through which “opposing forces attain the perfect synthesis of which gold is the emblem”. I am sceptical of such idealism and mystical readings, especially where these might be translated into the earthy matters of mental health and illness. And I suggest Paracelsus would have agreed – the “perfection” of nature is a matter of vigilant care rather than idealistic cure. Symptom is not to be eradicated but engaged to reveal its individual patterns. Symptoms serve purposes. Paracelsus lets us into the secret of alchemy: it is a way of perfecting nature’s unfinished work imperfectly. This is Jacques Lacan’s the Real – that aspect of existence that we “know” but can never “know” because the natural world is filtered through human consciousness, language and culture (the Symbolic) and then adapted to the intense greed of the ego or self (the Imaginary), or as Lacan named these three orders: Impossibility (the Real), Absence (the Symbolic) and Fraud (the Imaginary). Science of course has taken on this role and has its own epistemologies grounded in the experimental method and multiple verifications of findings. But science has side-lined the ontological aspect of bringing Nature to fruition: as our facilitation of natural processes proceeds, science says nothing of the parallel development of the scientist. Thus, we know of Newton’s account of gravitational laws, Einstein’s theory of relativity and Jennifer Doudna’s CRISPR technology for gene editing, but what of the effects of these perfections of Nature on the scientists themselves? Did Nature radically transform or complexify the scientists? How did their intensities as individuals change? Alchemy describes the development of the person and the culture as running parallel to facilitation of the development of matter. Both are matters of a fine balance of interrogation and love, or care; both seek beauty or qualities rather than “perfection” in terms of quantities (controlling weight, cholesterol levels, points on a pain scale, and so forth).

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Paracelsus (in Moran 2019: 39) said: “What is not there entirely the alchemist must complete … Thus it is also with medicines”. Again, in turn, Nature “completes” (or rather complexifies) the alchemist, who must attend to these transformations. Paracelsus continues with a telling conclusion, where alchemy is “the art of removing the useless from the useful and bringing a thing to its final being and material end” (ibid.: 40). We can question the idealism of such a project, but we see that its machinations bring together the aesthetic (the creation of beauty) with the functional (the creation of beauty in “usefulness”). Alchemy, as early medicine, aligns the person with the natural world in a kind of midwifery as beautifully articulated craft, and in turn becomes a method of the art of “self-forming”. Interested just as much in psychological health as the physical, Paracelsus maintained a non-normative view of what constitutes psychological wellbeing. Each individual expresses a different profile and we are all conflicted by psychological disturbances just as we have to suffer the inevitable onset of illnesses and death. But we can make sense of our being. He described an intimate relationship between psyche and soma, exhorting us to “treat the mind, and the body will get well” (ibid.: 64). Predating psychoanalysis, Paracelsus suggested that repressed emotions can create illness and that expressed emotions can cure. Again, psychoanalysis provides us with a galaxy of conceptual notions that we can utilise in imagining our psychological states, such as “id”, “ego”, “superego”, “displacement”, “projection” and so forth. But these lack metaphoric substance. They are abstracted from Nature (again, who has seen an “unconscious” or an “id”?). In contrast, Paracelsus (and alchemy generally) provides us with a rich metaphorical web based on “expanded” natural substances (“salt”, “sulphur”, “mercury”, “lead”) and operations on substances (from which psychoanalysis borrowed its terms) such as “projection” and “sublimation”. Alchemy describes such transformations in sensual terms – what can be seen, smelt, tasted, touched, and absorbed; what attracts and what repels, what arouses passions and memories. The biomedical sceptic should, properly, stop us in our tracks and ask: “how can metaphors create or cure illness? Surely they are merely descriptive of conditions?” Well, our everyday living and relationships are surely embodied and enactive metaphors, activities that far outstrip their literal content but rather signify deeper meanings. A fleeting moment’s eye contact through a car window tumbles into a fantasy riddled with emotion and invoking memories. An excessively gripping handshake with another (who fails at the same time to make reassuring eye contact and whose palm may be clammy) signals a desire to control and triggers memories of a dominant father. Apparently petty microaggressions in a work context begin to accumulate into bullying and harassment that we can picture metaphorically and symbolically as snakes and ladders. Conversely, the therapist providing a combination of warmth, inquiry and challenge is affording a stream of

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affirmative enactive and embodied metaphors that provide roadmaps for what symptoms want. As chapters 9 – 11 illustrate in detail, study of the multiple “operations” described by alchemists upon substances to stimulate transformations are readily configured in psychological terms, such as calcining, where one may be reduced to dry ashes or dry essences through “burnout” – perhaps the most common symptom currently amongst medical and healthcare staff in the Covid era. The consequences are as much physical as psychological: tiredness or lack of energy, muscle aches and pains, dull headaches, general irritability and so forth (webmd 2021). Early Modern alchemy is usually described in three ways. First, the misguided notion that gold really can be made from base metals given the right procedures. This is to take alchemy literally rather than seriously and is misguided. It is in itself a sign of inflation and grandiosity. Ironically, modern science can make gold from other elements, but this requires nuclear rather than chemical reactions so expensive that the gold produced would not pay for the process involved: Gold is the chemical element with 79 protons in each atomic nucleus. Every atom containing 79 protons is a gold atom, and all gold atoms behave the same chemically. In principle, we can therefore create gold by simply assembling 79 protons (and enough neutrons to make the nucleus stable). Or even better, we can remove one proton from mercury (which has 80) or add one proton to platinum (which has 78) in order to make gold. The process is simple in principle but hard to do in practice. Adding or removing protons from a nucleus are types of nuclear reactions. As such, no series of chemical reactions can ever create gold. Chemical reactions change the number and shape of the electrons in an atom but leave the nucleus of the atom unchanged. The ancient alchemist dream of creating gold by simply reacting chemicals is therefore impossible. You have to use nuclear reactions to create gold. The difficulty is that nuclear reactions require a lot of energy. (Baird 2014).

Second, the intensive laboratory-based, hands-on practices of alchemy leading to an intimate knowledge of how substances change when they are subjected to grades of fire, leads to empirical chemistry (established in the 18th century). Third, thanks to Jung’s intensive study of alchemical texts as symbolic of the human condition, alchemy can be thought of as a forerunner to psychoanalysis. Here, psychological and spiritual transformations are coded as changes in matter within a hermeneutic or mystery tradition. Alchemy provides a complex symbol system for contemplation of human individuation (realising potential), as does psychoanalysis in its abstractions such as “defence mechanisms”. But there is a fourth option, where alchemy is shifted from its Jungian ground in symbols to a grounding in complex signs as metaphors, where this can be seen as forerunner to modern poetry – as a metaphor factory and medium for exercising creative reverie. Of contemporary psychologists and therapists, as noted, James Hillman (2014) is the best example of this approach. The alchemical work and po-

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etic diction are then identical. This book follows such a fourth line, reading “alchemy” as a medium for metaphor generation in the face of a dominant mechanical, scientific ideology that rejects metaphor and poetics for literal description and itemisation. The poetic approach draws on the tradition of alchemy as a psychological process, but takes psychology away from sole interest in the personal to reconnect with the world. Through the poetic imagination, words and images engage objects or worldly phenomena. Thus, we engage worldly substances such as lead, or processes such as gravity, but through the filters of metaphors. So, leaden depression or melancholia is appreciated through the nature of lead itself – heavy and grey (gravity, seriousness), and poisonous over time (obsessive introspection). But, while the “stone” of lead is heavy, it is malleable and readily softened or melted. Melancholia can transform. Here is Shakespeare’s Hamlet: I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air – look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

Within the fug of “foul and pestilent congregation of vapours” now experienced is the knowledge of “this majestical roof fretted with golden fire”, looking up and out to the sky. Depression contains its cure within its own body. Lead is heavy but soft and malleable. Alchemy describes operations conducted on metals to “perfect” nature. Operations include differing methods of dissolving in liquids, or driving off liquids and breaking up solids through fire (calcining); or coagulating, producing differing kinds of solids and amalgams. The rhythm mirrors therapy: analysis and synthesis, breaking down into particulars and building up again to provide a different picture, generating insight. But the synthesis is best grasped through complexity and chaos theory, not as a reductive, linear process. The “container” must be broken, or necessarily read as porous and constantly in translational contact with other systems. The metals pass through various stages of transformation largely indicated by changes in colour, sometimes described as a sequence: from black and blue to yellow, white, silver and gold (Hillman ibid.). This is embodied metaphor, where the blacks, blues and then yellows of bruising giving way to riches of insight (silvers and golds). Symptom accompanies insight or illumination. There is often an appearance of a rainbow or “peacock’s tail” heralding the gold, and doesn’t a sudden insight or illumination feel this way? Alchemy provides a material poetic diction (again embodied and enacted metaphors) describing both worldly things and

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events, and the human condition. From Shakespeare’s melancholic Don John and mercurial Ariel to contemporary depressions in the economy and mercurial politics, alchemical language as metaphoric store serves us mightily. Who has not seen the peacock’s tail or rainbow literally and prized its magnificence, or felt the peacock’s tail or rainbow as the mighty flush of falling head over heels in love?

The death of alchemy and the birth of chemistry revisited Before the experimental wisdom of science and the development of sophisticated ways of investigating the natural world, Nature could be described and catalogued, but not properly explained. Such explanations were speculative or imaginative: philosophical, poetic and not based in experiment. In literally investigating how materials such as metals responded to heat, alchemy was a forerunner to chemistry. In creating a vocabulary of metaphors about substances, alchemy was also a kind of poetry. Alchemy acts as a transformative medium through which we can resist taking phenomena literally, yet we also avoid losing the matter of the world through abstraction. Alchemy invites a material imagination and provides a vocabulary for transformation. It is a medium for understanding the interaction of mind and matter, or the psychosomatic – a word first coined by the poet Coleridge. Alchemy provided a crossroads where matter and speculation about that matter met. As described in the previous chapter 3, the death of alchemy and the birth of chemistry were marked by the decline of the phlogiston theory in the late 18th century (Hillman ibid.; Nicholl 1980). Even Isaac Newton (1643 – 1727) was passionately interested in alchemy; while Joseph Priestley, who isolated oxygen in 1774, was also a believer in the phlogiston idea. Recall that when a metal is burned it increases in weight. The phlogiston theory said that an animating and lightening “spirit” within the metal is driven off by heat, causing the metal to get heavier (or depressed, melancholic). In Shakespeare’s The Tempest written between 1610 – 11, the spirit Ariel represents phlogiston. Trapped by the witch Sycorax in a tree and made inactive (heavy), Ariel is released by Prospero to act as his guiding spirit or intelligence. In 1772 Carl Wilhelm Scheele isolated oxygen, but did not write up his experiments until after Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier had isolated oxygen in 1774. Priestley was also a devotee of alchemy. By the end of the 18th century the phlogiston theory had collapsed, as more gases were isolated and their properties studied. Metals did not lose some magical animating spirit said the new chemists, rejecting an alchemical worldview. Rather, as described in the previous chapter 3, oxygen combined with the metal during heating, and the gas (that has volume and weight) added to the overall weight of the metal during the process of oxidizing.

Are we worth our salt?

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Material chemistry, with a reductive worldview of literalism (what can be weighed and measured, and what evidence can be gleaned from controlled experiments) displaced the alchemical worldview.

Are we worth our salt? Leona Godin (2016), commenting on “the poetry of alchemy”, notes: writers worth their salt know writing can be fine or painful, but it’s the edit – the distillation – into high proof prose or poetry that knocks socks off. Writing – the putting words on paper or device – is like dropping berries in a bucket–fermentation will happen and you will get something mildly alcoholic. You can thank the yeast fairies for that. Likewise, you can thank the human brain for the stories and images that drop into the buckets of our imagination. But it is the work of the writer to distill the fermented mash into a strong-ass spirit. … Adam Rogers writes, “Distillation tells us that having less of something can make it more potent. It is concentration. It is focus.” While fermentation is natural and happens with or without us, distillation is a human invention, a technology.

Where the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, echoing the quote above, says “Remember that poetry is life distilled”, we may imagine that poetry foregrounds metaphors from life as background, giving metaphors a particular prominence – as things raised from a flat surface and then a terrace or platform. This is a kind of distilling out from a homogenous background. In this chapter I dwell on the process of “distillation” as a key to both poetry and psychotherapy, where metaphors are not borrowed from “life”, or re-heated, but created from scratch from imagination. Is imagination not “life” as yet undistilled or raised to platform? Imagination is tacit, engages with absence and the beyond-conscious. Imagination is part of soul, or psyche – a metaphor for “depth” (that in turn is a metaphor for quality). And so we create a metonymic chain of qualities and intensities that may just reveal an inherent rhythm, a motion and an insistence. This is a poem in creation. Its productive force, an over-production, must however be distilled. It is this distillation that, both literally and figuratively, “makes sense”. The raw, undistilled poem is too hot to handle or too heavy to lift (having its birth in the earth or body’s core) and must be cooled at room temperature. This is a first rule of psychodynamic psychotherapeutic practice. The client’s raw matter is too engaged with gravity to lift out whole from psychic depths and is too hot to handle in its raw state. Thus, it must be refined or analysed (the work of therapy as alchemy). It must be distilled, to extract the essential meaning. The word “distill” has its origins in the Latin de (“down” or “away”) and stilla (a drop). To distill is to gather the essence of something through heating and con-

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densing, or through any method of condensing. This is not only a great description of the poetic process as innovation, but is also a fundamental process in alchemy and later in chemistry. It aims to increase purity. In epistemology, or theory of knowledge, a distillation is a tight or condensed description aiming at the kernel of truth. Distillation draws out the essence of something through a purity of re-invention. It is the essence of any spiritual or moral discipline, of art and of elite sport. If we again translate this across to the practices of psychodynamic or depth psychotherapy, distillation describes the continuous process of close or vigilant attention to what is going on with the client. The therapist cannot take in everything that is happening and so attention must be selective, or distillation must constantly occur. At the same time, an opposite process is occurring of free-ranging or “paradoxical” attention in which a general picture of the process or encounter is grasped at a more intuitive level. Vigilant attention offers the specifics. The same applies to diagnoses and interpretations, that may at first be multiple and wide ranging, but are gradually refined. Returning to a point made earlier, and drawing on mining metaphors, raw (hot and heavy) psychic matter hacked out in lumps in psychotherapy through the client’s associations must be refined through interpretation.

Figure 4.1: Alchemical distillation

The process of writing poetry as distillate is one that is learned and is not divinely inspired. Many people think that they can write poetry straight off the top of their heads, missing the art of poetry that is a refined imagination drawing on technique such as use of field, rhythm, alliteration and, particularly, wise use of metaphor. Psychotherapy too is a wise use of metaphor, as is alchemy. Both alchemy and psychotherapy are poetic practices of distillation dedicated to the production and ap-

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plication of novel metaphors. Is this obfuscation? Isn’t psychotherapy much simpler – about people with mental health issues receiving care and hopefully recovering? Well, no. Psychodynamic psychotherapy is an educative process as much as curative. It surprises by suggesting that symptoms have purposes and meanings, so that to eradicate them, following a medical model, is premature.

Challenging the god term “mental health” While debates rage about the efficacy of a variety of approaches to psychotherapy, the conditions that are treated are mutable. “Mental health” is a relative term, not only for neuroses but also the more troubling psychoses. The effects of lockdown and isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic (from 2019 – 21) in the UK included “a 75 % increase in the number of people referred to mental health services for their first suspected episode of psychosis”, constituting over 13,000 referrals (Pidd 2021). Symptoms include disorientation, hallucinations and delusions. Lockdown served to raise public awareness concerning mental health, in particular the role of social deprivation. The figures suggest that in the UK annually one in every six adults has been diagnosed with a common mental health disorder such as anxiety, depression and related eating disorders. Nearly 8 % of the UK population currently display symptoms of mixed anxiety and depression bad enough to warrant visits to the General Practitioner, while 40 % of patients presenting to GP practices do so with mental health symptoms. Prescriptions for antidepressants have almost doubled in a decade, from nearly 36 million in 2008 to 71 million in 2018. There is an economic cost: in the UK, one fifth of days lost from work can be attributed to mixed anxiety and depression. Meanwhile, across many studies, nearly half of medical and healthcare workers globally are increasingly suffering from mental health issues related to stress and burnout. Against such a background, we have a moral duty as caring communities to alleviate suffering caused by mental health issues, particularly in addressing systemic inequities and inequalities, where, for example the Race Equality Foundation (2020) found that, black and minority ethnic communities are at comparatively higher risk of mental ill health … . For example, people from African Caribbean communities are three times more likely to be diagnosed and admitted to hospital for schizophrenia than any other group. Irish Travellers are six times more likely to die as a result of suicide than non-Travellers. … (while) black and minority ethnic communities are less likely to access mental health support in primary care (i. e. through their GP) and more likely to end up in crisis care.

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Such inequities are also gender-based, such as mental health issues suffered by women as a consequence of domestic abuse or “intimate partner violence” (Refuge 2021). While suffering is evident and public concern is high, “mental health” has nevertheless become a “god term”, used as if we all shared common understandings of its meaning and references. The American rhetorician Kenneth Burke (1969) first introduced the descriptor “god term” for words or phrases that are used rhetorically, uncritically and unreflexively, as Kperogi (2016) summarises: that instinctively evoke warm fuzzy feelings in people, that effortlessly sway opinions, and that galvanize people into action. The words are often so broad and so semantically indeterminate that anyone can read any positive meaning into them. In other words, they are clean semantic slates on which people inscribe whatever positive attributes they want.

In The Ethics of Rhetoric, Richard Weaver (1953/2017), a rhetorician following in Burke’s footsteps, notes that Burke’s “god term” has “inherent potency” as a “rhetorical absolute”. While a god term may remain vague and baggy, in its very invocation it arouses passion, commitment and apparent understanding; even more, explanation in the absence of facts. Kperogi (2016) notes, Words like “justice,” “democracy,” “progress,” “accountability,” “good governance,” “transparency,” “change,” etc. are examples of god terms. They are vague enough to defy semantic precision yet likeable enough to attract positive cognitive and emotional associations.

In contrast are “devil terms” that stigmatise and invoke fear, revulsion or distaste in the majority, such as “terrorism”. A “god term” can be seen also as an ideological interpellation, a slipping of one outlook into a wider cultural discourse that positions the former as authoritative, providing it with ethical charge and merit. The principle behind the “god term” becomes unquestioned, just as its power implications – affording an ideological position – fail to be thoroughly interrogated where such questioning or doubt is seen as an act of bad faith. The bucket term “mental health” serves as both god term and devil term. While public sympathy for mental health issues is evident, descriptors such as “psychosis” and “schizophrenia” can become devil terms or afford stigmata. “Mental health” is today primarily legitimated through a biomedical imperative drawing on a normative classification system (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – DSM-5, 2013). This is presented in the baseline linguistic register of the “list”, cloaked in scientific terms for credibility, and readily recognised by its exclusion of metaphor. The DSM-5 version of “mental health” and illness symptoms and treatment is rhetorical, set out like an engineering manual. Mental health is then treated as a closed system based on regulated input and out-

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put, rather than an open, complex, adaptive system carrying high levels of uncertainty and mutability. Both authors and users of the DSM manual, however, know that things are not so straightforward in matters of mind and psychosomatics (body-mind interaction), largely because of the changing historical and cultural contexts that so influence symptoms of mental illness. For example, it is plain that the new cultural context of social media has placed undue pressures on young women in particular to adhere to certain norms of body identity, leading to a rash of eating disorders in an attempt to achieve a normative shape. Where “homosexuality” was once a listed disorder now it is, properly, normalised. Yet, the closed system model prevails, as do closed system models of treatment such as short-term cognitive-behavioural therapies. This reductive, bioengineering approach to mental health is not necessarily a bad thing – many people have found relief and stability through accurate diagnoses leading to standard pharmaceutical treatments. My concern here is rather that mental health and mental illness may be better appreciated through wider cultural lenses than reductive biomedical frames – for example changing historical patterns and conceptions of symptoms. Here, I will not talk of statistics, normal distribution, or even personality “types”. Rather, I will treat “mental health” as a relative term and address its potential for becoming stigmatised. My main concern is to encourage poetic appreciation and understanding of mental health issues based on metaphor richness. Models of experience that invite high levels of metaphor description are best described again as complex, open (nonlinear), dynamic systems that necessarily make fuzzy distinctions between the “normal” and the “abnormal”. In contrast, reductive, engineering-led models based on closed (linear) systems will seek clearer boundaries and distinctions. Biomedical science-led psychiatry, guided by classification systems and drug formularies for treatments, also typically looks to explanations for mental illness in brain dysfunction, again potentially courting reductionism.

What is the matter? Drawing on fractal theory, we can make a case that each level of explanation (social, individual, cortical, cellular) has its own forms of complexity. Thus, it is not strictly “reductionist” to consider explanations for mental illness at the brain level, for here is an order of complexity. What is key is that focus on a level of complexity does not erase possible explanations at other levels of complexity. A neurological focus can of course produce spectacular explanations. For example, some persons with severe cases of depression resisting a range of drug

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and chemical intervention therapies, and even electroconvulsive therapy, may react positively to a new treatment: an implanted “pacemaker” for the brain (Belluck 2021). This device is calibrated to respond to brain wave patterns associated with chronic depressive episodes that can lead to suicide ideation. Pulses of electrical stimulation appear to stave off a potentially deep depressive episode. This is part of a wider trend in contemporary neuromodulation related to mood disorders. Implants are tailored to patients’ needs through series of pre-trials where patients describe the feelings they have when certain parts of the brain are stimulated through multiple electrodes that can be modulated for location and size of dose. Interestingly, however, and returning us to another level of explanation – the linguistic – patients’ responses are mapped largely through metaphor responses. On stimulation, one patient says: “it’s like nails on a chalkboard”. Another emits a “giant belly laugh” and describes her stimulated mirth as such. The general response is one of easing the depression and not shifting it entirely, so patients remain on anti-depressants; but for some it has meant that depression is no longer debilitating and they can work again. Thus, while advances such as neuromodulation may benefit some, understanding how they work is registered through metaphor, encouraging us to seek multi-level explanatory models as we stick with the baseline assumption that such models will be complex. The medical community generally resorts to apt metaphors where it claims scientific objectivity as its frame. Noting that patients undergoing neuromodulation treatment seem to be able to separate out rational thoughts from emotional clouding and park the latter, where previously the emotional clouding would obscure attempts at thinking straight one doctor says: “The emotions are still there, but instead of sticking like mud, it’s running off like water”. Of the patients, one says that she is “seeing things that are beautiful in the world” where, in the depths of depression, “all I saw was what was ugly”. This resort to metaphor is not in the spirit of the highly technical, technological and scientific approach to these persons’ depressive illnesses. Yet of course it is embracing: powerful and accurate. Science needs such metaphor frames. Interestingly, “like mud” and “like water” are similes for otherwise (at present) non-explicable brain functions that frankly resemble medieval and Renaissance alchemical descriptions, as we shall see, such as “heavy earths” or “fat earths”. Let us park this notion here and pick it up later. Surely contemporary science, especially the cutting edge of neuroscience, would not readily tolerate such a comparison? Surely ancient alchemy is of historical interest only, a curiosity, and a mere footnote in the development of science? However, if mental health is taken to be a product of interacting systems process, then we need to involve more levels of explanation than that of brain mechanisms. Here, I show how we can view the human psyche by drawing on alchem-

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ical traditions that represent both entire symbol systems and semiotic registers (including the meanings generated by nonverbal, musical/tonal and visual languages). While alchemical psychology is an established stream of thinking within Jungian and post-Jungian Archetypal Psychology, as explored in the previous chapters, here I extend this model specifically through a poetic imagination, one that emphasises the value of quality metaphor multiplication. Not enough has been made of the power of metaphor in psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy, although there are notable exceptions (see Bleakley and Neilson 2021; Rosenman 2008). Yet the “talking cures” of psychiatrists and psychologists provide a historical template for metaphor enrichment. Sigmund Freud won the Goethe Prize for Literature in 1930 (while he never won a Nobel Prize for Medicine despite being nominated on 12 occasions). His writing rarely refers to a scientific fact, but is patently metaphorical (Spence 1987). While Freud made maps and models of the id / ego / superego make-up of the psyche, these are imaginary territories. Without Freud, there would be no James Joyce or Robert Musil. But Freud of course is a curate’s egg: brilliant case-study prose then littered with the baggage of clunky technical terms such as “defence mechanisms of the ego”. Just as our neuroscience expert above resorts to metaphors of sticky mud and flowing water to describe unseen neural events, so unseen and unknown processes (by definition), such as the life or dynamics of the “unconscious” are mapped or articulated only as secondary phenomena such as dreams, free association, slips of the tongue, and fantasies – all rationalised through conceptual systems. Just as Freudian or Jungian conceptual abstractions (again the ego, id, superego, and then Jungian archetypes) provide a symbolic language by which we can appreciate the human psyche, so alchemy provided a parallel sign system for the early modern mind, until displaced by the logic of chemistry in the 18th century. Some of this is shared with psychoanalysis, such as the processes of “sublimation” and “projection”, especially as these are expressed in parapraxes such as slips of the tongue. However, there is an important difference between the language of alchemy and that of psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychology. The former is metaphorrich and highly inventive and expressive, where the latter (with the exception of dynamic and analytical psychotherapies) tends to resist metaphor for language masquerading as technical knowledge that is reductive. Where alchemy invented embodied and embroidered metaphors (“heavy earths” for leaden and melancholic states, “sweating kings” for sulphurous mania) that are purposefully ambiguous and open-ended or poetic, quasi-scientific psychology has invented a dry conceptual language (“egocentric”, “rational functions”) that resists metaphor and displaces a poetic imagination. More, such language serves the rhetorical purpose of persuading us that concept is fact, and an idea is ultimately a neurological matter, as the wiring of connections and disconnections.

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James Hillman (2014: 15, 16) sees such conceptual literalism as a symptom within psychology and psychotherapy. He contrasts this with the stock of “imaginatively precise alchemical words”, where alchemy’s “beauty lies just in its materialized language which we can never take literally”. For Hillman, alchemy’s therapeutic effect rests with the fact that it “forces metaphor upon us”. Words drained of their blood, metaphors strangled at birth, concepts replacing experience – this is modern psychotherapy’s attempt to restore humanity to psychological health, but at the expense of living, embodied language – the world of metaphors that is our creative cradle, our poetic store. Why bother to “fix” the human psyche if it is to be at the expense of metaphor? Alchemy’s work is not restricted to analysis (solve). Rather, this is the prelude to synthesis (coagula). Modern approaches to mental health may be too fixed on reductive analysis (fixations on early childhood trauma as a totalising explanatory model; short-term cognitive-behavioural problem-solving as a totalising therapy) at the expense of a more complex synthetic method. The metaphorical language of alchemy messes with this reductive approach, but in productive ways, where it asks, in two senses at once: “what is the matter?”

Paradigms lost Historians of science will tell you that Renaissance alchemy was a forerunner to modern chemistry and medicine, pioneered by the Swiss physician and polymath Paracelsus (c.1493 – 1541). In the wake of modern science, alchemy is seen as a historical anachronism. However, this is to read alchemy literally rather than figuratively and then to miss that the alchemical imagination has much to offer contemporary psychiatry and psychotherapy, particularly as a source of inventive image and metaphor that allows us, for example, to think mental healthcare more imaginatively. Alchemical thinking invites a poetic imagination into an otherwise reductive biomedical and behavioural psychology to stimulate “thinking otherwise” about habitual practices. The classical Greek physician Hippocrates (c.460-c.370 BC) – the father of medicine – developed a map of four humours, whose qualitative intermixing was used to explain personality and symptom: choler (relating to youth, sanguinity and hotbloodedness), black bile (relating to experience and melancholic mood), phlegm (relating to old age and slowness) and yellow bile (relating to ambition and short-tempered frustration). Later, Galen (c130-c210 AD), living in the Roman Empire, grounded his medicine in this established map of the four humours. While the humours were related to bodily organs, such as black bile to the spleen, this system was fanciful, entirely imaginary, a web of metaphors that enriched an

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imagination of the body and mind, but added little of benefit to practical help for illness. Association of the humours with actual bodily process was purely coincidental, based on the observation that if blood is left to sediment in a clear container, there will be a thick, clotted base (taken as “black bile”), above which is a layer of red blood cells (taken as “blood”), above which is a layer of white blood cells (taken as “phlegm”), while on top is a clear yellow serum (taken as “yellow bile”). In turn, the four humours were based on supposed admixtures of elements: the hot and dry choleric, dry and cold melancholic, cold and wet phlegmatic and hot and wet sanguinity. Treatment of illness was not one of appreciating a person’s individual profile of symptoms, but rather of processing a person through pre-set typologies with formulaic treatments. The longstanding four humours map held sway until the tail end of the 15th century, when challenged by Paracelsus. The abstract language of humours as a generalised medicine gave way to the specifics of Paracelsian proto-chemistry, based on largely inorganic mineral and metal remedies. But Paracelsus too had an overriding typology, based on the interactions between alchemical “sulphur”, “salt” and “mercury”. While grounded in, but not confined to, the literal substances, these terms embraced a range of metaphors, images and symbols representing sulphuric, salty and mercurial qualities. Paracelsian medicine for body and mind sought to balance these three qualities but in specific treatments tailored to individual symptoms where the guiding principle was “treat like with like”. Given the deep historical importance of the alchemical tradition, informing the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of John Donne and the science of Isaac Newton for example, can we merely reject “alchemy” as an aberration, a misguided precursor to modern chemistry? Yes, we can certainly reject alchemy read literally, as a laboratory-based search for the “philosopher’s stone”, describing both a substance and set of processes that supposedly not only transform base metals into gold, but heal diseases. But this is not what alchemy primarily set out to do – it is a literalist aberration. Alchemy rather provides a way of thinking about life that distorts the naturalistic perspective while sticking with matter as the substance of thinking. I am not being dogmatic about he we should read alchemy – just describing a way between the symbolic and the literal. The naturalistic fallacy is to take the world literally rather than metaphorically. In turn, metaphors, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argue, must be read materially and substantially – metaphors are embodied. Alchemical language, as embodied metaphors – or the act of the material imagination – is as potent now as it was in the time of Shakespeare. In the following chapter, I show how embodied metaphors of “fire” serve both ancient alchemy and contemporary psychotherapy. We are steeped in such metaphors. Shakespeare for example refers to “a fire sparkling

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in lovers’ eyes” (Act 1, Scene 1) to describe the passionate glances between Romeo and Juliet. Alchemy describes a number of processes carried out on substances (such as metals) in order to create transformations of value or quality in those substances. What else is psychotherapy but this? The processes are necessarily metaphorical where they deal with complex intangibles such as mood and personality. As noted, alchemical processes can be reduced to two kinds: solve et coagula, or dissolve and congeal – take apart and re-unite. Psychotherapy too is a rhythm of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting back together. In chapter 11, I consider the many ways or styles in which substances can be taken apart (analysis) and brought together (synthesis). Where the substances of alchemy are sulphur, salt, mercury, lead, silver and gold, the substances of psychoanalysis are ego, id, superego, and unconscious – again, all metaphors. Nobody has ever seen an unconscious or an ego. But we all recognise slips of the tongue and supercilious behaviour as the matter of the metaphors. Alchemical operations on substances include calcinatio (burning), solutio (dissolving), separatio (pulling apart), coniunctio (bringing together), putrefactio (allowing to rot), cibatio (feeding), multiplicatio (increasing) and projectio (sending out). So too, psychoanalysis borrows directly from these operations, such as descriptors for invisible defence mechanisms of the ego that are only known by their consequences: projection, reaction formation, displacement, denial, sublimation, transference and reaction formation. Thus, unseen psychic energy (again, where is the “unconscious”?) is moved about just as the alchemists saw substances change through interaction with other substances, heating, exposure to air and so forth. In both alchemy and psychodynamic psychology and psychotherapy common terms are material metaphors. They rest between body and mind as a means of sensemaking. They are imagined and embellished processes in the same way that we might experience a “body” of weather. While we are in the midst of the downpour and sudden gusts, our experience is beyond the simple sensations of rain of skin or the sound of the wind: we experience a complex whole rather than the parts, and there is something behind and beyond the wind and rain that is poetic. In our re-telling of the storm, we embellish and create a narrative. In everyday speech we link many conditions, states of being, or qualities to actual substances of the world in a direct and naked manner – “gritty”, “steely”, “earthy”, “an iron will”, “tough as nails”, “built like a brick shithouse”, “weak as water”, “rock solid”, “airhead”, “as right as rain”, “butterfingers”. Is this not alchemical thinking? Just as Freud invented a metaphorical landscape for the psyche, so we live in the wake of, for example, Coleridge’s psycho-neologisms such as “ac-

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tualise” and “narcissism”. Alchemy’s language too is in a stream of poetic diction. We should take it seriously, but not literally. But sometimes, the alchemical descriptions are uncannily modern. Just as we might go to a Spa with a sauna to relax and alleviate our mild depressions or black days, here is an emblem or illustration from Michael Maier’s (1617) Atalanta Fugiens (Atalanta Fleeing) (Atalanta was a mythical figure, a favourite of Artemis, said to be brought up by bears and running wild in the countryside, who protected her virginity by firing arrows at her suitors – an emblem of “purity”, a central notion of the alchemical Work, where whatever was being worked upon must not be accidently sullied):

Figure 4.2: The King sweating out his impurities or melancholic state here (we) observe only what Excrement and of which Concoction it is that ought to be evacuated by Bathing, for hereupon the whole matter will turn. In Stoves or Hot Baths that Heat which is included in the Body is usually, together with the Blood, brought to the superficies of the skin whereby a Beautyfull complexion is made in the Face and whole Body; and if this appears it will be a sign that the Melanchollye Blacknesse which infects the skin may insensibly be evacuated, and all the humors corrected so that a pure and Rosy blood may afterwards be generated. For it is necessary that the whole temperament of his body be amended, because being Cold and Dry it is repugnant to the bittering of his blood, whereas He on the contrary is Hot and Moist; and whether this can be done or no it is necessary for the Philosopher to foreknow and foretell by Prognosticks.

This is a straightforward purification, described plainly. But alchemy’s language is more often free-floating, imaginative, like many contemporary mental health scenarios, where suffering too is real but free-floating and ambiguous (what, really, is

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“free-floating anxiety”?), and where the responses of psychiatry, clinical psychology and psychotherapy too are free-floating. Alchemy’s words however are grounded in quasi-material forms (“our” sulphur, “our” salt, “our” lead) and so provide a more tethered alternative to their psychological counterparts (mania, obsession, depression). The most commonly expressed and treated emotional disorder today is “anxiety”, derived from the Latin anxius, meaning “concerned, uneasy, troubled in mind”. “Causing anxiety” derives from angere or anguere, which is “to choke, squeeze, torment, or cause distress”. The tangible choking and squeezing gives so much more meaning to the condition of anxiety, the general descriptor having slipped from its tether, now free-floating, just like “hysteria”, met in the previous chapter, originating from the Greek word for uterus hystera. The connection dates back to 1900 B.C. Egyptian medical papyrus configurations referring to a “wandering womb”. Freud and Breuer infamously ploughed the same furrow, where the language and metaphors preceded and shaped the condition, often in genderbiased ways. In a lovely reversal of interests, the celebrated mythographer Mircea Eliade reads alchemy psychoanalytically, suggesting that the infamously male pursuit of alchemy detailed gross compensation by men. Where the mysteries of birth are denied to men, instead they acted as midwives to matter or transformations in substances. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age;” said the poet Dylan Thomas. Does this not capture the masculine component of alchemy noted by Eliade, a sulphurous enthusiasm? This must be tempered by a salty wisdom and a mercurial imagination. Psychoanalysis relies on the primary metaphor “depth” (Spence 1987). This is reinforced in Archetypal Psychology’s reverence for “soul”, psyche or imagination as “deep” (where spirit or mind is lofty or raised). Spence (ibid.) asks us to consider Heidegger’s spatial notion of “clearing” as an existential space of good faith and illumination, as an alternative metaphor to psychoanalysis’ “depth” psychology. Do we not create clearings for clients and patients as places of expression, reclamation and invention? The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s (2011: 212) definition of psychoanalytic practice also leans heavily on use of metaphors of “depth”, but adds to this both “layering” and “concealment”: The criterion for depth-psychological thought can be considered fulfilled if mental and emotional processes are divided into an experienced front side and an unexperienced reverse – in such a way that the subjects learn to understand themselves in new ways through this distinction.

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Sloterdijk artfully captures not just the architecture of a conscious/unconscious divide, but also the process – that of a flux of experience variously entangling and untangling mental and emotional realms that are paradoxically beyond experience and need to be brought forth from the salt mines of the memory, against the pressures of dynamic forces such as repression. In Freud’s term these are suppressed realms, but in a poetic sense they are unexperienced because they constitute a ground of inspiration that is at once un-nameable and unknowable. They are also built from imagined experience as the fragile recovered fantasies of childhood. It is this ground that the alchemical imagination also inhabits, as we shall see. It is “salt” that gives substance and body to this fragility, discussed in chapter 7.

Illustrative examples: mania as “sulphur”, depression as “lead” As an introduction to how I will deal with the interactions between ancient alchemy and modern psychology let us briefly consider how modern psychological concepts can be re-visioned as metaphorical matter. What, for example, is the interplay between ancient alchemical “sulphur” (a substance with greater power and meaning than literal sulphur) and modern psychiatry’s notion of “mania”; and then alchemy’s “lead” and psychiatry’s “depression”?

Sulphur and mania Material cures such as pharmaceuticals are never imagined poetically (as embodied metaphors) in the medical world, but rather are mechanically listed in drug formularies. It is not the stated function of the formulary to provide anything other than the bare minimum of information: what the drug is, what it treats and what are the side effects, graded from common to rare. But what an educational resource an emboldened formulary might present to medical students (Bleakley 2015, 2023; Bleakley and Jolly 2012). For example, a parallel text might include patients’ idiosyncratic responses; it could place the drug in a historical context and give a range of literary references. A whole genre of contemporary literature draws on “everyday” use of anti-anxiety drugs (hypnotics and anxiolytics), anti-depressants and stimulants (particularly Ritalin for ADHD) (Bleakley 2015). This describes the fashion, rather than the clinical necessity, for chemical regulation of mood. Alongside functional descriptors of use of opioids (“weak” codeine phosphate and “strong” morphine) in palliative and end-of-life care we might find reference

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to Paracelsus, who first prescribed opioids clinically; Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose opioid-infused visions underpinned his major poems; the opioid crisis in North America and beyond based on over-prescribing and mis-prescribing fentanyl for example, driven by the greed of pharmaceutical companies (Bleakley 2021b); the novels of David Foster Wallace, Brett Easton Ellis and Rick Moody; and a whole You Tube culture of personal-confessional videos related to prescription drug use and abuse. For example, lithium was a commonly prescribed drug for bipolar disorder (swinging between mood changes of depression and mania). Its use has gone out of favour and now less than 20 % of patients suffering from bipolar disorder are treated with lithium in North America (Strakowski 2022). Over 50 % of psychoses are now regularly treated with second-generation antipsychotics. Despite evidence that lithium helps to alleviate suicide ideation, it has become an unpopular medication largely because it no longer makes money for pharmaceutical companies, who are then keen to market new drugs. For illustrative purposes here, I could have used almost any extract from the British National Formulary (BNF) to make my point below. Here is an extract from the BNF describing lithium carbonate treatment for bipolar disorder: LITHIUM CARBONATE Treatment and prophylaxis Treatment and prophylaxis Treatment and prophylaxis Treatment and prophylaxis

of of of of

mania, bipolar disorder, recurrent depression, aggressive or self-harming behaviour

By mouth For Adult Dose adjusted according to serum-lithium concentration, doses are initially divided throughout the day, but once daily administration is preferred when serum-lithium concentration stabilised.

It is basically a list. In contrast, here is an extract from The Treasure of Treasures for Alchemists by Paracelsus, describing alchemical sulphur: But it should be noted well that the Sulphur of Cinnabar becomes the Flying Eagle, whose wings fly away without wind, and carry the body of the phoenix to the nest of the parent, where it is nourished by the element of fire, and the young ones dig out its eyes …

This metaphorical and mystical talk, with its sharply pathologised images (to stimulate memory), could not be further from the BNF’s flat diction comprising a listing. Yet it surely parallels an episode of unsighted mania, where “sulphur” stands for an insatiable fire that burns everything in its path, including its carrier. The

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manic person is blind to his or her own behaviours, motivated by an all-consuming passion. Paracelsus further suggests: Man is a thinker. He is that what he thinks. When he thinks fire he is fire. When he thinks war, he will create war. Everything depends if his entire imagination will be an entire sun, that is, that he will imagine himself completely that what he wants.

Here again is an imaginative description of mania as the consuming fire of the Will and the intense passion of alchemical Sulphur. The manic episode’s qualities are however not configured in plain, literal description, but as image, aphorism, hyperbole and metaphor. In contrast to Paracelsus’ description, below is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM-5) description of mania: Name: Bipolar I Disorder Manic Episode Class: Bipolar and Related Disorders A. A distinct period of abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or irritable mood and abnormally and persistently goal-directed behavior or energy, lasting at least 1 week and present most of the day, nearly every day (or any duration if hospitalization is necessary). B. During the period of mood disturbance and increased energy or activity, three (or more) of the following symptoms have persisted (four if the mood is only irritable) are present to a significant degree and represent a noticeable change from usual behavior: 1. Inflated self-esteem or grandiosity 2. Decreased need for sleep (e. g., feels rested after only 3 hours of sleep) 3. More talkative than usual or pressure to keep talking 4. Flight of ideas or subjective experience that thoughts are racing 5. Distractibility (i. e., attention too easily drawn to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli) 6. Increase in goal-directed activity (either socially, at work or school, or sexually) or psychomotor agitation 7. Excessive involvement in activities that have a high potential for painful consequences (e. g., engaging in unrestrained buying sprees, sexual indiscretions, or foolish business investments). C. The mood disturbance is sufficiently severe to cause marked impairment in social or occupational functioning or to necessitate hospitalization to prevent harm to self or others, or there are psychotic features. D. The episode is not attributable to the direct physiological effects of a substance (e. g., a drug of abuse, a medication, or other treatment) or another medical condition.

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Unlike the disorder it describes, the description – again characteristically a listing rather than a continuous piece of prose – proceeds as flat affect, objective reporting, maintaining distance from the “hot” centre of the condition itself. In its literalism, it is almost quantitative. Proponents will point to its clarity, brevity and prescriptive tone – in the indicative mood of “this is” rather than the subjunctive mood of “this may be”. While maintaining a similar brevity, the alchemical imagination of Nicholas Flamel (14th – 15th centuries) treats “sulphur” (that I am now equating with mania) poetically, as: Sulphur, the fiery spirit that vivifies everything. … which (through) fire maintains every bodily thing for as far as it is natural.

Thus, sulphur is the force of life, the same force that the poet Dylan Thomas describes: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees / Is my destroyer. … The force that drives the water through the rocks /Drives my red blood … .”

Lead and depression Everyone is familiar with low mood and certainly with “reactive” depression following bereavement for example, or loss of identity and status through losing one’s job or having an accident, or being stigmatised. Not everyone will be familiar with chronic and recurrent deep depression and feelings of hopelessness and isolation that produces a kind of mental fog and extreme lassitude. Here are the DSM5 criteria for such depression in adults: 1. Depressed mood most of the day, nearly every day. 2. Markedly diminished interest or pleasure in all, or almost all, activities most of the day, nearly every day. 3. Significant weight loss when not dieting or weight gain, or decrease or increase in appetite nearly every day. 4. A slowing down of thought and a reduction of physical movement (observable by others, not merely subjective feelings of restlessness or being slowed down). 5. Fatigue or loss of energy nearly every day. 6. Feelings of worthlessness or excessive or inappropriate guilt nearly every day. 7. Diminished ability to think or concentrate, or indecisiveness, nearly every day. 8. Recurrent thoughts of death, recurrent suicidal ideation without a specific plan, or a suicide attempt or a specific plan for committing suicide.

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Once again, this is a technical and indicative listing, where items are purely intrapsychological and contain no natural, historical or cultural reference points. The list is one of flat affect and objective reporting and not of identification with a lived character. It is difficult to distinguish here between a lingering melancholic condition (once considered as the ideal state of the reflective thinker such as Shakespeare’s Don John in Much Ado About Nothing) and a depressive state. People talk of “clinical” depression as if this were different from other kinds of depression, but this merely returns us to the list above, which is the formal “clinical” description, perhaps no different from a lay understanding. In alchemy, lead – a heavy, malleable and dense metal, also a slow poison – can be seen as paralleling modern clinical depression. The alchemists saw lead – largely in symbolic terms, but echoing the dull grey nature of the substance – as worthless, heavy and tainted. Lead was associated with the Greek titan Chronos (Roman Saturn) who was said to have devoured his children lest they usurp his authority as a prophecy indicated, a story discussed in chapter 2. Zeus, his child, was hidden from him and he swallowed a rock thinking it was the baby. Later, Zeus would overthrow Chronos as the Gods defeated the Titans. Chronos, or Old Father Time (the same root as “chronic”), signifies the drag and burden of time. Lead was considered a necessary balance to sulphur where impulsive mania calls out for introspection as a counter-weight. Both need reflection, as any action needs reflection or a reflexive curve that checks the consequences of an action in order to modify it. In alchemy, such reflexivity is described as the work of quicksilver, or a mercurial spirit. Alanah Fitch’s (2004) masterwork on the history, chemistry and cultural imagery of lead shows how the reductive science of modern chemistry has displaced a metaphoric imagination of natural substances such as metals. This makes sense within an explanatory scientific framework, where alchemy is seen as a misguided, fantastical exploratory system and chemistry is functional and explanatory. But to lose the metaphoric and poetic richness of the alchemical imagination itself seems misguided in the realm of approaches to mental health and illness. For here, there is no easy or direct equation between biomedical cure and complexity of symptom. Here, presenting symptoms, while experienced – and often as disabling – cannot be literalised in the same way as torn cartilage or raised cholesterol. A keystone of modern psychiatry is that psychological diagnoses and character coincide, but this is a mistaken assumption. Character is surely too complex and fluid to be caged by diagnostic categories. Lucy Foulkes (2021) suggests that instead of wondering what people are about, now “We look at the people around us, real or fictional, and we try to figure out what they have” (my emphasis). People are known by their symptoms. Our perceptions and understandings are filtered through prior labels, and classifications such

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as DSM-5 and its popular representations. As Foulkes drily observes, Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from the death of his 13-year-old brother; Lady Macbeth has Obsessive-Compulsive-Disorder (OCD) brought on by guilt; Lear is bipolar; Winnie-the-Pooh has ADHD and Dorian Gray has body dysmorphia. In our times, TikTok and You Tube videos on “high functioning anxiety” and “body dysmorphia” are rife and, in the main, therapeutically unhelpful – rather, they seed and breed anxiety and self-doubt that itself becomes a treatable condition. Here, the label is mistaken for the condition and comes to obscure the object of attention. Jean Baudrillard (2009) warned against this – he called it “precession of the simulacrum”, where the copy or label precedes the object, or, the map precedes the territory. The map (DSM-5) becomes the territory. This has plain disadvantages: over-generalisation, where the individual is lost to the category, leading to generalisation of treatments. Paracelsus consistently warned the physician to treat the individual patient and not the generalised condition. As Lucy Foulkes (2021) observes, it takes a whole novel for us to understand or inhabit the world of Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (and this is grade 1 compared to William Faulkner’s characters at grade 5!) Let’s not imagine that we can readily encompass character in a DSM-5 paragraph. The primary difference between the entirely naturalistic viewpoint of chemistry (informing biomedicine) and the speculative imagination of alchemy is, again, that the latter does not reduce substance to material elements, but expands substance as sets of metaphors. “Lead” for a 16th century alchemist conjures a whole range of correspondences such as Saturnine introspection and the deliberate maintenance of tradition (again, Saturn eating his own children so that they do not usurp him) or a will-to-stability. Lead represents gravity, introspection, dullness, dryness, cold, sadness and old age, as the melancholic disposition or the slow poisoning of experience. This is Shakespeare’s Hamlet, sad and brooding, suspiciously looking out for his enemies: I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air – look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. (Hamlet Act II, Scene II).

Medicine, psychiatry and psychotherapy can all benefit from study of the poetic imagination, especially where this affords an alternative viewpoint to the popular approach of “storying”, or narrative-based approaches, as a psychological cure-all (Bleakley and Neilson 2021). Poetry keeps us in metaphor-rich territories of space

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rather than time, providing new “fields” for aesthetic approaches to symptom grounded in the maxim: “appreciation before explanation”.

The literal and the metaphorical Modern psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy are grounded in a scientific biomedical outlook that privileges the literal and reductive over the metaphorical and expansive. Such a division is already troubled by the fact that the “literal” is already often couched in metaphor (“hard headed”, “concrete”, “common sense”) as we saw earlier from our neuroscientist’s attempt to grasp the process of electrical stimulation of the brain to relieve chronic depression as separating out the “mud” so that the “water” could flow freely, rather than endure the daily grind of living their admixture as a sticky mess exuding a fug. When it comes to understanding the human mind and emotions, rather than the material body, biomedical science conveniently reduces mind and feelings to the physical – muscle, brain, hormones and so forth. In turn, where physical treatments (primarily pharmaceuticals) are developed for ailments of the mind, these are conceived as treating body or soma (such as supposed effects on neurotransmitters) rather than psyche. Further, such treatment is described in the concrete and reductive language of certainty (as cause and effect) in a way that reduces possible confusion, contagion or uncertainty. Paradoxes and ambiguities are purposefully ironed out in rhetorical gestures: metaphors are avoided where literalism is privileged; the subjunctive mood (“possibly”, “maybe”) is avoided for the certainty of the indicative mood (“certainly”, “this is”) even where this is blatantly rhetorical or persuasive; and fact and reason are then privileged over hunches or intuitions. Mastery trumps mystery. A typical rhetorical gesture masquerading as mastery through fact (where ambiguity and uncertainty are conveniently occluded) is the listing of possible side effects of pharmaceuticals. Here, a “list” trumps the more complex possible “discussion”, debate or discourse about side effects and their meanings, providing an island of certainty for the patient in a sea of uncertainty. Side effects are partitioned off not as confounding presences within treatment but as parallel appearances, each to be dealt with in a logical manner. For example, a common side effect of Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors (SSRIs), antidepressants, is feeling anxious. A common psychological response to anxiety is depressive feelings. The ouroboric worm or snake (figure 4.3) devours itself from the tail, as a common alchemical image of regeneration shows (see the previous chapter 3). Key biomedical texts – already introduced – circumscribe the process of reducing often complex and unruly mental health issues to rational understanding and

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Figure 4.3: The ouroboric dragon or worm

subsequent control through treatments. These, again, include the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), now in its 5th edition (2013) and the prescribing “bibles” for doctors known as drug formularies – in the UK, the British National Formulary (BNF) (this is largely dedicated to treatments for physical diseases, but also covers mental health disorders and imbalances). The BNF is, at the time of writing, in its 82nd annual edition (published September 2021). The DSM and the BNF both subscribe to a common philosophical frame – at once ontological (about experience) and epistemological (about knowledge and theory) – that assumes we can make distinctions between the “normal” and the “pathological”. I will not address this issue any further here – it has already been extensively covered in critical review, particularly in the work of Georges Canguilhem (1991) – but rather note this in terms of a dominant epistemology and discourse, open to critique. To put the DSM and BNF into context, they are discursive products of a cultural and historical mindset that Michel Foucault (1974) analyses in The Order of Things. This mindset is the historical tendency to order experience through logical epistemological frames. The European Enlightenment expressed a logic that showed intrigue with classification systems or taxonomies such as groupings of animals and plants by external characteristics (phyla, genera,

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species, types). Complex webs of resemblances common to kabbalah, astrology and alchemy gave way to orders of representation based on exclusion rather than inclusion, such as taxonomies of natural history and knowledge. Eighteenth-century obsession with classification schemes was a way of bringing order and then understanding to a complex world (even formal gardens and architecture follow this scheme). As noted, the logic of classification was particularly strong in the emerging sciences (such as taxonomies of the animal and plant kingdoms), but spilled over into social orders and hierarchies (class and caste systems for example), and then into the more unpredictable realms of psychology and individual human behaviour. Such classifications, ordered by a social elite, can be seen as a way of maintaining power or control. For example, Foucault (2006) shows, in The History of Madness, how previously socially acceptable or widely tolerated idiosyncracies, such as the behaviour of the renowned “village fool”, become subject at a certain point in history to classification, as mental health “abnormalities” or deviances from the norm. As a historical accident two forces conveniently collided. First, the sudden availability of sanatoria for housing the “mad” as incidence of leprosy radically declined across Europe. And second, a social cleansing policy: policing and cleaning the streets of unwanted vagrants and prostitutes. This deprived these groups of status as citizens, compromising identity. But it also created a rationale for treatments of newly minted “illnesses” and “deviances”, birthing both psychiatry and social work. The sanatoria were conveniently re-populated. Classifications of newly minted illnesses flourished; while archaic and well-tolerated outlooks such as melancholia were rebranded as pathologies such as depressive illness. As the DSM developed since its inception in North America in 1952, fine-grain classifications have evolved, such as “binge eating disorder” (BED), characterized by frequent and recurrent binge eating episodes with associated negative psychological and social problems, but without the compensatory behaviors common to bulimia nervosa, OSFED, or the binge-purge subtype of anorexia nervosa. BED is a recently described condition, which was required to distinguish binge eating similar to that seen in bulimia nervosa but without characteristic purging. Individuals who are diagnosed with bulimia nervosa and binge eating disorder exhibit similar patterns of compulsive overeating, neurobiological features of dysfunctional cognitive control and food addiction, and biological and environmental risk factors. Some professionals consider BED to be a milder form of bulimia with the two conditions on the same spectrum. Binge eating is one of the most prevalent eating disorders among adults, though there tends to be less media coverage and research about the disorder in comparison to anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa.

Infamously, homosexuality was “depathologized” in 1973 in DSM-III, and removed as a “treatable” deviance. This alone demonstrates that psychological “conditions” are culturally sensitive. Thus, DSM attracts great scepticism from those who see

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mental “health” and “illness” as relative notions. This is not to disparage scientifically driven psychiatry and psychology and its related pharmaceutical treatment regimes. Many would suffer greatly if their symptoms were left undiagnosed and untreated. However, here I am introducing a well-worn critical perspective that this book seeks to extend – into historical territory itself often mocked by rational science through misunderstanding of its purposes. I speak again of traditions of alchemy, popular in the Middle Ages as a mystical system where transformations of natural elements were taken as symbols for human potential; while by the Renaissance and Enlightenment, at alchemy’s peak, laboratory-based pragmatic alchemical experiments were giving way to the birth of chemistry, as the gases of the air that we breathe were being isolated and their functions discovered (Hillman 2014), as discussed in the previous chapter 3. Here, medical applications of laboratory-based alchemical discoveries, such as laudanum (tincture of opium) for pain relief, were accumulating as “chemical therapies”, inaugurated in particular by Paracelsus. Paracelsus can be considered as the father of pharmaceutical psychiatry, as he researched and catalogued a number of chemical-tincture based treatments for what were perceived in his time to be illnesses of the mind and soul. Despite his weighty, lengthy and often obscure expositions on alchemy, Paracelsus said, at the end of the day, alchemy is no more than the aspiration to exquisite quality in cultural pursuits: the smith forging an exceptional tool, the baker making a perfect loaf, the cook preparing a sumptuous meal. But saying “no more than” belies the years of hard work it takes to achieve mastery in any walk of life. Alchemy might be conceived as the exquisite touch in any walk of life that turns Nature into culture in ways that intensively deepen human life and reveal beauty. Paracelsus, who authored over thirty books, pioneered the art of observation in medicine. Prior to his work the dominant method was to treat symptom in a standard way, regardless of the patient’s idiosyncratic presentation. Paracelsus pioneered an individual medicine of qualities, or tailored treatments based on close observation. Again, he did not treat in a formulaic way: here’s the symptom and here’s our formulaic treatment; but asked “what does this symptom want in this unique case?” Amongst a number of other contributions to medicine, he insisted that wounds (previously treated by, for example, applications of cow dung that merely added to infection) should be kept clean; introduced the use of opium (laudanum) as a painkiller; and suggested that specific elements would remedy specific complaints, such as iron for “poor blood”. More, he practiced a psychosomatic medicine, or an early psychiatry, in which he saw physical ailments and psychological wellbeing as entwined. Paracelsus combined an alchemical imagination with a chemical pragmatism, introducing the word “chemistry”.

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Figure 4.4: Paracelsus

Alchemy and poetry In the West, the 16th century in particular was a high spot for alchemists who were also poets (Schuler 1995) such as Edward Cradock (“A Treatise Touching the Philosopher’s Stone”) and Simon Forman (“Of the Division of the Chaos”). Charles Nicholl (1980) shows how alchemical language pervades the poetry of John Donne, and the plays of Shakespeare, particularly King Lear. In the 17th century, Andrew Marvell also drew heavily on alchemical themes. Leaping forward to the 20th century, H.D. (Hilda Dolittle), Robert Kelly and Peter Redgrove stand out in particular for their use of ancient (pre-chemistry) alchemy as a source of poetic inspiration. Roula-Maria Dib (2020: 70) expertly explores H.D.’s use of both an alchemical and feminist imagination in the latter’s WWII epic Trilogy. In “a step further / toward fine distillation of emotion” H.D. claims, “The elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone / Is yours if you surrender / Sterile logic, trivial reason”. Yet H.D. does not bulldoze cool, mercurial reason with sulphurous emotion. She invokes “Hermes Trismegistus … patron of alchemists / (whose) … province is thought / inventive, artful and curious”. For reason is reflective, silvered, mercurial. In “The Alchemist”, Robert Kelly (1981) describes the sage who must face up to failure in the Work, as he

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holds his hands to his face & weeps for the lost struggle wasted in the snowfall in the crucible, only the fire of Law burning off sulfur & mercury and this fire is earth’s face

Peter Redgrove (1984) sees alchemical workings in everyday life. In “A View of the Waterworks” he describes the public commodification of water as an alchemical miracle: Water in the works; The commuters of water Pour out of the pumping undergrounds The cream stucco and red stone stations, The quick of water Compelled to comb through bars Into cells that are brick-lined, Into underground palaces without light Until they are called forth By that youngman spinning the taps And in the early morning sunlight splashing his face. Water in pulses like pensions.

Redgrove brilliantly captures the modern expression of alchemy in a public engineering works: the transformation of rain into the splash from our taps through a series of vessels: the palaces of the waterworks. Alchemy and poetry are of one root, again celebrating intensive and extensive production of metaphor. The tradition of Medieval and Renaissance alchemy is a verbal, visual and activity-related form of poetics that intensively metaphorises the natural world of minerals and elements so as to create a poetic vision of life, turned from dull to engaged, from scattered into intense. But this does not follow the optimistic ideals of spiritual paths, promising ‘growth’, even enlightenment. Rather, poetry-as-alchemy-as-poetry embraces suffering, symptom and the “crooked timber of humanity” (Immanuel Kant) as necessary elements, some of which may be transformed but some of which is indelibly imprinted. Thus, New Age, self-help optimism and idealism (de Rola 2013) promising “perfection” of Spirit, is anathema to the alchemical imagination that embraces lunacy, lauds the melancholic and sees virtue in failure. It mocks also the “personal growth” model of alchemy as spiritual transformation, for the spiritual rests with Redgrove’s democratic waterworks that provides an alchemical miracle for public good. In apparently bizarre, but of course highly coded, alchemical texts a King eats his son; a male stranger places a toad to suckle on the exposed breast of a woman;

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people jump into blazing fires and emerge unharmed, even tempered. These Art of Memory pathologised images (see chapter 8 on alchemical salt) are in a tradition of declaring the “crooked timber” of soul – that pathology, or suffering, must not be eradicated before it is appreciated and interrogated for its meanings. This is key to working in the field of “mental health”. Already that modern term has cleaned up symptom. “Wellbeing”, “wellness” and other New Age terms whitewash the reality of psychological suffering, with whose language we must be intimate before we can offer helpful intervention. Again, alchemy provides this metaphoric language in a rich way that is by-passed by the technical descriptors of psychiatry’s DSM 5. Alchemy resists both rude reductions to matter and idealistic elevation to spirit. Rather, traditional alchemy’s work was poetic: the multiplication of metaphors to create an imagination of chaos. Again, the closest we have to this now is chaos and complexity theory. Alchemy’s task was to turn linear, closed systems (and minds) into nonlinear open, adaptive, complex systems with maximum complexity at the edge of chaos, described through a material language of substantial metaphors. This begins with the bottom-line, the heavy lining, what has sunk to the base, the plumbline: leaden facts of life or humdrum reality. Waterworks. Yes, water does work. And it is public – I don’t “own” it. As James Hillman (2014: 139) says: “The depression is the mine” and not “the depression is mine”.

Metaphor multiplication Poetry is the medium par excellence for metaphor multiplication. Alchemy mirrors this work. Metaphor multiplication can be summed up as the paradoxical meeting of two processes: first, the systematic distortion of Nature; and second, the natural distortion of systems. The first process is a challenge to the naturalistic perspective (and then to scientific reductionism). “Nature” is clearly a cultural construction, evident from historical evidence of differing readings of what constitutes both the “natural” and the “objective presentation of facts”. The evidence for this, paradoxically, is the “natural” event of the imagination at work. Imagination distorts Nature, or re-presents Nature. Indeed, for poets historically, the poetic imagination “improves” Nature. The second process is a challenge to human systematising of Nature through the logics of classification or empirical inquiry that transcends nature, as meticulously tracked by Foucault (1974) in The Order of Things mentioned earlier. Here, Foucault asks: what are the historical conditions of possibility for the emergence of a certain discourse? The discourse in question is, as noted, the Enlightenment desire to codify and order knowledge and society in order to exert power: the tam-

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ing of Nature through naming and ordering (kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species); the removal of the bad (prostitutes, the destitute, the homeless, vagrants) and the mad from city streets to fill the empty sanatoria as the new asylums, where the mad would be catalogued and classified in intimate detail. Our challenge to this in reclaiming the virtues of alchemy for contemporary psychology is to encourage a natural distortion of suffocating systems (the latter symptomatic of the anxiety that is intolerance of ambiguity). The human mind and its extensions in artefacts that expand our senses are the instruments through which empirical inquiry and logic work. However, we know from historical evidence that representations of reality are contingent upon the artefacts used to view reality (from microscopes and telescopes to particle accelerators and colliders). As Kant suggested, Nature is then necessarily transcendent rather than immanent as the senses suggest. Human systems distort Nature rather than providing direct access to the natural world. Listing, systematising and classification – the primary fascination of Enlightenment culture – afford a convenient collective defence against chaos, complexity and surprise. Jacques Lacan configures this dilemma of the tension between the systematic distortion of Nature and the natural distortion of systems as a tension between the Imaginary (denaturing through memory and imagination) and the Symbolic (transcending through thinking) as one reaches for the ineffable Real (Nature-in-itself, the goal of alchemy as the “perfection” of Nature). In peppering with metaphors, the alchemists, like poets, attempt to glimpse the ineffable Real, or speak with the animals. We know this place by several names, such as Beauty, Love and Terror. Where Freud saw dreams as the royal road to the unconscious, we might see productive metaphors as the passageway between Nature and culture that leads to the heart of language, a pre-existing context into which we are born, and which we systematically impoverish through denial of metaphor and reduction to technical language (the way of science), or the everyday acceptance of metaphor overuse and abuse (the trivia of social media). Alchemy is neither a literalising nor a spiritualising, but the production of embodied and enacted metaphors for poetic inspiration. It is, as James Hillman (2014: 8) suggests, “a method which indulges the soul’s surprising beauty and inventive freedom” and a contradictory “method of chaos”.

Update: the book’s topics James Hillman, the father of Archetypal Psychology, once warned me never to try to systematise or attempt to master alchemy, because it will always beat you, unravelling before your eyes, increasing to monstrous size, demanding your attention

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and then exhausting you. Never trust anybody who speaks of alchemy in terms of imperatives and certainties (“alchemy” is this or that) (for example de Rola 2013). Pick and choose, suggested Hillman (who himself concentrated on colours in particular); be prepared to be extremely confused as well as surprised. Following this advice, in taking Medieval and Renaissance alchemy (particularly the Renaissance Paracelsian tradition that links alchemy to medicine through chemistry) as a lens through which we can re-vision mental health and psychological therapies, I limit myself to meditations on four topics only: the substances fire, sulphur and salt; and the operations on those substances, concentrating on the coniunctio (the transference in therapy and the flux of eros in life). I am also wary of personalism – treating psychological therapies as contained within the vessel of the individual person – but rather connect to the social, historical and cultural, and to the natural and social worlds of objects. Alchemy’s task is to “expand” those objects by situating them in networks that feed them and reveal their beauty and qualities. In the process, confusion will emerge. But contradictions and ambiguities can be celebrated and treated as resource rather than hindrance. For example, in the following chapter 5 we leap straight into the fire. But, of course, we will not do this literally, but metaphorically – and this reminds me to apologise to readers who think that I have been too metaphorical up to now. I have to remind those readers that my bent is towards the matter of metaphor, or embodied metaphors. Let’s get to the flame.

Chapter 5 Fire

Figure .: The alchemist tends the fire

Book-ended by fire Humanity is book-ended by fire. Water is essential for life, but fire is the great humanising element, the starting point of culture. Fire turned the “raw” into the “cooked” – metaphors for nature and culture (Lévi-Strauss 1983). But, more than cooking, fire provided heat, light, and protection from predators. As the hearth, fire becomes the embodied symbol of the heart of the family, or communal warmth. The Greeks dedicated a goddess, Hestia (Roman Vesta) to the hearth as the focal point of the home. We are now all branded by fire as the shared hearth runs riot in global warming – our primary existential threat (Long 2021). The human imagination, primarily in reverie or daydreaming, is grounded in gazing at flames (Bachelard 1988), while our poetic sensibilities are forged in the heats of passions. “Inflammation”, from the Latin inflammare, means: “to set on fire with passion”. Thus, our passions, erotic desires, deepest loves and wishes and bodily symptoms have the same inflamed root – they are entangled poetically https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-007

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in fire. A range of related metaphors arise from this – a “rash” means both a skin complaint and doing something hurriedly, without thinking. The word has its root in the Germanic rasch meaning nimble or quick. The hot rash spreads like wildfire. In the heat of pimply youth, the skin erupts in miniature volcanoes spewing matter from below. We get hot and bothered, red when angry and blush when embarrassed. To “boil” (from the Latin bullire) means to seethe, gush, bubble and swell in fiery turbulence. These are all descriptions of water coming to the boil, but also of emotional overflow and bodily expressions in symptom. We get “hot under the collar”, “hot and bothered”, “fired up”, have “heated exchanges” and “blazing rows” – troubled, confused and bewildered by emotional overheating. “There’s the rub” we say, linking raw and irritated skin with aggravation. Our “hot tempered” outbursts are sulphuric, manic, impulsive without reflection or insight.

Alchemical flames: calcination In myth, the salamander (or “fire lizard”) is capable of living in fire and becomes a symbol of fire’s ability to renew (figure 5.2). The phoenix rises from ashes as a symbol of fire’s regeneration. The phoenix is a legacy of the Egyptian bennu, a mythical bird that represents the daily death and rebirth of the sun, the mytheme of all resurrections. Under the heat of the sun, plants regenerate in the fat of the soil that itself becomes a kind of dry flame, an earthly warm flesh. A dung or compost heap generates an inner heat. The alchemist becomes identified with the fire (figure 5.3), as his or her primary task is to keep the flame burning, to maintain interest, enthusiasm and passion for the Work. The psychotherapist must mirror this level of enthusiasm. The Work is the ever-evolving task of transformation, the enrichment of life for oneself and others in community. This precedes finding meaning and love. In both are deep satisfactions. But this is the personal gain. At the level of the world the Work is surely about challenging inequities and inequalities and addressing the climate emergency, our most pressing large-scale alchemical experiment. Alchemy’s central concern is the effect of fire on substances: calcination or burning. This is literally defined as the conversion of metal or other minerals to states of fine powder by means of heat; and the creation of pressure as liquids are boiled off creating gases. Alchemy’s concern is defined by poetic metaphors such as the heat of passion (the intensity of interest and involvement, commitment to engagement in life – to making things happen). Alchemy’s “fire” is psychotherapy’s focus on enthusiasm, passion and, above all, warmth in relationship. Too much enthusiasm and there is likely burnout, or burning down to dry ashes leav-

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Figure 5.2: The salamander as the ever-regenerating fire

Figure 5.3: The alchemist is identified with the salamander as living in the fire, or maintaining enthusiasm for the Work

ing bitterness and resentment; too little, a sign of creeping depression, loss of libido, lack of focus and interest. Calcination, derived from calcina or lime, literally means “to reduce to lime or quicklime”. Calcining is described in alchemy as a range of heats both literal (fire’s effect on matter) and imaginary (or metaphorical/psychological, such as the initial warming of interest to the incandescence of burning out and its after-effects such

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as reduction to an ashen state). The psychologically inflected language of alchemy then describes emotional engagement with life as passions, desires and commitments, again with its hoard of metaphors: “warm embrace”, “fired up”, “burned out”, “heated arguments”, “dying embers”, “emotional warmth”, “heat of the moment”. The medieval alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (763 – 809) said: “Calcination is the treasure of a thing; be not you weary of calcination”. Greek myth tells us that one is made immortal by immersion in the fire: in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the goddess feeds ambrosia (the food of the gods) to her mortal son Demephon by day, and by night she throws him into a living fire to purify him (figure 5.4).

Figure 5.4: Demeter feeds Demephon and tempers (matures) him in the fire

Calcining, dissolving and coagulating are the primary mechanisms in alchemy’s overall project – described by George Ripley (1415 – 90) as “loosing and knitting”: analysis and synthesis (solve et coagula) (see chapter 11). This describes the opening of what is dense, and then a particularising or bringing back to density, to weighty matters: again, repeated patterns of analysis and synthesis – the particularising (noticing details) in the grinding and heating, the overall vision restored in the knitting back together of the parts (this may be a heated argument over details and then a coming together over tears and compromise). All therapeutic attention works this way: analyse first and then synthesise, knitting together a different pattern, challenging fruitless or symptomatic habits; or, utilise the habit by giving it new material to inflame. This is democracy in action. Warm passions can melt your heart and embrace a fulfilling relationship. When the passions are fierce, the emotional body may burn and stick and stays

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as an obsession that is very difficult to prise away. Laurence Kirmayer (2000), a Canadian psychiatrist who was a pioneer in describing the importance of metaphors in therapeutic encounters, describes a woman who feels constant “burning” in her stomach. All medical investigations reveal no somatic issues. She describes the recent break up from an intense relationship with a male lover. Has the sulphurous and overheated nature of the relationship – too much too soon – stuck to her like tar, something she can no longer stomach? Is this symptom the burning desire to re-kindle the flame?

Fire loosens A young boy, age only 10, was developing a habit of pyromania, a fascination with flame. He would steal matches, then start fires in the countryside that mostly would be harmless, burning out quickly. But one fire got out of control. Rather than scaring him off the habit, this seemed to spur the boy on. Subsequent fires led to his parents being warned with the threat of court proceedings. In therapy, it was clear that the passion of the couple’s relationship had burned out. Was the boy sensing this and compensating in a way that only his psyche could make sense of, becoming a “firestarter” through trying to re-ignite his parents’ lost love or absent warmth? Therapeutically and alchemically, something was stuck, coagulated, and needed to be heated gently, loosened up. A new kind of warmth needed to be kindled in the family setting that would provide the right flames for contemplation, a hearth, a common focus. Alchemical loosening (solve) in particular involves fire as well as making solutions in liquids: dissolving, unglueing, separating, unsticking, forcing apart, unhinging, picking apart, prodding, differentiating, extracting, breaking up and breaking down, purging, distilling, splitting off, breaking in, breaking out, thinking through. These are the basic techniques of psychotherapy. Such loosening ranges from the gentle to the strong. In the loosening is often a purifying. The need for such loosening is often a burning need. The waxy residues of old habits are slowly melted; or what causes one to be stuck is suddenly illuminated by bright flame. Fire dries out substances so that they particularise or are turned into powder. This allows the individuality of the substance to show through. The “fire-tried stone” (Trinick 1967) – a common term for the alchemical goal – is a metaphor for a purity that is defined by its particulars, the development of close noticing and the poetic revelation of what the Russian Formalism school of literary studies called the “stoniness of the stone” (the intrinsic prime qualities) that is also the malleable or soft stone (Bleakley and Neilson 2021). The stoniness of the stone is the idiosyncratic nature of each person. A person gets to know herself as she is,

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not as others imagine her to be, individuating such qualities in a lifelong “becoming”. This is a process of differentiating or revealing an idiosyncratic nature that refuses stereotype or fixity. Again, it requires analysis first: a coming apart, disintegration, coming unstuck, or a revelation of pathologies rather than their avoidance. To keep such fires burning and maintaining intensity is a matter of vigilance or watchful waiting. Synthesis (the exercise of reverie in creative production) follows analysis. The newly coagulated should be warm to the touch. The draining of lifeblood is halted through the flame of cauterisation. Importantly, just as catharsis or abreaction is useless without subsequent insight, so analysis must be followed by synthetic habits, a pulling together. For the practices of psychodynamic psychotherapy, and within a medical humanities broader perspective, all the above may sound a little woolly and idealistic. To get at the “stoniness of the stone” is to address symptoms that prevent a person from living a more fulfilling, intense life, or realising qualities that may be hindered by symptoms and circumstance. Psychotherapy attempts such work. But symptoms cannot simply be eradicated because they serve purposes and these must be identified and addressed. For example, in medical education, medical students must learn how to balance an openness to their patients’ suffering just as they must look after their own psychological health. In general, medical education tends to lead, paradoxically, to increased insensibility as emotional insulation is learned as a defence against overwhelming by affect. Psychotherapists learn to manage their openness to clients’ emotional states through three avenues: in practice, management of the transference and resistance dynamics; training therapies and ongoing supervision; and self-management of “free attention”. Medical students do not learn psychotherapeutic acumen and so can readily be prone to over-defensive tactics: on the one hand as excessive emotional insulation (an ego defence strategy) leading to loss of empathy; and on the other as susceptibility to anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and burnout. Supervision for medical students rarely involves psychological or psychotherapeutic orientation, while transference and resistance dynamics of patient relationships are rarely discussed, except in psychiatry and sometimes in general practitioner education. Returning to the key practice of management of free attention, psychotherapists will learn how to manage empathic affective or cathartic response without getting swamped by affect. Medical students, in affect-laden circumstances aggravated by intense work pressures, will adopt a “sink or swim” mentality in which to swim is to block off from feelings (emotional insulation). This book suggests taking the education of “free attention” up a register through an alchemical dial. Drawing on embodied metaphor and a poetic imagination, the basic psychotherapeutic technique of free attention (operating within close listening) is intensified. The alchemical equivalent is walking into the fire as a form of tempering.

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Fire necessarily first disintegrates and then integrates (smelts) at high temperatures. As we fall apart in the heat, or particularise, so we recognise our fixities or habits, and we necessarily go a little mad, at the edge of frenzy. The Greek god of frenzy, zeal and enthusiasm is Dionysos. As a six-months-old embryo in his mother Semele’s womb, Dionysos was prematurely baptised by fire. Mortals must never look into the faces of the gods, but Semele asked to look upon Zeus’ face knowing that he was the father of the child Dionysos. Zeus consumed Semele in flame but Dionysos was saved and gestated in Zeus’ thigh for the remaining three months. Dionysos became the god of “indestructible life” reflecting his own tempering in flame. His sidekick Iakchos was a torchbearer and his followers the Maenads carried fire in their hair. The members of the club of fire are enthusiasts. “Enthusiasm” has its root in the Greek enthous – to be possessed by a god, or inspired (to have fire breathed into one). Enthusiasm is as important as empathy in the psychotherapeutic encounter – a basic building block. If the Dionysian light touch of evident enthusiasm flees the therapist’s nest, then Apollonic technique is the residue: therapy-by-numbers.

The world’s on fire Again, fire in the form of global warming has become humanity’s central existential threat, its burning issue. Spontaneous wildfires have become an emblem of our times, a cultural calcining or, as the alchemists described it at its most extreme, a “burning down to dry essences”. Fire has forced post-industrial humanity into a synthetic choice – to radically change lifestyles and cultural forms based on insatiable economic “growth”. Heat, or enthusiasm, is where the Work of reclamation starts. By the “Work” – drawing on the always capitalised description of alchemy’s task of promoting transformation through boundary-crossing and expansion of networks (an open-ended dialectical movement) – I mean wider cultural engagement with Nature: scientific pursuits, intellectual and philosophical deliberation, the passions of the arts and humanities and personal and interpersonal psychological developments such as the advanced and sophisticated politics of authentic democracy turned to projects such as redistribution of wealth and resources, addressing inequity and inequality of opportunity and unhooking from carbonbased energy sources. These are not just material projects, they are poetic too – they require intensive deliberation, exercise of reverie and imagination and meditation on what we really value in life. These are aesthetic and ethical choices as much as material, instrumental, functional and political. We have for too long been focused on the use of fire (as enthusiasm) to increase quantity rather than quality in life.

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Psychotherapy, as Hillman and Ventura (1992) and Bleakley (1996) have pointed out some time ago, begins not with individuals but with the world. Within psychoanalysis, Alfred Adler (1870 – 1937) pioneered such a vision as the founder of community psychology and social work. Our eco-logical issues are more pressing than our ego-logical ones. We have food disorders before eating disorders; poverty before anxiety; emotional and sexual abuse before depression; war, conflict and migrant displacement before post-traumatic stress disorder. Our psychotherapeutic metaphors are necessarily worldly rather than cultivating personal “growth”. Without engagement, enthusiasm and passion, from simmering interest to intensely hot engagement, there is no motivation, development or innovation as engagement with worldly matters. “Liar, liar, pants on fire!”, “hot headed”, “heat of the moment”, “fiery temperament”, “fired up”, “dried out”, “ashen”, “on the boil”, and so forth. These are modern metaphors in an alchemical tradition of discriminating both positive and disturbing qualities. Alchemists described a whole range of fires with a vocabulary to suit, where tending the fire was the mainstay of the Work. What is a healthy relationship but a tending of the fire lest it burns out to dry cinders? What is a passion but a burning desire for engagement and involvement in something that inspires? What is fire but a sharing of inflamed passions – the spate of forest fires in California, the creeping desertification of the Sahal: these are global fires that engage our inner fires of concern and identification, fired up for all the right reasons, activism as fighting fire with fire. Now our focus for a passionate psychotherapy and the treatment of symptom is not the mania of individuals but the manic behaviour of fossil fuel corporate interests. Psychotherapy becomes largely barefoot in the form of activism, political strategy and collective future-thinking.

The secret fire A motif in alchemical illustrations shows Cupid (as a messenger of Eros, the god of love and passion) embracing fire (figure 5.5). This indicates the love for the Work (turning the everyday into the unique) and that the fundamental alchemy of human relationships is based on kinds of heat – from the warmth of friendship to the intense fires of sexual passions, where “getting burned” and burnout always beckon. Gaston Bachelard (1964, 1988, 1990) describes a range of meanings of “fire” as differing passions in relationships, grounded in the primal scene of bodies keeping each other warm and of sexual congress compared with making fire through rubbing sticks together. Here, friction provides emotional heat. “Fire” has a double meaning of both emission and containment: the first like firing a gun, its origins in powder needing a

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Figure 5.5: Eros embracing fire

spark to explode and propel the shot (also “you’re fired!” or expelled from your job), the second the inner bodily warmth of pleasure and satisfaction. Bachelard (1964) says alchemy “is an attempt to inscribe human love at the heart of things”, while “sexual reverie is a fireside reverie” (in other words, a heartfelt and warm imagination of the other as lover). One alchemical vessel (alchemical vessels are forerunners of chemistry laboratory equipment such as retorts), the “double pelican”, shows a circulation of passions between a couple (figure 5.6), a mutual engagement of fires.

Figure 5.6: The double pelican

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The pelican is said to bite its own breast to feed its young on its blood, a metaphor for the intensity of motherhood. In the double pelican, the couple feed each other in a circulation of passions. Attraction, embrace and sex may lead to either afterglow or cold ashes, depending on whether or not the warmth of the relationship has constancy. The double pelican too offers an image for the process of the transference, especially where the therapist holds erotic feelings temporarily transferred by the client onto the therapist. Such feelings are for another and must be returned when the timing is ripe – the client discovering a lost love for a parent or sibling, or a long-held desire or passion for some issue in life. Heat is equated with interiority: literally the warmth of human blood and the volcanic core of the Earth. The cold-blooded (reptiles, snakes) are distrusted and consumed in the fire of the hot-blooded (cold-shouldering displaced by warm intimacies or hot desires). In figure 5.7, the hot-blooded lion (representing fire and sulphur) eats the cold-blooded snake. But the snake too represents the ingested mercurial spirit, or the faculty of reflection. Within hot impulse should be silvered reflection, the ability to generate insight within the act, or to weigh up consequences. The alchemist, as ever, tends the fire, his gaze – importantly – is on the flame and not the emitted smoke. To tend the flame and not be clouded or distracted by the smoke is also to focus on cause rather than just treating symptom. Short-term psychotherapy of course can offer relief, but if this does not touch causes, but lingers only on symptom relief, then it has limited power.

Figure 5.7: The lion eats the snake / the alchemist watches the fire

Interiority in turn is equated with depth of reflection and insight. The secret fire of eros is also life force, vitality, and the will. Fire is the basis for the power of reverie – a warm attachment to things, an imagination that illuminates through that

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warmth as intensity of interest, the naturalist’s passion for observation and close attention that Bachelard calls “substantial concentration”.

Norton’s menu of fires Where scientists measure heat numerically or quantitatively, alchemists described a range of qualities of fire. Quantity embraces, but must not be confused with, dosage. Dosage is about quality too. Not too much, not too little is relative to the context and occasion, going against the population study background that informs psycho-pharmacy and drug treatments. The alchemists were meticulous about dosage. Thomas Norton (1477) (Caxton’s printing press was introduced to England in 1475, but Norton’s Ordinal of Alchemy was not printed until 1625) described thirteen kinds of fire. “Who would know the Master?” says Norton: “It is he who understands the regulation of the fire, and its degrees”. The tension here is between one who can identify with the emotional experience of the range of fires at the same time as they can literally keep the fire in, with close attention (as tenders of the flame, like blacksmiths, glassblowers and chefs). Norton describes this range of fires as a series of metaphors: – A fire that “scalds the pig and goose”. This is required for “covering the stone with sweat” and “decoction of minerals” (extracting an essence through heat). These are wonderful embodied metaphors, their meanings not at all transparent. But we have literary parallels. The alchemists describe heating the stone to “whiten” it; as noted earlier, the early 20th century Russian Formalist School of literary theory describes a process of defamiliarisation, or seeing things in a new light, revealing the “stoniness of the stone”. Here, matter is re-visioned through a poetic imagination. Cultural activities ultimately aspire to transformation of consciousness that is revelatory. Fire is the root of this as it transforms the raw into the cooked, cold into warmth, and darkness into light. – A fire that dries linen and slowly roasts meat. This must be a gentle and even heat. We see this in one person’s love and care for another over time. Therapeutic inconsistencies of warmth are troubling, indicating that the therapist is turning “empathy” on or off at will as technique and not genuine feeling. – A fire that separates substances. Here the fire gets more intense so that it particularises and discriminates. Isn’t this what a more intense emotional involvement brings? Therapeutic confrontations too can provide such sudden and intense heat that draws out particulars. – A white heat, maintained at even temperature, where the eye can see no moisture. Now the fire has defeated or driven off all water, so the heat is pretty in-

Norton’s menu of fires

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tense. There is a danger of drying out. A therapeutic intervention may be too hot to handle. A “moist fire” that removes substances adhering to the side of the vessel. This fire dilutes thick substances by generating an even dryness. With an eye to the risks of drying out, this paradoxical fire is the therapeutic gaze – warm, discriminating, able to tease out one issue from another and offering an even hand. A fire that dries substances seeped in moisture. This is a necessary fire after too much water, a drenching, or an accidental spillage. It can be compared with the warmth of consistent empathy and care. It is not, however, hanging somebody out to dry. A parching fire. The fire here is too strong, but it may be necessary to bring on a need for water – burning off emotional defences so that engagement with feeling is restored. Hot but clear interventions may bring on a thirst for more of the same. An effusion of fire, or drying by smoke. Here, the naked flame is not necessary. Smoking brings flavour. The smoke does not obscure but may be used to disguise flame, the therapist’s confrontations seeking to bring out flavour in the client’s psyche. A corrosive fire. Too much heat promises hurt. A consuming, fierce fire that smelts. But, the fire cannot be too fierce and may need to be kept at an even high temperature for some time to be effective. Another necessary blast of heat to burn off some defence, or purge – but must be carefully controlled so as not to scar. A fire that purges impure metals. A heat that produces discrimination, or separates out issues so that hindrances can be burned away. A fire hot enough for sublimation. The intensity of the heat must be carefully gauged so that it does not burn or scald, but provides for a rich fermentation. This is the kind of incubating heat that raises information to the level of knowledge and wisdom. A secret fire. The most important fire of all, employed at the time of projection of the Stone (at the moment of realisation of a critical and permanent change). If a mistake is made with this fire, the whole Work is destroyed. How do you keep a relationship on the boil, or a creative impulse alive and kicking so that it is productive and not reproductive? This fire can be the gentle heat of fermentation and does not even require flame. Its maintenance calls for consistency.

Norton’s embodied fire metaphors can be readily applied to relationships and intimacy as we can see, and to therapeutic relationships (it is important to spot when a fire is all smoke and little flame for example, where the smoke is excessive and

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patently failing to cure, but rather serving to obscure). And Norton describes only half of the picture as the tending of the fire, not dealing with the consequences: such as burnout, burning down to dry essences, letting the fire go out through neglect (unable to rekindle the flame), reduction to dry ashes and so forth. But we can also take this list literally, as cooking, or work in the forge. This list provides a vocabulary for international relations, inter-ethnic tensions and the constant readjustments or firefighting within a democracy. Finally, here is a vocabulary for global warming that enriches the common scientific accounts, bringing metaphor to the table. Conservation and regeneration or renewal applies to the ecology of language just as it applies to land, sea and air.

The four fires The alchemists also describe a simpler alternative system to that of Norton: of four grades of fire with metaphors to suit, where fire is linked with the other elements. There is heat directed through water (the correct vessel for this work is the water bath or bain-Marie); heat directed through earth (as an ash bath or simply a pile of animal excrement); and heat regulated by air (a fierce flame with plentiful air and a smoking where the air supply is choked). 1. Low constant heat called “the brooding hen”. Its primary alembic or vessel is the water bath, guaranteeing a constant temperature. Such even warmth can be seen as the maintenance of interest and enthusiasm; the steady heat of a parent’s love for a child; empathy and guaranteed attention in therapeutic relationships, or a therapeutic alliance; constancy in friendships; common decency; the steady warmth of a developing relationship; alliances and political stability; a welcome climate. The alchemists also described a paradoxical “coffin’s fire” that is “slow and eternal” – referring to keeping memories alive (figure 5.8), the warmth of remembrance. The alchemists insisted that rotting dung (of, say, horseshit) is the best medium for maintaining an even heat, calling this the stink of Hades’ riches. In psychotherapy, breaking down ego defences leads to the release of repressed matter that must be kept warm and in ferment despite the stink; in healthy relationships there is always the background stench of composting matter, a healthy turning over and airing of symptoms, grumbles and dissent. This constant fire is again that of the hearth, the heart of the home, ruled over by Hestia (Greek) or Vesta (Roman) as the “family fire” – the warmth and intimacy that close families can engender. The focused fire is a glow, a smouldering ember and a spark of hope; it is embodied constancy – something lost since many homes do not have literal hearths and we are now conscious of related air pollution. Fam-

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Figure 5.8: The fire of the coffin

ilies also, notoriously, breed resentment and abuse to break up, where the hearth is scattered and common focus is lost. These are more damaging, intense and scalding heats leaving permanent scars. The hearth is neglected. The gentle fire is also that of keeping the pot simmering on the stove and the fire that brings craft to humans (Prometheus steals fire from the gods and passes it to humans, turning Nature into culture, the raw into the cooked – baking, pottery, smelting. Humans quickly abuse the privilege of fire as they pillage and burn, and turn the forge into a factory for weapons). The constant fire is again that of desire and erotic urge. Such interest, however, can overheat to become prurience. When Psyche visits the sleeping Eros to glimpse on his face, she accidently spills candle wax on him as she leans over, startling him into wakefulness and losing the mystery of the attraction. Love feeds on mystery. When we lose the fire of eros, we lose passion for life and everything that feeds it. The essence of fire is the flame of the candle as a symbol of constancy and contemplation, interest, engagement and enthusiasm. When the flame of the candle is snuffed, so too is our desire. 2. The heat of the sand bath, also called “the fire of Autumn”. This is a soft fire, but twice the intensity of Norton’s “the brooding hen”. It is a more passionate and inflamed warmth, a growth in desire and interest, a deeper form of attention. Where the poetic imagination scans the terrain infected by the heat of the brooding hen, so this heat focuses the imagination more clearly and intensifies its desires. Enthusiasm is evident and this can tip readily into symptom: blushing (embarrassment, realisation of an erotic charge, sudden impulses), sweating (gripped

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by an uncertainty), or reddening in a rising anger. There is something on the horizon to be confronted, a deeper embrace, a passion engaged. Here, one might confront one’s resistances or engage with the resistances of another. 3. The heat of the ash bath is, in turn, twice the strength of the heat of the sand bath, as the heat of Spring. Here, there is a greater ferocity and intensity of engagement and passion, like two rams butting. Resistance is exposed to intense heat, making sure that a direct flame is avoided (that might simply char, or scar). The poetic impulse here is at its peak in application, but often short-lived before scaling back to a background heat of interest and enthusiasm. 4. The heat of a direct flame that Norton called “scalding the pig or goose”, this is the heat of high summer. Also, the paradoxical heat of “ice burn” – the jarring effect of extreme cold, mirrored in suddenly being jilted, discovering a dark secret of an intimate, or the direct threat of the unexpected. This is twice the heat of the ash bath, so pretty intense – said to be the melting point of lead. This metaphor suggests the intensity of flame required to confront melancholia, agitating into activity. The alchemists point to two main dangers of direct flame: such intense heat can dry matter out completely (lack of moisture means a dry product – poetry as scorching academic exercise or pyrotechnics, without a necessary emotional dampness; psychotherapy as brilliant insights and interpretative pyrotechnics that make no impact on the client); or may vitrify – turning to glass, as the sudden emergence of fear in the heat of the moment. Or, alternatively, the heat of the moment produces illumination and light. Both intense fear and illumination can come from the heat of exchange as direct flame. Where 2 and 3 above require the vessel of the reverberatorium or calcining furnace (think of this as the consulting room, keeping the heat even and circulating – see figure 5.9), in the heat of the direct flame things are brought to a head. The heat must be emitted, or steam must be let off. Where intense heat can purify, overheating however can ruin the Work. In alchemy, as in psychotherapy, resistances (the whole stone, or the petrified psyche) are broken up or powdered by heat, but too much fire can leave us ashen, burned out. The over-zealous confrontation of resistances may lead to a digging in by the client in counter-resistance. Too much fire, or too intense. In The Plumed Serpent – first published in 1926 – D. H. Lawrence describes “The sense of life ebbing away, leaving dry ruin” and his character Carlota, who “sat like a heap of ash on (Ramon’s) bed, ashes to ashes, burnt out, with only the coals of her will still smouldering”. Supreme and direct heat is the most vigorous form of calcination – matter broken into, forced into submission, raped, assaulted. Fire now a violator and thief (see the following chapter on red sulphur as “thief ”); hot discomfort turning to suffering and horror. Hot under the collar suddenly shifting to volcanic eruption, as fiery outbursts of temper; simmering

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Figure 5.9: Freud’s consulting room in Vienna – the reverbatorium

passions suddenly flaming, uncontrollably hot, spitting flame – and then uncontrollable wildfires, or hell fires. Fires break up and break down what is fixed. A relationship burns out, ends in a conflagration; a career goes up in flames. Such fires promise dismemberment but also renewal. Burnout leads to a new vision. The alchemists’ image and metaphor for this was the salamander burning up in flame, met earlier (figure 5.2) – the image is annotated as constant renewal. The salamander invites and consumes fire through the chill of its body suggesting a link between cold-blooded acts and burnout. Cold-bloodedness consumes another’s fire. The relationship between ice and fire is reflected in language. Latin febris (fever), favilla (glowing ashes), and fovere (to warm) are cognate with MiddleHigh German friezen (the fever) and frasien (feverish convulsions) as frozen fire. There is a close connection between ice and fire in the Latin pruire (burning, itching) and pruino (hoar frost, ice coat) that gives us our English “prurience” (dry burning sensations, itching, skin irritation), also used to describe someone who is insistently interested in sex, or has an itch that cannot be scratched, a feverish desire that is frozen or remains immature, where satisfaction or satiety is never reached. Repressed desire is somaticised just as it hits the surface of the psyche. The itch sets in. The heat goes from gentle warmth (pleasant fantasies) to intense burning (prurience again).

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In Dante’s vision of Hell, the lower reaches include the fiery city of Dis, boiling pitch, and the river of boiling blood, Phlegeton. But at the lowest reach, the Ninth Circle, is the frozen lake of Cocytus. Hades’ realm in Greek myth has the fiery river Phlegeton, but the depths (Tartarus) are icy cold, with a relentless, bitter wind. The battle between fire and frost is a recurring mytheme and poetic trope, returning us to ice burns mentioned earlier and is embodied in whisky-on-the-rocks. Ice and fire come together in the symptoms of fever where the body overheats yet we feel chilled. In fever, the skin goes from dry, white and cool to sweat-soaked, red and hot that we might imagine as a chilly emptiness. A chronic atmosphere of chill may drive us into feverish states and vice versa, where a hot, fevered relationship is met by distancing: the literal cut-off as the metaphoric “cold shoulder”. Treatment of fevers is often accompanied by emotional warmth, where the advice is to “sweat it out”.

Labourers in fire In the work of alchemy as in poetry and psychotherapy, there is a general rule: “don’t take your eye off the work” or “tend the fire”. This means: do not become obsessed with self but consider rather the context in which the self becomes obsessive. What forces us into self-obsession is narcissism. We can “work” on the self (through alchemy, poetry and therapy, or any medium) without self-interest. The alchemists used the metaphor of tending the fire as first priority: do not watch the changes in the substances being worked upon, but tend to the qualities of the fire and necessary changes will follow. Above all, as mentioned earlier, do not be distracted by the smoke – its visual clouding, but also its disguising of tastes and smells (unless the smoke “cures” or brings out flavour, quite another tactic in the use of fire). Alchemists are again labourers in fire. The Work is conducted largely through heating and cooking substances. The alchemist brings enthusiasm and endurance to the Work that reflects the nature of fire: warm, vibrant, inflamed, inspired. An alchemist’s capital is sunk into fuel costs and the maintenance of the Athanor or furnace that eats up all his wealth (figure 5.10 where the alchemist’s vessel of coins are not the products of the Work but rather the cost of tending the fire). Fire is a living being demanding constant attention. Where our interest is caught is in the flammable face of the world so something is kindled, our passions fired, our desires enflamed. The heat of the fire cannot be abstracted from the body that gives the heat, whether it is the incinerating naked flame (burned out; passionate moments of excess) or in the steady comfort of a warm bath (ease and support); or the moist,

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Figure 5.10: The alchemist must constantly attend to the fire and it is costly

heavy warmth of rotting dung (a steady heat that also raises a stink: the insistent questioning or persistent research that exposes corruption). As our defences and resistances melt, so a permeating stink rises. Heats and fires must be differentiated: the slow and gentle, the moist and heavy, a paradoxical fiery lingering (“make haste slowly” say the alchemists, or “without haste without rest”); sudden and sharp (the poet Ted Hughes’ “a sudden, sharp hot stink of fox”); the stinking sulphur and the biting fire of salt; paradoxical “wet fires” and “heavy fires”. Alchemy texts are celebrated for their indirections, inconsistencies and ambiguities. The Way (as in Taoism or Zen Buddhism or any mystery religion) is never direct but oblique. The path constantly forks and the directions for travel are always confusing. This applies also to modern Lacanian psychotherapy, perhaps the most sophisticated conceptually of all approaches to psychology and one that feeds on metaphor production. Thus, as noted above, we are told: do not watch the changes in the substances being worked upon, but tend to the qualities of the fire and necessary changes will follow. But now, we must also not be lulled into believing that by studying fire we know the fire. For example, we must know how the fire is regulated and this is the knowledge of the blacksmith and the meat curer, including the uses of various bellows, the nature of the furnace, the varieties of smoke – again, does the smoke occlude the fire and its effects or does the smoke appropriately “cure”? Alchemical fire is not sited just in the laboratory and furnace, in the smithy, the smokehouse, or the kitchen. The heats of enthusiasm, desire, devotion and interest are also seen in the library and the clinic; in the passions of research and healthcare; and in poetry.

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The outcomes of calcination Burning wet passions down to dry essences This is to burn out the sappy moistures of youth (wet behind the ears) in tempering. In The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine (1625) it is said: “Maturity and fixity are obtained by the living fire”. Moisture is driven off until the stone attains indestructible fixity. When the stone is completely calcined, it is said to be impervious to the fire itself, or lives in its own substance that is the calcined state. Youth, wet behind the ears, sappy, is calcined in life experience that includes series of heated exchanges. As we age, we dry out or are less sappy, and maybe develop dry humour. The residue (the oxidised metal) is heavier, more weighty; issues have more gravity. Heraclitus said: “it is death to souls to become water”. Where the “wet soul” refers to the naturalistic perspective, the sappy innocence of youth – taking things on face value, or on trust – the dry soul is that of psychological maturity giving meaning to image and metaphor. Ageing brings reflection in which sappy first impressions are baked or tested in the flame. Driving out the sap refers to maturing, baked like a biscuit, fired like a pot, tried and tested or hardened, referred to in John Trinnick’s (1967) alchemical text The Fire Tried Stone – a celebration of Jung’s pioneering work in linking psychology and alchemy. In calcining, a vapour is given off and this may be collected or condensed against cold surfaces (memories of youth and sap tested against hard realities; looking in the mirror). Burning out the wet passions is to combat hysterical defences (fear of deep emotional involvement) and sappy understandings, where one cannot face the heat of the kitchen. Emotions may dry us out to leave only a dry pulling – but this is not the quality of fire, not a dry essence, but an ash, a residue. What we need from maturing in the fire is a dry wit, the dryness of a mature wine. It is typical in psychotherapy to meet highly successful people in mid-life who suddenly feel a vacuum, a crisis, where the fires of their early life seemed to have burned out and they feel ashen, dry and unproductive. Paradoxically, they need warmth as they crave moisture – how to invest their experiences wisely, how to shift from obsessions that are now overly raw to new interests, and how to re-kindle what has burned out but still has life as it simmers in the hearth.

The value in the residue The calx or ashes left over from the fire have value:

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i.

As permanence of experience, not washed away in regret but fixed in memory and character. This is to address D.H. Lawrence’s fear (in The Plumed Serpent) of “The sense of life ebbing away, leaving dry ruin”. ii. The residue has gained weight (oxidised) or has more gravity than the original metal before calcining. Weight, seriousness, concern: anchoring rather than flighty motion are felt. This is responsibility. Exposure to fire brings this extra weight of residues (the slow oxidations in life) as responsibilities through experience, or greater knowing. iii. Powders fall apart or particularise – stick with pathologies and know their details. Better to not dissolve the ash in alcohol or tears but to see the value in the dry pulling or tugging. Attend to the gravity of the situation by looking at its particulars. Use the fire to separate out issues.

Creating a thirst The fire creates a need for water, a thirst. Back to the classic mid-life crisis. Some alchemical texts say that we must create a thirst where none was previously recognised. Through calcining, we get to know what thirsts we have, what precisely are our desires and what directions we should take. The challenge is then to find out what in particular will slake our thirst, such as a particular experience or substance. Indeed, for some alchemists, calcination is the core of the Work as it produces an ever-thirsty Stone that will seek to imbibe. The Stone wants to harden as we get older but we must keep it soft and malleable. This is the everlasting search for knowledge, wisdom, challenge and relationships that create the ever-imbibing Stones. Alchemists speak of the Stone out of which all colours appear. This may be a good definition of poetry. The Stone is not some magical substance but merely experience used wisely and considerately.

Dangers in calcination Premature calcining Burning out before time, unexpected burnout, too hot to handle, burning out others with our intensity before getting to know them. These are burning issues that could be avoided or foretold. There is too much heat too quickly – over-eagerness, too much too soon, overload. Recycling youthful enthusiasm and vigour in midlife. We collapse in our own heat before the job is done from exhaustion, cynicism, bitterness, ending up humourless and detached. This may be too long at the naked

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flame, or too long providing warmth for others. Living in this excess of fire can cause a mirroring of the very conditions that burn us out in our own behaviour – causticity, scorching comment, scorn, dessicating criticism. This is a loss of moisture or emotional liquidity. Premature calcining can lead to aridity (life goes dry and brittle with no sap, no tears at all, no vitality, only residues), bitterness (ashes), and exhaustion (no flame). Such causticity may be turned on oneself. Contemplation of the steady fire of the flame acts as a counter to premature calcining. As noted above, the flame of the candle teaches the steady gaze and the steady provision of warmth (in friendships and relationships as well as in professional contexts). “Fire smoulders in a soul more surely than it does under ashes” says Gaston Bachelard (1964: 13), which is to say that reverie can focus on fire in the time-honoured tradition of our earliest ancestors gazing into the communal fire in the cave. Hence, our imaginations are “fired up” and we exude “warmth”. We look back on “old flames” with pleasure and celebrate our current flame.

Vitrification In extreme heat, incandescent ash turns to glass: in the midst of fury is a clear insight. Or, extreme anger solidifies such that a couple is frozen in fire or vitrified, where the scenario is clear for all to see and to see through. Vitrification is a pane. It hurts to see through to what one cannot touch. The intense heat of an argument brings transparency in the absence of a desire to touch. A white-hot idea may become an ideology, producing fixation – glassy-eyed converts with fixed ideas hardened into ideals. What is a viewpoint from the ideologue’s perspective is a window on folly, a transparent idiocy, from the perspective of the observer. The vessel created by the ideologue becomes a prison. What seems like clarity from the vitrified’s perspective is a glazing-over that gives no room for mirroring or reflection. Here, the vessel is mistaken for the Work. The container – a set of rules, a dogma as the structure of the idea – hardens and the structure is mistaken for life itself. The idea also is not the same as the act. Glassy-eyed converts project their ideology instead of seeing value in another’s beliefs. This applies to schools of psychotherapy where the guiding principles no longer guide, but set out to shape the client in the mould of the school.

Premature cooling Taking the heat away too soon can ruin the Work – withdrawal of warmth, of attention, betrayal, sudden loss of intimacy, cutting off. This may signal a fear of com-

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mitment, an inability to stay at the flame. Or it may be tardiness in maintaining the hearth as the heart of the home. The heat of encounter too can be suddenly cooled by over-analysis or intellectualisation when what is needed is a steady heat. As noted earlier, the alchemists warn against taking one’s eye off the fire. Psychologically, this is the burning issue. All around it will be deflections and defences and being distracted by these can lead to premature cooling. Study the fires and tend them.

Resist blowing on old embers When the fire goes out, the alchemists say: start a new fire elsewhere and do not try to stoke up the old fire. You can unnecessarily stir up resentments as you stir up old loves or hates; and in attempting to re-kindle old flames, you may simply end up wallowing in sentimentality. Or, you may throw all your money into what is wasted work, a project now in ashes.

Use air wisely The control of the fire is through judicious use of the bellows (alchemists were called “puffers”). Sudden conflagration through too much air leads to premature calcining and too little air leads to premature cooling. Watch out for puffing up – inflation, intoxication, too much talk, domineering behaviours, dominating conversations. The sudden and hot flame can burn up relationships quickly, or lead to burnout where work is intense and all-consuming and no balance is achieved. But do not withdraw air too quickly in a choking and closing down, where this produces suffocating smoke and smokescreens. Too much smoke and not enough flame is characteristic of jargon-led conversations and lack of technique. But the right amount of smoke, as we saw earlier, can “cure” or produce unique flavour.

Repeated themes Alchemical texts are purposefully opaque and often irritatingly oblique. They were designed this way to prevent arrest when alchemy was an illegal pursuit. But they also play, properly, on riddle and metaphor. Accompanying illustrations can multiply up the obscurities. But this is no different from much poetry or the direct experience of the dream and waking imagination. Psychodynamic psychotherapy too often feels this way. It is not a straightforward path of cumulative insights and

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“growth”, but rather a series of twists and turns, parallel narratives, dead ends, paradoxes and puzzles. But it has a feeling of “suchness” or it sits well. Lacanian analysis in particular delights in ruin of a sort; of paradoxes and upsets; of stirring up the waters just as they have settled. It is an analysis paralleling Trotsky’s “permanent revolution”, Bruno Latour’s retreating horizon of endless “translations” and Yrjö Engestrõm’s model of learning as an ever-expanding set of innovations through “boundary crossings”. The journey is the destination, as the New Agers might say. Such alchemical texts and meanderings of the psyche can be interpreted, picked apart (hermeneutics) just as they can be enjoyed for their multilevel meanings and labyrinthine puzzles. Sometimes, however, exegesis of a text can be fairly straightforward, as can analysis of a psychological block or a hazard. Fabricius shows a wolf apparently devouring (certainly nuzzling at) the body of a dead (or at least prostrate) king (figure 5.11). In the background, a raging fire consumes the wolf and the king seems to be emerging from the fire, unscathed. The wolf can be taken as voracious hunger, a fire in the belly. The king as tired matter, played out, needing rejuvenation. The rebirth comes through the calcining of the body of the wolf. Let’s take this as the purification of gross canine hunger, or a tempering of that hunger in the flame to renew the king’s authority and vitality.

Figure 5.11: The wolf devours the king, who is reborn in the fire

There is a dual sacrifice – that of the tired king and that of the voracious hunger of the wolf. We must re-kindle interest and temper over-enthusiasm: stick with the Work no matter what. The king emerges as a tempered, reflective and discriminating person – also now with a renewed thirst for life. The Work is to gain reflective

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capacity, to make glass in the flame, the fire visited over and over. The Rosarium (1550) describes this creative rebirth in a set of metaphors: “The unclean body must be cooked and calcined until it reaches the whiteness … burn in water and wash in fire, cook and cook again, moisten and coagulate all the time, kill the living and resuscitate the dead”. In other words, drive off sappy moisture (youthful ideals), purify through life experience and create a thirst for creative intent. The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine (1625) says: “maturity and fixity are obtained by living fire”. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” is a harsh invective, but it has some truth. Here, we walk away abruptly from the fire lest it creates damage.

Chapter 6 Red Sulphur The Love of War D.H. Lawrence once said “Gods should be iridescent”. Well, certainly they should not be dull. Perhaps the same can be said about us mere mortals. But how far can we go on the “iridescence” spectrum? Where does “dazzle” become violence or violating, too strong to stomach? The Roman writer Seneca described how “Warlike Mars invented new forms of strife and a thousand forms of death. From this source streams of blood stained all lands and the sea grew red”. Further, such warmongering among mortals is a “lust which sets men’s hearts aflame”. The metaphor is powerful: erotic charge meets warring impulse, centred on the heart, the primary symbol of both love and courage. Humanity (the male half at least) seems to have embraced a love of war (Hillman 1987). In Greek myth, the goddess of love and eroticism, Aphrodite, was paired with the god of war, Ares. Aphrodite would take Ares to the bedchamber to stop him from visiting the battlefield. As a pacifist who abhors violence, I nevertheless have to come to terms with the inevitability of a range of violence – from everyday microaggressions to ethnic conflicts, from gender-based bullying to mass slaughter. In the USA for example, an average of two million domestic violence incidents are reported every year, while a further estimated eight million incidents go unreported. Understanding violence – including compulsive acting out of bullying and microaggressions – as a horror and a form of abjection won’t make it go away (“all you need is love”, “give peace a chance”). But it does provide some moral distance, gaining a perspective from which we might better understand why violence (and its media portrayals) permeates society. Julia Kristeva’s (1982) extended essay on abjection, The Powers of Horror, points to a difficulty with the stance of ethically distancing oneself from violence. She argues that Kantian moral perspectives, a supreme form of logical gymnastics or training of the mind and affect, is an impossible position from which to fully understand violence, horror and the abject because the latter is grounded in primal passions and not intellect. Such understanding is best done through Aristotelian catharsis – an emotional identification with the issue and with those who are violent and violated. This is not to condone violence but to understand it within its own nature. The western imagination after all is grounded in a war book – Homer’s The Iliad – that continues to provide a mythical and metaphorical background against which interpersonal and inter-cultural conflicts can be understood. And Homer’s second great book, The Odyssey, while a story of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-008

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homecoming and hospitality, contains at its close some of the bloodiest scenes in literature as Odysseus and his son Telemachus slay Odysseus’ wife Penelope’s suitors (see below). William Tanner Vollman’s masterwork on wars and their meanings, Rising Up and Rising Down, runs to seven volumes and over 3,000 pages, and was over 20 years in the making. It mirrors Homer for ambition. An abridged version was published in 2005. I can promise that reading this offers a unique therapeutic encounter. Kristeva’s clinical work as a psychoanalyst has more recently been focused on helping traumatised refugees or migrants fleeing conflict, particularly children, who have found domicile in France. Her personal battlefield is the – sometimes bruising – psychoanalytic session, where the analyst or therapist (working in pairs or teams, particularly with the psychiatrist Marie Rose Moro) must bear the multiple stories of hurt provided by their clients in “inhabiting” those – often terrible – accounts (Kristeva, personal communication). Kristeva warns that the analytic encounter necessarily invites eros: love as compassion for, or identification with, another that revolves around how to deal with extremes of life force. Here, the psychotherapist, as “translator”, must meet the foreign language of the Other (the client’s obsessions, compulsions, perversions, desires, intimacies, double-binds, untruths and so forth) on what the American poet Charles Olson called a poetic “field” (a delimited meeting place shared by all parties). This may mirror a battlefield. The client’s troubles, hurts and confusions, symptomised in language and bodily forms (habits and tics), spills over the confines of the field (the consulting room, and the limits to cultural exchange based on “difference” as Derridean différance and deference, or the explicit understanding and honouring of spaces between people based on upbringing, values and customs). The scattered material must be brought back into the field where it can be made sense of, or turned into a “poem” as elegant and humane therapeutic intervention. Such dynamics are familiar to depth psychotherapists in any context and I will show how early modern alchemical notions can illuminate this work for postmodern, multicultural times. Writing on abjection long before the transcultural therapeutic work mentioned above, Kristeva (ibid.: 30 – 31) described “the sad, analytic silence” provided by the therapist that “hover(s) above a strange, foreign discourse” of the client. This discourse, naturally troubled, “shatters verbal communication … by means of a device that mimics terror, enthusiasm, or orgy, and is more related to rhythm or song than it is to the World”. It is the analyst’s knowledge of “abjection” as musical atonality and a playing out of tune (too flat as depression, too sharp as mania) that underpins what Kristeva called a “’poetic’ unsettlement of analytic utterance”. The analyst aims for “analytic jouissance”, a psychological desire that is, again, “poetic mimesis”. In dealing with the abject as this is linked

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to the spectrum of violence described above, from extreme fiery impulse to nagging microaggressions, drawing on Greek myth the therapist provides the presence of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, to the client’s martial impulses personified by Ares, the god of war. The psychotherapist is not a lover of violence but a passionate advocate of “close reading” of symptom, drawing particularly on Freud’s notion of the vicissitudes of instinct and Jung’s notion of “enantiodromia” where an exhibited symptom can suddenly turn into its opposite given the right conditions. Psychotherapy is necessarily a strategic, rather than a directly martial, occupation. It follows Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” strategy in engaging-combat-without-fighting. As noted, in myth, Aphrodite takes Ares to her bed as lover to keep him away from the battlefield, turning warring passions into close erotic encounters. (A similar, but homoerotic, arrangement is hinted at between Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad). But this love story is also the tale of therapeutic encounters. Not the literalising of eros, for therein lies an ethical rupture, but the bearing in mind of the treatment of raw “violence” (uncontrollable anger, violating behaviour, impulse) with tenderness. Kristeva (ibid.) suggests that good analytic encounters are not to be learned through technique, but through “history”. It is only by understanding the history of the client and the history of psychotherapeutic technique, that we can ratchet up our own capabilities as psychotherapists. But history can be taken “deep”, beyond the modern. We shall see that the early modern period, particularly the Renaissance, provides a background against which we can understand the interplay of war and love, of violence and nurture: a complex verbal and figurative background provided by alchemy. And our main protagonist here is alchemical red sulphur: described in alchemy as a raw desire, a hot impulse and an unregulated “thief ” who breaks into the household uninvited – in other words, Freud’s primal “instinct” and its vicissitudes. Instinct here has two faces: Eros or life force and Thanatos or death wish. Alchemical red sulphur embodies the paradoxical condition of these forces operating simultaneously as a pharmakon or “healing poison”, an ambiguous signifier and a logical contradiction. For psychoanalysts following Lacan, the unconscious always speaks with such a forked tongue or dual meaning and this is embedded in the premodern alchemical tradition with its impenetrable texts and gnomic illustrations (see for example figure 6.1). For this stream of psychoanalytic thinking, contra Freud’s more overt rationalism, psychological “health” is best represented as the full force of a poetic imagination, a life understood as largely metaphoric, for which we must cultivate high tolerance of ambiguity. Many commentators have articulated issues about humanity’s embrace of warfare as a way to settle disputes or exert power in powerful ways. James Hillman (1987) writes of a paradoxical “love of war” (another pharmakon) as a way in which Ares and Aphrodite meet, but on the battlefield rather than in the bed

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Figure 6.1: The mercurial spirit in alchemy, necessarily enigmatic

of Venus – through a male gendered tenderness found in companionship between men at war. It is again archetypally embodied in the homoerotic relationship of Achilles and Patroclus in Homer’s The Iliad. For Hillman, such a love of and for war extends beyond companionship in combat to a love of the battlefield itself, that becomes the poetic “field” for male expression and collaborative bonding through the “unit”. In Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now there is a famous scene in which Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) says to his troop “I love the smell of napalm in the morning … it smells like victory”: Homer’s The Iliad redux. A celebration of sulphurous power. Such militaristic metaphors of masculinised teamwork extend even now to firefighters, the police and medicine – the latter historically thriving on metaphors of combat such as “the war against cancer” (Bleakley 2019). And we wonder why in these sectors institutional sexism, racism and authority-led hierarchies are so hard to change. Sulphur’s impulse is hard to contain and harder to adapt or change. As noted, the prolific author William T. Vollmann (2005) also approaches an understanding of human conflict and war historically over a massive, seven volumes work (available also as an abridged edition). In tracing conflicts globally and historically, Vollmann extracts themes that are then translated as neo-Kantian moral imperatives. These are justifications for war and conflict distilled from the ethical pros and cons. Wars have an underlying rationale such as defence of

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territory, response to invasion, defence of nationalism or identity, religious imperatives, seeking of resources, political and ideological imperatives and so forth. Through a moral calculus, the author weighs up claims for war (attack or defence) as rights and responsibilities arguments. While he focuses largely on the ethics of conflict, Vollmann points out that wars have an aesthetic component – for example, the martial epic song and poem, the elegant design of combat apparatus shown in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings and the evolution of guns to fit hands so artfully pictured in Western movies focused on the “fastest draw”. Alchemically, these too are sulphurous concerns: gunpowder, intensity and the heat of battle. The Chinese alchemist Wei Boyang, around 142 AD, referred to a substance with unusual combustible properties – sulphur. It was used in gunpowder, an explosive key to mining, but also the main component in fireworks used for public spectacle. Gunpowder was not used in warfare however until the 10th century AD. Thus, sulphur in gunpowder for a long period had utility and aesthetic appeal, but its martial aspect took some centuries to appear. Weapons must have their handlers – those who have committed themselves to combat are surely of sulphur, combustible, bent on “engagement” of the enemy: love and war always close.

At the volcano’s rim Before gunpowder and fireworks, sulphur’s stink and fire of course are first encountered raw in nature as eruptive forces – fissures and volcanoes. The American poet Wallace Stevens made a distinction between “force” and “presence” as two major poetic strategies. “Presence” is a quiet, listening strategy; where headstrong force ruptures, wrestles and wrangles to make change. Both are legitimate strategies, but their co-existence is strained. In alchemy, salt (considered at length in chapter 8) is the substance of Stevens’ “Presence” offering grounding, where sulphur is the substance of “Force” offering violent rupture. Salt too can “burn” in quantity – as a marker of psychological obsession it can offer a metaphor for compulsive behaviour following obsessive thought and image. The Romans would salt fertile land that they had once occupied as a cynical leaving present and reminder of their power, but this dry burning can be read psychologically as one of literal bitterness, not of the flammable power of naked flame, or the hot intensity of sulphur that feeds fire. Where salt offers metaphors of obsession and a turning inward to intensity of contemplation as sleight, raw red sulphur is a bursting forth, a vital energy, mania: impulse and compulsion. The 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, the American poet Louise Glück (2006), was inspired by a small crater lake in southern Italy, Averno. The Romans took this as the entrance to the underworld. It is a fount of alchemical sulphur, nat-

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urally, mythologically and poetically. Glück writes: “I want to shout out // the mist has cleared- // It’s like some new life”. The poet recounts how she is reborn in a sudden acceptance of death’s inevitability, here at the rim of the volcano. She asks earlier in the poem “Alverno”: “should I be taking / one of the new drugs for depression?” Now, she accepts her fate at the lip of Hades, and the depression lifts. She can smell the sulphur and it is a bracing tonic, also fumigant. This is a brave step away from leaden melancholy, life now sparked back into flame. But the flame here is not consuming – it is rather a comforting warmth, a snowmelt. Sulphur too can be gradual and cheering in its warming as small doses of inspiration and courage, quite different from masculine raging on the battlefield, closer to the intimacy, warmth and friendship that James Hillman (1987) describes as an eroticism of war, a battlefield bonding. In this chapter on alchemical sulphurs (of the red varieties, where the following chapter 7 considers green sulphur as the erupting natural force of life and as the heat of ferment – or vegetative rot), I illustrate in particular how psychotherapy can, and must, be extended from the personal to the world soul, from individuals to collectives and their cultural artefacts. As Julia Kristeva (above) shows in her current psychotherapeutic concerns, life-course or developmental trauma read through a post-Freudian lens is so often intimately tied with the post-Adlerian social and collective traumas of displacement – particularly forced migration caused by war, ethnic conflict, ideological extremes, or climate change. The Climate Emergency can be seen as a need to attend to global warming symptoms that have resulted from human abuse of natural resources. It is necessarily a therapeutic scenario, one of close “attendance”. This follows the theme of James Hillman and Michael Ventura’s (1992) We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse, where a plea was made for the switch in focus from cultivating the personal in psychotherapy to attending to the sufferings of culture – or to symptoms of the world soul – through public activism or using the arts and humanities (such as film and literature) as therapeutic media. Mobilising early modern alchemy and its modern interpretations, here I develop future-focused cultural readings through an alchemical psychology. In considering metaphors of sulphur, I hope that through this chapter you, the reader, feel the heat and smell the stink of raw sulphur and its oily compounds. The psychotherapist, an expert in enthusiasm, must always be at the flame.

The violent claims of red sulphur The climax of Odysseus’ homecoming – chronicled in Homer’s The Odyssey – offers a catalogue of terror, motivated by revenge. After wandering for 10 years, following

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nine years of fighting in the Trojan War, Odysseus, in disguise, returns home to Ithaca to discover that an unscrupulous band of suitors has been vying for the hand of his wife Penelope. They are moreover living at Odysseus’s expense, presuming him dead and plotting to kill his son Telemachus, who believes that the father he hardly knew will eventually return home. Odysseus reveals his disguise to his son and plans for bloody revenge on the suitors helped by Telemachus, described at the close of the epic poem as the “Slaughter in the Hall” (Book XXI). Having trapped the suitors in the Great Hall, father and son proceed to systematically pick them off by arrow, lance and sword, in cold-blooded revenge. The leader of the suitors, Antinous, about to drain a goblet of wine, receives an arrow “square in the throat”. Homer continues to catalogue the bloody details: “as the shaft sank home, and the man’s life-blood came spurting / out his nostrils … / (in) thick red jets … / a sudden thrust of his foot … / he kicked away the table … / food showered across the floor, / the bread and meats soaked in a swirl of bloody filth”. Another suitor receives an arrow “ripping his breast beside the nipple so hard / it lodged in the man’s liver” (trans. Fagles 1996 and passim). Odysseus “kept picking suitors off in the palace, one by one / and down they went, corpse on corpse in droves”. Encouraged by the goddess Athene – first in disguise as Mentor, then as a portentous swallow perching high on the main roof beam of the great Hall, and finally panicking the suitors through appearing in her full epiphany – Odysseus takes on an animal fury, a rage so powerful that with Telemachus they “struck like eagles, crook-clawed, hook-beaked … wheeling into the slaughter, slashing left and right / and grisly screams broke from skulls cracked open … / the whole floor awash with blood”. One terrified suitor clutching Odysseus’s knees and begging for mercy is promptly beheaded “square across the neck”. The slaughter complete, the dead “lay in heaps” like beached fish “twitching, lusting for fresh salt sea”, while the sun mercilessly “hammers down and burns their lives out”. Odysseus’s now elderly nurse Eurycleia finds him standing “in the thick of slaughtered corpses, / splattered with bloody filth like a lion that’s devoured / some ox of the field, and lopes home, covered with blood”. As he is “spattered with gore”, he pauses for reflection: “Bring sulphur, nurse, to scar all this pollution … / bring me fire too, so I can fumigate the house”. Note that reflection is intrinsic to the impulsive act of violence, preventing this from becoming compulsive: Odysseus carries the epithet “wily” or “crafty”; he is aware of his anger and its consequences within the arc of the act of aggression itself. So, Odysseus adopts Paracelsian alchemy – treat like with like to heal – his sulphurous fury tempered by sulphur and fire, as apologia. After the slaughter, overcome by sadness and sudden tender feelings Odysseus “broke down and wept”. Salt treats the sulphurous stink: impulse inextricably linked with remorse and possibly regret, but – as noted – insight accompanies outrage or is intrinsic

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to the arc of violent anger. This is key to working therapeutically with what appears to be uncontrollable, hot desire – how can reflexive insight become an integral part of the arc of outrage or impulse? I am no Buddhist scholar, but my understanding is that such intrinsic insight and ongoing reformulation within otherwise hot desire is central to Buddhist practice. For the alchemists, red sulphur – anger, hot desire, impulse – must be tempered by another substance, or “whitened”, whether this is “salt” (grounding) or “mercury” (reflection, critical reflexivity, insight). Again, such descriptors are to be read as embodied metaphors, or metaphors embedded as activity. “It is better to burn out than to rust” observes the singer-songwriter Neil Young. Salt tears surely bring out the rust, but sulphur’s rampage and rapacious acts keep remorse and sadness at bay, for now overwhelming anger is dominant, driven by revenge. Odysseus’s name means both “angry” and “wily”, his vitriolic and merciless attack is not just driven by blind impulse as the desire for revenge. He knows what he is doing within the act. For him it is a moral imperative to punish the suitors. In alchemy, again, sulphur is usually tempered or “whitened” by salt as noted above. Homer’s images are in hindsight alchemically exact, for Odysseus’s victims are described in salty terms, as beached fish; and salty, bitter tears offer an antidote to sulphurous combustibility. Sulphur needs a substance as big as itself to temper its presence, to turn acting out into inward contemplation and an impersonal rage into personal, bitter remorse where apparently blind impulse transforms into moral courage. Our big, post-industrial sulphurous experiment, resulting in global warming and ecological catastrophe, is red sulphur run riot, without whitening as an inbuilt arc of reflection. That nobody saw this coming is ridiculous. The Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius described a “greenhouse effect” in 1896 – where increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide could increase ambient temperature; Guy Callender described a global warming effect in 1938; while Gilbert Plass reiterated this carbon dioxide theory of climate change in 1956. The magazine The Ecologist was first published in 1970. In 1972 I was publishing the UK’s first surfing paper that included a regular page on the environment and ecological issues. Overwhelming evidence for climate change was available by the 1990s. The reflection that is necessary for sulphuric impulse was muffled by the fossil fuel’s primary impulse to make as much profit as possible at all costs, and damn the consequences – rampant, stinking sulphur of the red kind, running riot. The world soul, meanwhile, symptomising through ecological scarring and runaway climate effects. The Dust Bowl effects in the 1930s that caused widespread damage to farmland and ecology across the American and Canadian prairies was soon understood as a failure to apply proper dryland farming techniques as well as the product of severe drought. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962, chronicling the ad-

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verse effects of the overuse of pesticides. The running aground of the oil tanker SS Torrey Canyon in March 1967 off the western tip of the UK constituted that country’s largest ever wrecked vessel, causing the biggest ever oil spill ecological disaster, harming seabirds and sea life in particular. My father’s trawler and fishing boat were among the vessels sent out to try to “clean up” the acreage of oil filming the sea around western and northern coasts of Cornwall, where I helped too and so had first-hand knowledge not only of the extent of the disaster but also of how the “clean-up” (largely pouring gallons of detergent onto the sea) in retrospect only aggravated the initial damage of the oil spill. This is “Big Oil’s” sulphuric violence against the world, against Nature and the world soul. The profit motive blinds to ethical concerns Back to interpersonal violence: the film director Quentin Tarantino, schooled in film noir but also able to offer a parody of the genre, brings Homeric violence to the big screen as if it were slapstick, which of course is morally disconcerting. In Pulp Fiction Tarantino (1994: 141) shows the hoods Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield driving a young man destined to talk with their boss Marsellus Wallace. The two hoods have just shot three youths in cold blood, who seem to have been set up by a fourth youth Marvin, now in the back of the car. Vincent turns to talk to Marvin. Tarantino’s (ibid.) script says, “Vincent turns to the back seat with the .45 casually in his grip”. The car hits a bump in the road. The gun accidentally fires. “Marvin is hit in the upper chest, below the throat. He gurgles blood and shakes” (ibid.). Marvin is still alive: Jules: what the fuck’s happening? Vincent: I just accidentally shot Marvin in the throat … Look! I didn’t mean to shoot the son of a bitch, the gun just went off, don’t ask me how! Now I think the humane thing to do is put him out of his misery. Vincent asked Jules to honk his horn when he counts to three, at which point he shoots Marvin in the head, splattering the car and its occupants with blood and gore. Vincent to himself: Fuck. Jules: Look at this mess! We’re drivin’ around and on a city street in broad daylight. Vincent: I know, I know, I wasn’t thinking about the splatter.

Impulse and its discontents Returning from the world on fire to humans in heat, red sulphur’s fiery and pungent properties can be recognised in human personality as intense desire, impetuousness, hot impulse, rage and unreflective or unthinking act. This echoes the descriptors of alchemical fire catalogued in the previous chapter. Caught in the nature of this substance, we fail to reflect on our actions as they are happening,

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Figure 6.2: Emblem of alchemical sulphur, an eternal flame

dominated by drive. In Pulp Fiction, above, there is literally a bumpy ride full of unpredictable accidents. Jules and Vincent seem to be following the thread of fate that is the distressing impulse of sulphur playing out before them and to which they respond with improvisation, driving the script on. We all know it is going to finish badly. Sulphur in the red variety burns us and burns us out. The Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said that “whatever thymos wishes, it buys at the expense of soul”. Thymos, or “blood soul”, is the instigator of impetuousness, caught in the metaphor “hot blooded”. Without the reflective qualities of psyche or soul (imagination), thymos, which is self-fertilising, continues to impel itself, imprisoned in its purpose until it burns out, or burns others. Red sulphur is described by the alchemists as “blackening silver” or impeding reflection and they caution that such sulphur has a dangerous purpose and should be cooled, sublimated, or “whitened”. Again, distance needs to be created within the impulse itself, introducing a reflexivity, modelled by Homer’s Odysseus above. Odysseus is cold blooded and calculating in his pursuit of the suitors, yet shows remorse. Ethical reflection inhabits the hot impulse, giving it psychological complexity and maturity. Odysseus’s main epithet after all is “wily”. In Tarantino’s film, a complex distancing is readily introduced because his characters are cinematic representations (there is already distance between the screen and audience) and caricatures, self-mocking in situations larded with irony. That is why we can laugh at such violence. Or rather, the laughter itself provides a “whitening” distance from hot, immediate, terrifying engagement with the sulphurous moment. In real life, if we witness violence or outrage, especially when it appears to be calculated, our emotional response is not one of laughter but usually fear or anguish. Film, like theatre, serves its original purpose described by Aristotle to promote catharsis and this embraces perplexing and sometimes nervous

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laughter. We have a strange fascination with such representations of violence – they are now commonplace in films, television, books and above all, video games. At the same time as violence attracts us it repels us, we abhor it: ever-present ethnic conflicts, sectarian stand-offs, muggings, rapes, shootings, drug violence, police brutality, gang fights, physically abusive relationships, domestic violence (the family typically a hotbed of confrontation), playground bullying, prison violence, the legitimating and commodifying of violence in sports, cruelty to children and animals, online abuse, road rage, accumulation of microaggressions, and so forth. In a civilised society, we want to know the radical immediacy of violence, but not literally, and so the simulation precedes the reality, as mediation and representation. We crave the exciting presence of raw, red sulphur, but we fear its consequences and abhor its stink and aftertaste – a sulphur that the alchemists described as both fiery and acrid, that breaks into other substances like an acid, in a violation or rape, yet also brings colour, warmth and glory to all living things, and an oily nourishment. The alchemists personified active red sulphur as a dishevelled, corrupting and hungry winged youth, a disreputable cousin to wing-footed Hermes the trickster, but explicitly labelled a “thief ”. Spiritus Sulphur (figure 6.3) has a winged cap, indicating that the figure is headstrong, impetuous. William Faulkner’s anti-hero Thomas Sutpen in Absalom! Absalom! is described as looking like “a man who had been through some solitary furnace experience which was more than just fever” – a perfect description of Spiritus Sulphur, wrecked and racked by fire, close to burnout. Having worked psychotherapeutically with exhausted medical professionals close to burnout, an abiding image that haunts me is the sense of emotional dishevelment and the inability to self-present in a coherent emotional fashion in otherwise very focused professionals (Peterkin and Bleakley 2017). There is a stink of black sulphur in burnout and an eerie cold presence as the fire has completely consumed itself. At this point suicide ideation is common. In John Trinick’s (1967) reading of Introitus Apertus, an alchemical tract written by Philaletes in 1645, red sulphur is referred to as a “vile thief ” who breaks in where he is not requested or invited, and who offers the most severe obstacle to the refinement of substances in the alchemical Work. Crude sulphur is, in Philalethes’s account, the stinking, lank Spiritus Sulphur who is on the point of burnout or burning out others as an unwelcome presence. He corrupts and, according to Philalethes (ibid.: 21,29) is “vulgar”, “foreign”, “a robber”, “scorching” and is “not the right fire”. This judgement is of course from the perspective of a sublimated sulphur, a reflective consciousness, a socialised ego, whose identity is created from exclusion, in turn creating “otherness” and labels of “dis-ability”. From this moralising and idealising perspective of sublimated sulphur – the whitened

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Figure 6.3: Spiritus Sulphur – the “red thief”

variety – vile red sulphur’s intense immediacy dissimulates its true nature: its future again as a lingering black trace, a tarring with perceived shame, a stinking residue, or a cold ash. This is the tragic consequence of unreflective impulsivity and compulsion (an anal impulse contrary to the will) with its negative associations: “all haste comes from the devil”. While Robert Grinnell (1973: 25) says that “sulphur is a hot demonic principle of life”, also “in its negative aspect, Sulphur has close affinities with the ‘sun in the earth’ … the burning magma of the core … the fire of hell”. Such a black sun corresponds with melancholy and depression (Kristeva 1989), and “putrefaction, or the state of death” (Grinnell 1973: 25). Let us move from the personal to the earthly or worldly and the symptomising of Nature (as we also understand human symptoms through images of Nature). In this, we must be careful to not be trapped by a “naturalistic fallacy” – that is to assume that the substance of the human psyche can be compared with the natural world – for example the psyche reduced to mere biochemistry and physiology. This reductive view leads us from symptom (depression, anxiety) to drug therapy (anti-

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depressants, anxiolytics) based on supposed neurological models (facilitating blockage or release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine). Human imagination cannot be compared with Nature (again the naturalistic fallacy), but indeed creates Nature as evidenced in human creation of global warming and ecological catastrophe – the great red sulphur experiment – detailed above. The modern industrial human imagination has created Nature in its own image, as inflated and overheated. Lacan warns that the Real (Nature) is that which most deeply attracts our curiosity and yet can never be fully known thanks to the intermediary of language. Lacan focuses on the unsettling unease that we all experience in knowing simultaneously that Nature is both real and a social construct. This is why we seek “experience” of a direct, unmediated kind, through spirituality, therapies or drugs. We experience language as a forked tongue, speaking for a direct epiphany of Nature as it necessarily mediates the natural world, providing re-presentation. Language, paradoxically, is part of Nature, rather than a mediating instrument. It is that part of Nature that is also symbolic or culturally-inflected. It is split off from its Mother and as such is neurotic, anxious and always seeking completion. But there is no way back to Nature through language grown ever more abstract. In language, the closest we can get to the “fat earth” as nourishing presence is through metaphor and poetry. To move into the interior life of substance and avoid the naturalistic fallacy is to educate what Gaston Bachelard calls a “material imagination”. This is the employment of “embodied metaphors” and a “carnal hermeneutics” – ways of knowing that are embodied but not reduced to the material. Here, one must first break into matter, or break it down, and so we need the presence of the red sulphur thief. Here, he is ally. The material alchemists literally used “green vitriol” (ferrous sulphate) and “oil of vitriol” (sulphuric acid) as corrosive agents, but we must imagine this poetically or metaphorically. V.I.T.R.I.O.L is a metaphoric signpost, becoming a well-known acronym in alchemical literature: Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem – “visit the interior of the Earth and by rectifying (purifying) you will find the stone”. This translates in Freudian terms as “visit the depths of the unconscious” (depth psychotherapy), in Jungian terms as “cultivate the work of the imagination” (an archetypal psychotherapy), in Kleinian and Winnicottian terms as “revisit childhood to restore the positive transitional object”, in Lacanian terms as “creatively exploit the knots of language” (the poetic vision), and in Adlerian terms as “develop authentic democratic habits” (a political psychotherapy). The “stone” is not just what slayed Goliath, but the secret ingredient of poetry according to the early 20th century Russian Formalists, whose alchemical journey was, again, to reveal the “stoniness of the stone” through the poetic imagination in “close reading” of texts (Bleakley and Neilson 2021). Each of these approaches

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is necessarily a labour, work, creativity. The stone is naturally unnatural, again an embodied metaphor. Sulphur’s first principle, say the alchemists, is to “consume strong bodies”. Sulphur is the cache of metaphors concerning breaking things down, or breaking up, or breaking into: forms of force (violence and violation) either culturally condoned or taboo. A late 16th century alchemical text, the Rosarium, says of the material’s vitriolic nature: “Sulphur blackens the sun and consumes it”. The matter at hand must be eclipsed and consumed: again, broken down and broken into, as the work of a thief (curiosity, inquiry, analysis, textuality, close reading, deconstruction, realisation of Otherness) before it is rectified (reconstruction, synthesis, understanding, identification and identity). Sulphur clearly has an affinity with fire – treated at length in the previous chapter – where the manic person, gripped by an impulse, consumed by a compulsion, cannot stop violating the necessity for cool reflection, as mania. Mania scorches the mirror’s surface and so to meet mania analytically, the therapist must be “silvered” and mercurial (acting as a non-magnetic, liquid metal that is highly sensitive to heat; in other words, the therapist resists counter-transference, is agile and adaptable, and responds with great sensitivity to the client’s emotional peaks and troughs). The therapist need not offer the reflection the mania deflects. Rather, the client can be led to her own sense of the necessary mirroring within the arc of the manic episode. But manic episodes are often productive and so the client must allow the red sulphur “thief ” to continue to steal while gradually developing discrimination (the silvering and salting combined) about what is worth stealing. For substances to be animated (the alchemical work at root offering a revelation of the world as ensouled, or inscribed), it must be “entered” in the sense of being given interiority or depth. In terms of the depth approach of archetypal psychology (the adoption of the metaphor of “depth” as primary) this is to work with the soul of things, psyche’s matter, or what matters in the psyche. The red thief thus does not steal but leads one to a sense of interiority and discrimination – in the frenzy of mania, what interiority has been revealed and what is worth stealing from the break-in? Causticity is a manner in which such a creative burglary may be achieved, the vitriolic eye and tongue a way of experiencing and recounting the depth of the world (caustic humour, satire, parody, critical awareness, flaming rhetoric). This is, of course, again a kind of violence: red sulphur offers an agonistic path, its primary images are carnivores – lion, eagle and wolf. The house from which the impulsive one steals is also a lion’s den. Beware – its inhabitants may bite back! I have now raised two distinct ways to work with impulse and mania psychotherapeutically: – first, within the nature of the substance itself (red sulphur, the carnivorous lion – figure 6.4) allowing full cathartic expression; and second, by

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Figure 6.4: Red Sulphur as the Lion

tempering the substance or “whitening” it (metaphorically salting the sulphur), encouraging a more cognitive insight-based approach (bringing reflection to impulse through silvering and the mercurial touch). To reiterate, the latter introduces reflection into the impulse, metaphorically as a silvering, a mirroring. This is to counter hot solar expression with cool, reflective lunar impression. The first, entirely expressive way embraces strong cathartic therapies that may not lead to insight but offer some aesthetic shape or form for the impulse, previously lacking, such as post-Reichian bodywork and bioenergetics, gestalt therapy, re-birthing, and arts therapies focused on bodywork such as drama- and dance-based approaches. Here, the primary therapeutic goal can move beyond catharsis or expression of impulse as the gaining of moral courage (taking us back to Odysseus’s encounter with the suitors). The therapy then engages both aesthetic and ethical dimensions. Such “direct action” therapies mobilise energy and shape it, but again do not necessarily afford psychological insight. Second, are therapies that seek to educate for reflection within the impulse, such as the psychodynamic spectrum of interventions, or analytic therapies. These are less about the sulphurs of muscle and movement and more about the mirroring of the sulphurs of the mind and memory, although this too embraces emotion, but at a cooler register than, say, bodywork. This approach is primarily linguistic and semantic, tracking the client’s words, memories, emotional flux (as signs) and cultural tastes (as symbols) such that the invention of new, embodied metaphors for this person’s life takes shape as an alchemical process, bubbling in the retort of the body and speech and cumulatively turning memory into reflection and insight. Such an approach can apply to psychodynamic therapies based on regression to the preverbal, for example to issues of parenting, such as those developed by Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, where the client still verbalises preverbal matters. Other inflections to the basic model of bringing reflection to impulse include feminist approaches with a focus on the semiotic and pre-verbal

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(Kristeva), post-Jungian approaches focusing on archetypal forming and Adlerian approaches focusing on frustrations to enacting democratic habits.

A fire inside The newly-minted metaphor horde becomes the silvering process whereby the client reflects on impulse, undressing an old set of habits, facing the naked revelations and redressing the situating by adopting new metaphorical projects. The “red thief ” spiritus sulphur is recast as opportunity, the client acquiring a new guise on the basis that what the thief has broken into and sets out to steal must be locked away for a reason and must be worth stealing. The “why” of the locking away, and the “how” of the re-stealing constitute the methods of an alchemical therapy drawing on the sulphurous trail I have followed in this chapter. To illustrate such a synthetic-analytic approach, I will draw on a case study provided by a Canadian psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer (2000) who is also a scholar of metaphor, that was introduced briefly in the previous chapter.

Case study: A fire inside Kirmayer (2000) analyses a patient’s interview with a psychiatrist where a 23-yearold woman explains that she has recurring burning sensations in her chest and abdomen. She uses the metaphor: “a fire inside” to describe these sensations. Exhaustive examinations and exploratory procedures reveal no somatic issues, no gastrointestinal or cardiac cause, yet the symptoms persist. Her doctors suggest it is psychosomatic, referring to such symptoms metaphorically as a case of “nerves” and referring her to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist elicits talk from the patient about a recent relationship where she says that she was in love, but the relationship went sour because the man was excessively controlling, possibly abusive. She agrees with the psychiatrist that there is more than a lingering passion here that was cut short and that she has not had the opportunity to release – and gain insight from – repressed feelings: an equal mix of love and anger for the man. Could this be the “fire inside”? The woman is not manic in her behaviour, but her unexplained symptoms have taken on a manic life of their own. An unruly and badly-mannered spiritus sulphur has broken into her psyche and now inhabits it, creating symptom independent from her conscious will – classically, giving her a bellyful and a heartache. In Freud’s day it would be seen as a classic case of hysteria.

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The psychiatrist, perhaps out of habit himself, turns the conversation towards the woman’s mother and sees that here is unfinished business between the mother and daughter (the Object Relations reflex). He steers her towards an explanation of her symptoms as being trapped by a maternal web that she needs to free herself from to gain a sense of independence. She seems to be in agreement with this, but it deflects from the unfinished issues with her failed love affair that have left her “angry” and she resorts to the familiar metaphor of her emotions being “bottled up inside”. Spiritus sulphur is the genie in the bottle perhaps. She still seems to seek a somatic explanation for her symptoms rather than a psychological one and while the psychiatrist concludes this initial consultation with an invitation to make a second appointment with him, the woman fails to do this. The thief in her belly and heart has escaped capture. Recall the medical establishment introducing the overarching metaphor of “nerves” – a stand-in for “psychosomatic” – into the woman’s understanding of what is happening to her. Yet her metaphor is “a fire inside”. The psychiatrist clearly felt that unresolved issues with the mother were leading to repressed anger causing the fires inside. But nobody as yet has addressed the twin fire in its own terms. Towards the end of the consultation, as the psychiatrist seems to be steering her away from returning to the GI doctors for a further opinion, she says that there are other physical issues: “Internal bleeding, and hemorrhage” (ibid.: 165). The psychiatrist does not follow this up, even as a coded message. Perhaps she is talking about menstrual distress for example, or is this a metaphor for the deep wounding that the relationship has caused? Is her major psychological symptom her inability to break free of literalism? The source metaphor of “nerves” conferred by the doctors has now mutated into a target metaphor of “internal bleeding and hemorrhage” offered by the patient – the metaphor that we imagine as extensive deep wounding from her rupture of the relationship. “Nerves” may be an inappropriate metaphor for the context, as it morphs into “blood loss”. We are closer to the sulphur, but have not yet engaged it. Maybe she is not nervy; rather the loss of her lover is experienced as a tearing away leaving a wound that bleeds profusely and lingers as heartache and bellyache. We are left with the impression of a double bind at work where the abusive ex-lover raises blood, but the woman also haemorrhages in his absence, losing life force. She wants her lover back, but not on his terms and knows that is impossible. The woman is in limbo, caught in a double-bind. She cannot stomach him but her heart yearns for him. Perhaps she fears self-responsibility by leaving decisions in the hands of experts (biomedical certainty), but also fears the authority of others as potential trap (her abusive boyfriend and emotionally suffocating mother are her models of authority).

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Actually, we know so little about this woman that all of this is conjecture, but let us play out the fantasy nevertheless. In this alchemical fantasy, the woman needs new metaphors to confront the fire within and to ask the symptom what it wants, rather than trying to eradicate it. In this passage, I am doing the silvering and reflective work that the woman must do herself to capture the sulphurous thief in her own homes (stomach/womb/heart) and gain insight into his presence. What is he trying to steal? In a homeopathic twist, it is precisely “fire inside”, as moral courage, that might turn this woman’s symptoms around. Perhaps her sulphurous desires have blackened and turned to an immovable tar, and need to be rekindled to form a rich and nourishing oil. Her desire, as it were, is stuck to the tar and can no longer be released or even revealed for its potency. In this state, there is a continuous stink (the tar) but no movement of psyche, no release from symptom.

Staying at the flame while embracing cool reflection Let us pursue a little longer the paradox that hot desire or impulse can simultaneously embrace the cold surface of the mirror, a lunar mate for the solar ego. What is it to reflect in the act? The psychologist and educator Donald Schön (1987), who invented the term “reflective practice” to denote how experts “think” their practices as they enact them, distinguishes between reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action. The former occurs after the event as an evaluation or assessment through consequences. The latter occurs during the event as a running mental commentary such as “how am I doing?”, “what do I need to adjust?” Of course, much reflection-in-action is just at the level of consciousness, or occurs automatically – as tacit knowing (Polanyi 1983). Current models of reflection drawing on knowledge of neural processes in cognitive science suggests that “reflection” is, paradoxically, just ahead of the event as a predictive process (Clark 2015). Activity is future-focused, where feedback from the environment constantly adjusts the reflective process within the act. I have called this “reflection-as-action” (Bleakley 1999): a future-facing arc of activity where impulse is shaped by memory. Jacques Lacan famously describes the moment of formation of identity as the “mirror stage”, where a baby first recognises herself in a mirror. The developmental paradox, as Lacan notes, is that the mirrored self is an Other, an image, and not the embodied self. This is the split we live with all our lives, that our embodied realities are ghosted by a sense of how others might see us. The tension between these two experiences can become unbearable and is the primary source of psychological symptom. But, returning to Andy Clark’s notion of predictive processing, the paradox of the Lacanian mirror moment is that it is situated in time as well as

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space. We see our mirrored selves as situated just in a future moment, as we glimpse at our image. This temporal split adds to our existential angst, because the “in the future” mirrored self is experienced by the embodied self as a form of potential, albeit fleeting. But this potential is held in the abstracted image (the mirror image) that is of the world but not of the embodied self. You gaze into the mirror, but your reflection does not gaze back. Rather it glances at you (Casey 2007). The glance is tantalising. The mirror self then lives in a world that the embodied self craves, and this is necessarily a source of distress. Lacan points out that the bridge between these two worlds is language. We can describe the longed-for mirror world as a future fulfilment, that of course is always in process and never achieved. It is an alchemical Work. To return to Schön’s model of reflection, a less sophisticated view than that of Lacan, where activity is collaborative, we might think of reflection as “refractive practice” – cycles of testing out ideas within a community of practice and adapting accordingly. Another development since Schön’s work is to think of “reflexivity” and “critical reflexivity” rather than simply “reflection”. Critical reflexivity is the ability to apply critical attitude towards one’s own thinking process of the character, intensity and quality that critique may be applied to the work of others. Reflection may mean gaining distance from the act in order to judge its value and consequences, while considering alternatives. Or it may mean staying with the nature of the act in its full arc in order to discriminate what is valuable or of quality, and what is destructive. Mania is a road to burnout for oneself and others around the flame, and embraces delusional behaviour and ideas, but periods of mania are great for getting stuff done. For debilitating bipolar issues, pharmaceuticals such as lithium can provide reflection-in-a-pill as long as side-effects are not themselves debilitating. Such side effects, of course, are deflections from the forward-facing arc of activity fed by reflection and insight. Let us consider some more what the alchemists called the whitening of sulphur as the psychological act of reflection within the impulse. This is Schön’s model of expertise, and Lacan’s view of the ever-present longing to fuse with “Nature” (the Real, the womb, the mother’s skin, the image of oneself in the mirror) that is consistently frustrated by the Symbolic (the intermediary of language). This is also the primary aim of psychodynamic psychotherapy – not to “know oneself ” or to “achieve potential”, but to reflect within the impulse. On the personal level this is described in co-counselling as having “free attention” available in the height of catharsis; and at a global level, it is being able to reflect on the consequences of human-made global inequities (necessarily now associated with the climate crisis) such that we are able to act in an ethically responsible way. Cultural forms can offer containers for our necessary, if conflictual, mania. To some extent literature and film act as containers for our violence, where we are

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already distanced by the nature of the medium and the engineered shunt between the real and the imaginary, in the same way that we wake from violence in a dream to conscious reflection. A presentation to an international conference on violence (Thomson 1997: 7) reported a new wave of Hollywood films “rejecting stereotypical male violence in favour of cool reflection”, with central male characters who have violent natures but are trying to cool their temperaments through engaged reflection. Roger Bromley (in ibid.), who offers this observation, suggests that the “new man” approach to the potentially violent hero may be “a response to feminism”. The gender reading is one possibility – another is alchemical: such a shift in media portrayal of masculinised violence can be read against an alchemical background, as a whitening of red sulphur. Crude sulphur is especially resistant to two other major substances of the alchemical imagination: mercury, read psychologically as reflective imagination, and salt, read psychologically as introspective particularity (see chapter 8). The workings of these substances offer the very conditions that make for engaged reflection and conscious schooling of a violent temperament. A common visual representation of this restriction of red sulphur in alchemy is the “taming of the lion”, where the lion represents the raw impulse and violent potential of red sulphur – either through the lion being paraded on a lead, as domesticated animal; or the lion illustrated with its paws cut off, its potency violated. Recall Odysseus spattered with the blood and gore of his victims, described as the lion loping home from the kill. While such unreflective action heroes are now out of favour, suggests Bromley, representations of violence may have grown, especially in film: “violence in the media has probably increased because of the need to stage culturally, and consider reflectively, the growing incidence of particular and localised forms of interpersonal violence in society”. Again, red sulphur in alchemy is always described as masculine – Jung (1970: para 140) calls crude alchemical sulphur “the masculine element par excellence”. If there is an emerging popular image of the reflective hero (resisting the sappy elements and sentimental bonding of the New Age’s “men’s movement”), then perhaps we are seeing an anima mundi spectacle at work: a collective cultural whitening of the raw sulphur through reflective speculation and distancing. The press certainly has Daniel Craig’s later James Bond films as showing a more feminine side to Bond, at least less stereotypically male, reflected in his dress code and the way that he interacts with women. Bond’s “coolness” is artfully – and often unconvincingly – represented in the way that he engages in spontaneous fights and scuffles and comes out brushing the dust off his suit and adjusting his tie. We laugh at this as spoof. Pre-Homer, an audience listening to a performance of the epics Iliad and Odyssey I think would have been genuinely moved – to stomach-churning – as the bard recited the grisly details of close-up, hand-to-hand warfare where spears lodge in livers or Odysseus,

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hacked off with his wife Penelope’s suitors, hacks off the head of one such suitor without so much as a blink. Let us stick with film and the way that the paradoxical “whitening” of sulphur can honour the flame and its wild trajectories while modelling cool distancing within the heat of the flame. This is to step into the fire and be tempered, albeit risking burnout, moving directly from red sulphur into white heat. The opening scenes of David Lynch’s film Wild at Heart portrays a young man (Nicholas Cage playing “Sailor”) impulsively raging into a fight in which he leaves his victim for dead, the latter’s head split open. At the precise moment of the realisation of the depth of violence he has enacted, caught by the horror of the onlookers, the man, the anti-hero, does not call for salt and does not shed tears, as does Odysseus, but coolly lights up a cigarette, as if he has just had sex, and pauses. This is a gutsier portrayal than the Bond parodies. Within the violence, everything is cool. But note the paradox: Sailor does not turn to a Martini cocktail like Bond, but adds fire to fire, following the violent impulse with semiotics of violence as the burning cigarette. So, this pause is not a distancing, a reflection, for the deed has been done and it is as if the flare of the cigarette merely offers a second chapter of violence: walking into the flame, taking the heat, for there is no subsequent sadness or remorse but simply hardening. This is reinforced as our hero proceeds to jail with its clanging doors, and sliding bolts and shutters. The dishevelled spiritus sulphur has broken into the psyche and robbed it of universal morality, where a personal ethics of the cold and calculating criminal mind is uppermost. Cage is caged, his violence merely pent up temporarily and neither fully contained nor whitened (salted) as long-term remorse. Eventually, he breaks parole and will re-offend. But he is cast as a likeable Robin Hood transgressor rather than a psychotic criminal and it is into the path of such hardened criminals that he will stray, cast as unfortunate victim. The underworld with which he becomes entangled is sulphurous beyond, with no inbuilt reflection. Sulphur is a lifestyle, but it comes with a cost of ashen desolation. As the film progresses, Sailor learns how to reflect within the arc of his violence. There is redemption. This conjunction of violent impulse and the flare of the cigarette in the opening scenes of Wild at Heart is a repeated motif in the film, as the moment in which desire and repulsion meet at a hotspot, a flare-up, a rift in the crust of the relationship, or an extreme erotic tension – hot breath held in, lungs on fire. Lynch’s hallmark is portrayal of such incendiary desire, as intense eroticism: on re-uniting, Lula (Laura Dern), Sailor’s (Nicolas Cage) girlfriend says to her lover: “Baby, you’d better run me back to the hotel; you got me hotter than Georgia asphalt”. Sailor, meanwhile admits “I didn’t have much parental guidance”, a state of lawless, unrefined or raw sulphur. There’s the mark of the birth of spiritus sulphur, the

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red thief. There’s no moral tether, no root, no history. Guidance is anathema to impulse. Merely the spark, the flame and the inevitable burnout. In thymic cycles. “This whole world is wild at heart and weird on top” says Lula, inverting Freud’s topography of the psyche. A powerful image in the film is a full screen close-up of a newly struck match, thundering into blaze, in which the viewer’s lower senses are suddenly and dramatically engaged as one practically smells the sulphur fizzing from the strike. The flareup of the match leads to an inevitable burnout, repeated in the flame and ash, or life and death, of the burning cigarette. This is reflected in the characters of the film, whose violent lives often end up in sudden burnout. Walking into the flame, into white heat, may harden us in the sense of promoting courage, but it may also render us as ash, in dramatic and fatal burnout, as the moth at the flame. “Negativity is the enemy of creativity” says Lynch, taking us straight to the shrunken heart of the ashen heap that has no centre and collapses under its own weight. This staying-at-the-flame, out of either desire or impulse, is then inscribed on the characters of the film as flare-ups and burned-out sufferings. Lynch harnesses and engages the senses normally alienated by cinema – touch, smell and taste – through evocative verbal and visual imagery. Much of the action centres around the anti-hero (Cage as Sailor) and his girlfriend (Dern as Lula) holed up in a seedy motel room in which an unattended patch of vomit on the carpet is a predominant feature and recurring image. Again, the viewer “smells” this vomit in the mind’s nostril, so that as time progresses in the film, the worsening sulphurous stink of the vomit offers a noxious background to which the characters appear to be gradually desensitised, as their own character stenches unfold, enmeshed in unexpected and unsavoury desires. As the sulphur gathers in the outer – as stinking environments and corrupt dealings – so the salty bitterness of the characters gathers to a head and implodes, as retort. Arguments ensue. People get hurt – badly. But people also get scarred psychologically or emotionally (again, “I didn’t have much parental guidance”). In an interview, Lynch describes idealised Middle America as “blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees”, but “on the cherry tree there’s this pitch oozing out. And millions of red ants crawling all over it”. Now there’s both an alchemical and Freudian image – manic sulphurous red ants feeding on their own destinies, the cold black pitch of exhaustion and burnout. Beneath the sane and comforting skin of the world is “another force”, its frontline a marauding army of potentially poisonous red ants. In the opening scene of Lynch’s “Blue Velvet”, the idealised picket-fenced lawn is being sprinkled. Suddenly, the hose starts snaking all over the place, like a wild animal. The man watering the lawn is having a heart attack, while the force of water causing the hose to snake mirrors the trauma. The viewer is then taken down, nose first, in a close-up of the soil beyond the

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grass, where insects are busy – the earth into which we must all be drawn at death. And here, mouldering, is a severed human ear. There is criminal activity abroad, infecting the perfect world. Lynch himself warns about the sulphurous or manic dangers in film-making: “making pictures has gotten too fast. Many pictures skim along the surface. They can’t delve deep because if you’re water-skiing at 50 mph, you’re not going to go beneath the surface. But if the boat stops, or even slows up, down you go into the deep water. And that’s where the good ideas are” (in Rodley 1997: 8). How then does the mania, represented as red or crude sulphur in alchemy, stop in its tracks, reflect upon itself to reveal depths? I have already noted that the alchemists describe this in two ways: first, the whitening of crude sulphur (its sublimation) in a transformation, a distancing and cooling, or reflection. And second, depth can be achieved within the body of red sulphur itself, without cool distancing, by stepping straight into the flame as an act of courage or tempering – thus furthering the fire. Although the risk of this – so amply demonstrated in Lynch’s Wild at Heart – is burnout, where amoral ghosts step from the ashes as sulphurous thieves bent on breaking into another’s heart and stealing the sulphur. They are now pirates of desire. Their primary mistake is to burn up too soon, to never achieve silvered reflection within desire. The English 17th-century alchemist Philalethes (a pseudonym meaning “lover of truth”) warns against a fatal error in the use of sulphur by the alchemist who is “impatient for results” (in Trinick 1967: 42). This is a premature “Burning the Flowers” or scorching the “tender” natures of substances in the desire to quicken or force transformation. Such an alchemist has not taken to heart the maxim that substances can only be transformed “in their own blood” or through their own natures and that one must “make haste slowly”. As a famous alchemical image shows, to step into fire, one must wear armour (the reflective awareness of defence mechanisms of the ego) and then one steps out of the fire naked, hardened or tempered. To follow sulphur as flaming desire into the heart of the flame itself is an act of supreme courage and should not be confused with condoning violence or simply adding impulse to impulse. Rather, as James Hillman (1981: 9) suggests, following a psychotherapeutic move first proposed by Wolfgang Giegerich, “compulsion becomes will through courage”. In other words, our compulsions may be mobilised in our favour through the courage to follow their trajectories – as explained in several ways above. Sulphurous projections need not be withdrawn (the usual advice of ego based, consciousness driven psychology), so that acting out is frustrated and reflection is forced. Rather, the projection may be followed as the course of the arrow’s flight, even as it approaches the sun. This reverses Freudian orthodoxy: instead of withdrawing a projection (seen from the point of view of consciousness as a potentially distorting ego defence), the projection may be leapt after, followed to a

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conclusion, pursued for its own merits. This kind of conscious out-rage follows an ancient Chinese custom where women suffering from rage or grief would climb onto platforms specially built for them in the street, to publicly vent fury, or to wail without shame: a public catharsis. Hillman (1991: 81) says that “anima” or “soul significance” accompanies “acting out”, impulses, or spontaneous catharsis. What does this mean? Again, psychoanalytic orthodoxy says that acting out is by definition blind compulsion and its motive must be sought and rooted out so that change can occur; but this offers a mere torching of the sulphuric impulse, treating same with same. Hillman’s archetypal psychology suggests that we must treat the symptom with a mercurial touch, an imaginative flair rather than a stereotypical sulphurous flare. This therapeutic move assumes that symptom has value and we must first ask “what does the symptom want” (its “soul significance”) and “what can the symptom offer?” before eradication. This smart, counter-intuitive questioning is the mercurial imagination at work. The symptom has meaning and should be interrogated before it is frustrated by analytic enthusiasms. Where is acting out leading the person? Is this not precisely the impulsive rushing into the fire? In Emblem 24 of Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens, the wolf eats the dead body of a king (Fig. 6.5). The wolf then enters the fire, howling, out of which the king walks, renewed. The king is then tempered, or given courage and character, in the heat of the flame. The epigram concludes: “and then from death / the King will rise, proud of his Lion’s heart” (Godwin 1989: 153). The wolf (animalised, hungry red sulphur) initiates a trajectory of courage, resisting second thoughts, sublimation, cowardice or confusion. It is a disguised lunar reflection, a red, “hot” or harvest moon intrinsic to desire. For some, the courage to live at the flame becomes a style of life that can be adapted or tuned, but never changed. These are lifelong risk-takers. With these images in mind, we might revisit our earlier case study of the woman with a “fire inside”, part in the belly and part in the heart. Can she be helped to walk into the flame and rise from the “death” proud of her lioness’s heart, now stomaching the world? I suggest in the following section that to honour the soul significance of what is usually decried as impulsive behaviour (red sulphur) may reveal a kind of fertility, an efflorescence that is hot desire: “flame into being”. This is a rich stink, a fecundity that may offend; a blackening at the flame but not a burning out. Anthony Burgess’s (1985) auto/biographical centennial celebration of the birth of D.H. Lawrence is aptly named Flame into Being: “Leave me alone now, for my soul is burning” says Lawrence in his poem “Nettles”. Here is the paradox of cyclothymia in a nutshell: the mania carries one through long periods as self-sufficient impulse (go it alone); after burnout comes withdrawal, another form of isolation, in leaden melancholy.

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Figure 6.5: The Wolf devours the King who is restored to life in the flame. Emblem 24 of Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens

The silver is blackened with soot, the mirror tarnished. Reflection is frustrated in both states unless one finds creative, therapeutic ways of affording reflection. In tempering at the flame rests an inevitable marking of character, a branding. The lick of the flames is a hot-pressing into form, the shaping of character. Elsewhere (ibid.: 248), Lawrence speaks of “black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue”, the colour of bruising. Courage to run into the flame, rather than gain distance from it, may invite a quick descent to hell, where the sulphurs burn blue and inscribe, or burn in the blues. The compulsive and sadistic punishing of slaves in American cottonfields, suggested the poet Saeed Jones (2014), did not produce servile behaviour, but transferred fire to the wills of black people who learned techniques of resistance. Amongst these was the birth of the blues, now (as jazz) America’s primary national art form. We all suffer at the hands of the sulphurous gods, whose bodies, as Lawrence suggests, should be iridescent; and in their fires we are tempered or strengthened at the flame. This might be read as an apology for oppression – but this is not what I mean at all. All oppressed persons find ways of keeping the flame of resistance alive and this creative fire must be honoured, given form and celebrated. It is a mark of character. Jung (1970: para 151) translates alchemical red sulphur into a principle of character psychology as “the motive factor in consciousness: on the one hand the world, which can best be regarded as a dynamism subordinated to consciousness, and on the other hand compulsion, an involuntary motivation or impulse ranging from mere interest to possession proper”. He further describes compulsion as “the great mystery of human life. It is the thwarting of our conscious will and our rea-

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son by a flammable element inside us, appearing now as a consuming fire and now as life-giving warmth” (ibid.). Jung then distinguishes between the heats of the naked flame and dung, the former often brief, the latter long-lasting. Strange that Jung should be so perplexed about red sulphur’s impulsions given that he was writing in the wake of Freud’s work on instinct, id and unconscious life; also, that Jung in his own life was so gripped by sulphurous intent, especially erotic desire (Bleakley 2011; see chapters 8 and 9). For Jung, compulsion has two sources: first the corruption that represents the darker side of life of personality; and second, the dangerous “complete being” or idealised illuminated state. These are personified respectively as the devil and Christ. Here are two faces of sulphur already discussed at length: compulsion as the moth at the flame, and as mania’s delusional states. Returning to David Lynch’s Wild at Heart as character study, Lynch himself said that there are three forces in life: light, dark and evil. Sulphur embraces this trilogy, in flame, burnout and the stinking tars of Dis, the underworld. It is useful here to distinguish between impulsion and compulsion. I have described alchemical red sulphur as a metaphor for impulse. But Jung carries this through to compulsion – the irresistible desire to act out. A compulsion is then a repeated impulse. But more, a hot compulsion often ends in a cold, sticky, tarry mess. This is expanded below, to embrace burnout – where too much time spent at the flame can lead to an extinguishing of the fire leaving only a residue that eventually turns cold. Robert Grinnell’s (1973: 25, 28) negative sulphur of the underworld, or black sun (the sun descended to hell) has its balance in sulphur’s “positive aspect” as a “balm “or “balsam”, which is a reflection also of the warm, vital spirit that is appetite for life or motive. This “natural luminosity” of sulphur is not restricted to human experience, but is primarily an animation of the world, displayed as a consciousness in matter, a “vital attention” moving in both objects and the subjects that perceive them. Here is Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”, where red sulphur becomes green (see the following chapter 7) and is actively permeating as bios or life-force. Where Jung, above, reduces the activating principle of red sulphur to human psychological principle as “the motive factor in consciousness” (voluntary well and involuntary compulsion), Renaissance alchemists clearly had a wider view, to include the extra human world, where sulphur is “the moving principle in our Art” (Waite 1991: 172) that “gives a deeper and more brilliant colouring to gold” (ibid.: 23). Which is to say it restores value and gives depth to the self-presentation of the world at large, as anima mundi (world soul). It is the vibrant self-presentation of nature, an efflorescence. Alchemical sulphur is the rising sun, the blazing cornfield, the blood-red poppy, the spitting volcano and the raging sea turned blood red by a sunset.

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Sticky black sulphur While accounts of red sulphur are not to be restricted to character study only, we must nevertheless recognise the power of alchemical imagery to illuminate understanding of human identity. Red sulphur moves across the spectrum of curiosity, interest and enthusiasm through passion, desire and vitality, to potential flareup, combustibility, burning desire, the hots, sudden flare-ups, eruptions and rifts, compulsion, mania, burn-up and burnout, where impulsion can be repeated as compulsion. My description of red sulphur so far has been largely about voluntary, dynamic will – “hot” sulphur. Let us now turn to a brief discussion of involuntary compulsion – “cold” sulphur. Compulsion may leave us in the place of the lovers Carlota and Ramona in D.H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent (a novel set in Mexico that is shot through with sulphurous images), where Ramon says to Carlota: “Go away! I have smelt the smell of your spirit long enough. … And she sat like a heap of ash on his bed, ashes to ashes, burnt out, with only the coals of her will still smouldering”. Discussion of dark and sticky compulsions then moves us into the territory of a second species of sulphur – black sulphur – as a product of combustion of the red. Red and black sulphur, as impulsion and compulsion respectively, are distinguished clinically. A compulsive personality, following Freud’s description of anality, may display excessive rigidity, fixity, obstinacy, perfectionism, orderliness and a lack of generosity and interpersonal warmth. The black sulphur formed from the burnout of the red coagulates and goes cold, as a hard tar; or is over-calcined as an ash (the alchemists talk of a cold scoria – ash of ash, cinders formed from the burning of already scorched matter – we call this a “shitty” condition). Impulsive personalities are fluid, hasty, hot, disordered, tense, explosive and lacking reflection: genitality, rather than anality, in Freudian terms (we mock these people with disparaging genital-metaphors, as “dicks” and “twats”). Compulsive personalities are implosive, or self-tarring, where an otherwise flexible and nimble ego gets caught in the tar pit. Impulsion is hot, compulsion is a path to the cold. Impulsion unreflectively and unremittingly drives one on, where compulsion keeps one fixed or anchored, returning again and again to the same spot, the same activity, the same obsessive thought. It resembles salt’s work in this respect, but as emotional heat that has burned out. The stink between Carlota and Ramona, the burnout of relationship, described by Lawrence, encompasses three states of sulphur: the red of the passion, still alive in Carlota’s will as smouldering coals (impulse); the entirely cold residue of the now burned-out relationship, as ash (the compulsion – returning again and again to the question “what went wrong?”); and the acrid stink of the spirit of Carlota (her unreciprocated love) that is a kind of underworld presence, a “dis-” (dis-

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taste, dysfunction, distress, discomfort, disturbance). The English word “dismal” is derived from the Anglo-Norman French dis mal signifying “evil days” or “unlucky days”. Black sulphur appears to have introduced only negative effects: cold ash, cold sticky tars and stench. However, let us recall the insight of James Hillman, via Wolfgang Giegerich, that “compulsion” may become “will” through moral courage, thus utilising the symptom of compulsion in its own cure. How might such a move be traced? Are there other blackened states besides cold tars and ash that are productive? In the following chapter 7, without resorting to the naturalistic fallacy (comparing nature with imaginative events) we will stick with the grounded imaginative world of embodied metaphors to enter the world of alchemical “green sulphur(s)”. Here are neither hard tars nor erotic desires “hotter than Georgia asphalt”, but rich oils with rainbow’d surfaces.

Chapter 7 Green Sulphur Fat and fecund earth As we saw from the previous chapter, what the Early Modern alchemists called “red sulphur” in its positive incarnation is emblematic of courage, motivation, invention, energy, will, direct action, hearty involvement, blistering pace, burning ambition and hot desire. Flip the coin and red sulphurous mania can burn oneself and others badly. From enthusiasms and light mood swings, red sulphur’s impulsions can lead to cyclothymia and then to bipolar disorder (in traditional psychiatric classification terms). These symptom classifications are relative and potentially stigmatising. My purpose here is to re-vision them within the metaphorical vocabulary of the alchemical imagination. Impulses take on a wide variety of forms: the red badge of courage is quite different from vitriolic outbursts and the sulphurous stink associated with the arc of extreme greed. Arthur Sackler, the bright son of a Brooklyn grocer, takes a job as an advertising copyrighter, earning enough to fund himself through a medical degree, trains as a psychiatrist and sets up a successful medical publishing business. On the back of his profits, Sackler supports his two brothers through medical school. The three brothers set up a small pharmaceutical firm, Purdue Frederick. As this grows, they change the name to Purdue Pharma, the company eventually becoming a global pharmaceutical giant. Arthur Sackler had also set up a medical advertising agency. Employing aggressive tactics, he marketed Valium directly to physicians, downplaying known issues of potential dependency associated with longer-term use of the drug. Sackler maintained a veneer of respectability through big philanthropic gestures, supporting art galleries, universities, medical schools and museums. This diverted attention from his less than ethical behaviour in the world of Big Pharma, where in particular Purdue went on to develop, and also aggressively market, Oxycontin, a pain killer with twice the power of morphine. The drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on the back of claims that it was slow release and would not cause addiction (Keefe 2022). But it did, and dramatically, as Anne Case and Angus Deaton (2020) detail in Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. The FDA official who made the final decision on approval for the drug was, within two years, employed by Purdue on an annual salary worth nearly half a million US dollars. The fallout from the aggressive, direct-to-physicians, marketing of Oxycontin was widespread addiction leading to a spate of suicides largely https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-009

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amongst blue collar, unemployed American men (Case and Deaton 2020; Bleakley 2021). Other opioids were also marketed. The estimated death toll currently stands at just under half a million persons. Under legal scrutiny, when this scandal was finally revealed, the Sacklers had taken out around $14 billion from Purdue that was processed through multiple offshore shell companies and bank accounts. The money was used personally and for philanthropy that kept up the gloss of public service rather than private greed. When taken to court, Purdue filed for bankruptcy and the Sacklers walked free. They constantly claimed innocence and seemed to bear no moral shame. Here is shameless red sulphur at work, the thief, spiritus sulphur breaking in and cleaning up regardless of the costs and damn the ethics. The business model is crude capitalism working on a linear model – input and output with no fuzzy edges. Desire must be crude and direct, taking no prisoners. Business is business. Money makes money. Importantly, one must not be caught as the thief – a front must be set up to make hot impulse and greed look cool and worthwhile. Philanthropy offers that front. But the linear, impulsive system risks burnout. In contrast, complex, dynamic open systems expand by translation across systems. This is the way of the substance (and substantial metaphor) that the alchemists called “green sulphur”, whose essence might be summarised as the intelligent forming of connections to make inspiring networks: slowly building on innovative transactions and translations, ethically bargaining and transparently accumulating partners as equals with similar visions of democracy and justice. Our biggest example of such transactional and translational connectivity is global democracy. For the alchemists, green sulphur was the ultimate transformative agent for the good, the substance that improved all other substances. They modelled this mercurial substance on the power of botanical Nature, or the expansive growth and interconnectedness of plant life, rooted in a fat earth and drawing in the light of the sun. Vegetative life throws itself forth as urgent and contingent self-display, in both flowering and decay. Alchemical literature persistently refers to this one kind of “green” sulphur – opposed to the red variety – as a substance that brings animal, vegetable and mineral life into efflorescence. For example, the alchemist Michael Sendigovius (1678, in Waite 1991: 151) says that green sulphur “produces all the odours and paints all the colours in the world”; and that every good alchemist learns directly from Nature, which is an “Open Book”. Green sulphur lights up vegetation beyond literal biological chlorophyll – it is the “effect” of green on the eye that is a kind of gentle fire, lighting up an imagination of Nature’s powers. Geber, quoted by Sendigovius (in ibid.: 130) says green sulphur “illumes all bodies” or draws attention to phenomena. Nature has intrinsic light and heat in her efflorescence; she is animated. This, claims Geber, is Nature’s “virtue”. Green sulphur and red sulphur are both often pictured as lions in alchemical texts, but, where they

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meet, the lion of green sulphur is shown as “eating” the lion of red sulphur or eating the fiercely burning sun as a symbiotic relationship (figure 7.1), a figure we have met previously, but one worth repeating here.

Figure 7.1: The green lion devours the red sun

What force can extract the power of the sun as readily as the juice of an orange? The alchemists saw that Nature was the more powerful of the two forces: the slow burn of green matter as opposed to short-lived human passion – the hot, impulsive arc that is the red thief at work. Plants take in the light of the sun and utilise it for their own growth. It is not voracious eating but slow absorption, quite different from red sulphur’s impulsive voracity. Sendigovius exhorts us, through the principle of green sulphur, to observe rather than interpret Nature, so that we might know the intrinsic value of substances and work with, and within, their key properties: “keep your eyes fixed on the properties of the natural substance” (ibid.). In other words, read Nature as an aesthetic text starting with deep appreciation and only then moving on to explanation. Knowing the properties of something is not the same as impulsive desire to change that substance, for you are now midwife to the substance changing itself – the primary rule of psychotherapy. Where the poet Wallace Stevens draws a distinction between projective fiery Force and stabilising earthy Presence, the alchemists described the two kinds of sulphur noted above with a similar metaphorical contrast. Red sulphur as a desta-

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bilising fiery Force and green sulphur as an earthing and nourishing Presence. The latter is vegetative Nature herself in full flow and flower (and in decay). A Nature not red in tooth and claw (referring more to the animal world than plant life), but as Dylan Thomas’s “green fuse” that drives the flower; and as Nature’s healthy rot: mulch providing the bed for growth. Where Robert Grinnell (1973) claims that “sulphur’s specific power is greater in the red variety” we should be wary that this claim is made from the perspective of impulsive red sulphur and is rhetorical, where Grinnell is arguing for the power of “focus”. Here, I shall argue the case for varieties of green sulphur, alchemical “substances” (again, embodied metaphors) that do different work from the red varieties of sulphur. Red sulphur can be thought of as individual characters’ impulsions, where green sulphur is the plot against which the characters’ actions occur. Green sulphur’s “plot” is a pun – it is the “field”, the soil in which plants grow, the “fat earth”. Green sulphur is the person’s psychological ground and fertility – what seeds can be planted and will they thrive and flourish? In psychotherapy, green sulphur’s presence is then provision of the “field”, container or vessel – one of basic empathy and compassion, support and sustenance. It is extension rather than intensity, providing a safety net or web. Of course, many people go into therapy because either this support is lacking in their lives, or is unperceived or misperceived (the sharp end of this is masochism); or they seem unable to offer this kind of support themselves and are seen as coldhearted or even cruel (where the sharp end is sadism). Affect in persons is the prima materia in alchemy, the “stuff ’ upon which operations are carried out in order to “rectify” (rectificando): refine, purify and aesthetically shape, or reveal the “stoniness of the stone” as potential. This is a work of embodied metaphoric invention and multiplication. The multiple digging over of the person’s “plot” – their idiosyncratic poetic instances and their overall life-courses or narratives – is the therapeutic work. Widened to issues of therapy on historical, social, cultural and ecological issues – such as gender-sensitivities, institutional racism, structural poverty, food disorders, ecological distress such as habitat rape and so forth – turns modern and post-modern therapies around, to acknowledge the imaginative use of the premodern and early modern alchemical imagination with its wider grasp of the power of embodied metaphor. Where we shift therapeutic concerns from practitioners treating the health of individual persons to anima mundi or world soul (Hillman 1996), we might now recommend Nature as therapist: the fields of the “green gymnasium” or “blue gymnasium” – green spaces or aquatic spaces for exercise, therapeutic intervention, tonic, or simply plain unwinding, contemplation and focus; or fields for recasting personal and social narratives. This in turn reveals a necessity for an ecologicallybased therapeutics where we attend to the degraded world and issues such as spe-

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cies decimation. How can a toxic environment provide a tonic? Here, the basic therapeutic rule is that multiplying up differences (ecological variety), or the expansion of networks, is patently more beneficial for the health of all than destruction of species. Variety and efflorescence create the healing hands of Nature. Where red sulphur can be read as intensive focus, green sulphur is an extensive flourishing offering nourishment. It has four primary valences: complexity (rather than linearity as closed systems); dissipation and entropy (running down and running out, as the inevitability of illness and death); tolerance of difference (respect for otherness); and production and expansion of networks (through “translations” and “boundary crossings”). Green sulphur does not invite tempering through insight or reflexive awareness, a silvering and mirroring. Reflexivity is inbuilt to complex, open, adaptive systems as natural process in differing levels of organisation. Thus, green sulphur does not need whitening. Rather, the smart therapeutic move is to explore the “naturalistic fallacy” where phenomena are taken literally, or “reality” is associated with the “natural world”. For we know that imagination, dreaming and vision are not literal but metaphorical, expanding our notion of the “natural” to embrace the unnatural. The natural stuff of life needs to be touched by mercurial green sulphur as an imagination of Nature (personified in Shakespeare’s The Tempest by the spirit Ariel). We humans cannot think of our lives as “natural” – we are linguistically-bound and culturally-determined (Jacques Lacan’s register of the “Real”). More, we are driven by figures of speech: we are analogical, rhetorical, metaphor-inventing creatures. We slip and slide with language precisely because we can – where the Stone becomes soft and then fluid, re-inventing its nature at every turn. In my praise of green sulphur, I will also encourage resisting a moralising stance against red sulphur, as a whitening or sublimation, sometimes a whitewash. We have already seen how red sulphur has innovative powers. It may follow its own intrinsic motion rather than it needing to be either sublimated or necessarily leading to burnout, as a courageous walk into the flame, a tempering of spirit. The alchemists saved red sulphur from the moralising judgement of “whitening” by suggesting that one can indeed go straight to hell, bypassing reflective awareness and sniff the air in a realisation that burning brimstone may offer unexpected riches. Few can stand such initiations – often described by those who have attempted suicide, or are recovering from previous substance abuse, gambling, food or sex addictions. The current wave of “mad studies”, in the wake of R.D. Laing and David Cooper’s “anti-psychiatry” movement, articulates how forms of so-called madness are indeed illuminating, based in celebration of diversity or difference, providing an alternative metaphoric body to the mainstream, critical of a “lite” world: fat-free, sanitised, odourless, and conceptual. Herbert Marcuse (1964), in a neo-Freudian critique of capitalism, called this “One-Dimensional Man”.

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Importantly, as a therapeutic marker, James Hillman (1991: 82, 83) notes that the alchemists described sulphur not only as a vitriolic power – hyperactive, violent and passionate – but also as aiding putrefaction, or hurrying the natural process of decay. In psychological terms, green sulphur is again a marker: it shows a stink, a symptom formation, a corruption, a place of rot, as marking an essential change in the psyche, however disturbing to consciousness. Indeed, consciousness – desiring closure, comfort and balance – will remark upon the stench of green sulphur’s rot as something going wrong. Crude sulphur “hinders sublimation” or “impedes detachment and distancing” or reflection (ibid.: 81). From the point of view of consciousness, this is again to be rectified, whitened. The compost heap needs turning, but doesn’t need to be rectified by reflection. Indeed, to work well, the compost needs to trap light and suffocate it. In this sense, the work of Nature as therapeutic vessel is similar to the intensity of red sulphur where it takes one to the centre of the earth for “rectification” or change. Such imaginary descents are familiar ways of initiation in shamanism, where journeys to the underworld realms of totemic animals are made to appease the animal spirits during the hunt. Odysseus and Aeneas make this descent into Hades in Greek and Roman epic respectively. Jules Verne takes us there in Journey to the Centre of the Earth as a redemptive journey, as perseverance trumps impetuousness and short-termism. But the journey to the centre of the compost heap is one of a deep motive or desire to turn one’s life over by investigating the stink. Psychotherapy itself should “stink” in this sense, as it roots about in the rot in latter-day shamanic descent (Bleakley 1996). In this sense it is quite different from New Age idealisms and purification strategies that seek the light. Indeed, from the point of view of green sulphur this New Age rinse is a whitewash, completely misunderstanding therapeutic ventures as seeking the light rather than the transformative heat that is the heart of the metaphorical compost heap, where change is best accelerated. Psychodynamic psychotherapy insists that there is always value in symptom. Breakdown can so often signify the disclosure of the repressed as all psychoanalytic methods reveal. Even the metaphoric crude red sulphur of the alchemists has “an aesthetic and reflective interiority beyond its crude compulsion” (ibid.), or realises depths out of its own apparent impulsive, self-destructing purposes: “Within my hot greed for the fatness of life, my desirous reach into the world – what analysis long condemns as acting out – there lies an anima, a soul significance” (ibid.). The stink of something going wrong is always the clue that composting is working. There is soul significance in soil and in soiling. As the expiry date of red sulphur shows in burnouts from impulse and compulsions, so green sulphur’s imaginal world emerges as an alternative route.

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The surface impulse of red sulphur may contain its own depths, revealed not in a movement to the ash and sulphur of burnout, but to the oily black sulphur of generosity, fecundity, richness, whose stink is that of the ripe yolk of the egg and of cooling tar, rather than the acridity of ashes. And then, a shift of vision reveals that the work of red sulphur is always embedded in the garden of green sulphur. The lion – a typical motif of sulphur – standing its ground is illustrated in Atalanta Fugiens as king of the sulphurous, the world of erupting volcano and of rich, stinking marsh (Godwin 1989: 179). The lion stands in natural surrounds. It does not join the thief in the bedroom of the house. Surplus wealth and resource reveal another, familiar side to anality: as “stinking” rich. Not the cold, retentive aspect of compulsion (the cold tars, the congealed mucilage following burnout or indeed already resisting flame as the heat of life itself ), but anality as expulsive and expensive: runny, warm generous filthy lucre – muck and brass together. The sulphurous stink builds new depths, a new body, and emits a complex of smells. Rather than burning out or burning up, the sulphur realises a rich deposit, a fatty, oily, nourishing placental body with depth and colour. Not the unwholesome stink of greasy, fried food, but that of the fat of the land. Our psychological term “libido” can be viewed as this yolky or fatty sulphur. Libido (from the Latin for “desire” or “lust”) is not a thing, but an embodied metaphor. Freud described libido as a force – what we see are its effects, in activities. In libidinous desire our sulphurs rage, where some are destined to be deposited as wondrous oils, as resource. Others initiate complexity and depth through maturation, or rot. In this way, our potentially thin lives (the play of “events”) become enriched, filled out with body, or embodied through the deepening of events into experiences and the low-lying fruits of descriptive technical language dropping from the tree and mulching in the earth as poetic tropes. It is always easier to pluck the low-lying fruit – with its plentiful sugars – as short-term gains, than to dig the mulch over for longer-term gains in preparing the soil and planting more trees. In the very long term, the trees and other organic matter rot and are hardened into coal, or pools as oil deposits. Francis Bacon (1627, in Williamson 1997) describes the whole purpose of the alchemical art as turning the watery into the oily, or the thin and bloodless disembodied into the embodied, “wherein Crude and Watry Substance turneth into Fat and Oily”. We can readily apply this to language, equating the thin and bloodless with reductive technical language and the oily with figures of speech such as metaphor and simile. In this way, a nourishing body of sulphur is made from a potentially thin and crude body through maturation, effectively through the very principle of quickening carried by the substance of sulphur itself. Again, this enriching presence of sulphur is not to be limited to personality and the psychodynamics of analyses, but is also an aspect of cultural and environmental psychol-

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ogy. Both the seeping presence of sulphur as rich, colourful and complex, and its penetrating, eruptive powers to violate and snatch attention, are precisely how the alchemists describe the worldly presence of the substance: as the self-display of matter in both efflorescence and decay. Sulphur quickening rot may quicken our appreciation of that rot – the fecundity inherent in a shadow world that Trinick (1967: 29), after Philalethes, moralises against, as “a dark tract of sickly and stagnant air … from the … continuing presence of corrupt and feculent matter” in the “psyche” that resists sublimation or idealism. To not see value in such feculence is now characteristic of New Age idealism and its tragic programme to “whiten” both the darker insights of alchemy and Jungian psychology, such New Age-ism caught forever in the wash-and-spin cycle. Referring to his paintings, the filmmaker David Lynch offers an alchemical conundrum: “I’d like to bite my paintings, but I can’t because there’s lead in the paint”. To get your teeth into alchemy – or an alchemical psychology and not a psychology of alchemy that merely offers a whitening, a sublimation, of alchemy’s matter through conceptual translation – is to bite on the potentially poisonous, or Infectious. It is also to chew over the potentially depressive, the leaden or melancholic road. It is the necessary poisoning of Snow White, whose stepmother / tor-mentor obeys red sulphur’s compulsions in her insistence on pursuing the girl’s death and who is made to dance in red hot shoes at Snow White’s wedding, a highly graphic sulphurous punishment. This is a necessary poisoning, for without this sulphurous intervention and violation, how would Snow White have attracted her lover and gained her awakening through his kiss? The stepmother tor-mentor is again a disguised mentor.

Green sulphur and the child archetype As ever-renewing Nature, green sulphur is Peter Pan or Eternal Youth. The alchemists’ search for the fountain of Eternal Youth can be read as a revival of Platonism’s interest in the immortality of the soul, or of the ever youthful (because ever renewing) life of imagination. Renaissance alchemy’s quest for the medicine of the immortals, or the elixir of youth, has returned as a literal contemporary cultural obsession: medicine’s concrete battle with the ageing process. Postmodern medicine has both literalised and secularised the soul, which is now configured as a receding horizon of physical longevity through the science fiction of cryogenic suspension, the science facts of stem cell therapies and the resetting of the life clock determined by the chromosomes’ telomeres that mark the time to the death of each cell of the body.

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Eternal youth, as the suspension of bodily decay, also holds promise of a vigorous creative life, keeping at bay the ancient fear of waning inspiration due to ageing. Where The Who sang, in the 1960s, “I hope I die before I get old” and Neil Young, in the 1970s, “it is better to burn out than to rust”, in 2000, Travis sang “I want to live forever, but always stay young”. In the intervening two decades, as births decline and elderly populations grow in post-industrial countries, so the elderly are perceived as an increasing burden and youth is further celebrated. An influential article on pop culture two decades ago suggests that “never before have we been so hung up on working on our inner child”, so that in these curious times teenagers are the earnest members of the society, while fortysomethings strive to be hip (Vernon 2000). This sentiment is hot news today, brought sharply into focus by youth activism particularly around the climate crisis, modelled by Greta Thunberg whose persona is that of the experienced “child”, forever young but not innocent. Paradoxically, where analytic therapies centre so much on childhood issues such as unresolved trauma or unacknowledged potential, it may be the focus on the child that proves to be the primary fascination for the client. The transference is then not to the analyst, but to the child archetype. The poet Dylan Thomas was exhilarated by “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower”, noting that this force also “Drives my green age”. This youthful force, sappy and seminal, is the genie in the bottle. But our obsession with youth culture (contra to the traditional reverence for the wisdom of the elders), may lead to an inability for adults to manage the passage from youth to old age. Thus, we invented the “midlife crisis”. This is the Peter Pan curse – eternal youth but without development of mind and feeling, sentiment, taste and judgement: Dylan Thomas’s “green age” as puerile fantasies made concrete. Gaston Bachelard (in Gaudin 1987: 95) describes: “the persistence in the human soul of emotionless but enduring childhood, outside of history”. This is an acute observation, for fixation on the child archetype erases actual idiosyncratic personal developmental history as well as the importance of history itself. We are in general history-denying and history-distorting, hysterically focused on the “now” of popular culture, but also intent on re-writing history for current rhetorical purposes. This ahistorical public imagination is symptomised by the desire to “cancel culture” – once a genuine movement in left wing circles to restore pride to culture that had been erased, such as black culture’s own account of slavery, but now appropriated by the right wing to erase so-called “woke” readings of culture including critical race theory. “Woke” was once a term of celebration for black culture, as one being “awake” or aware. In the idealisation of childhood, we privilege innocence over experience, desiring the moment of innocence before expulsion from Eden.

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Post-Edenic “experience” (knowledge of nakedness associated with shame, or the association of sex and sensuality with guilt) is acquainted with the bearing of responsibilities that frustrate libidinal pleasure. Our culture promotes two, irreconcilable, views of the child. First, that children are born corrupt and must learn to temper their desires through socialisation (the way of painful compromise); and second, that children are born innocent and this is necessarily eroded through development (the way of pleasure seeking). This would suggest that the “green age” of the child, and of raw youth, is to be seen as a paradoxical combination of pleasure and pain – the greens of both growth and rot. The greens of development and the greens of decay, parts of the same cycle, are forced into opposition in a culture that refuses ageing and attempts all-out warfare on the greens of disease (reflected in the continuing use of martial metaphors in medicine). Much has been written on the child archetype (Jung 1968b, Hillman 1975a), psychological and cross-cultural developmentalism (Jung 1910, Neumann 1973, Cobb 1993, wwmedgroup.com) and the grip of the discourse of the child on contemporary psychology (Ariès 1962, Boas 1990). Freud created a scandal when he wrote of child sexuality, challenging the myth of innocence. But Freud was not sexualising children. Rather, he was attempting to understand how libidinous pleasure operates in children and how its development into adult sexuality might be frustrated in such ways that adults take on character traits of regressed libidinous fixation: on orality (breastfeeding) and anality (toilet training). Alchemists prefigured Freud in their recurring motif of the child Eros (Cupid) embracing flame (figure 7.2). This suggests that the “child” (as archetype) equates with passion and desire, sensualised in early life and sexualised later.

Figure 7.2: Eros embraces fire

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Alchemists talked of impediments to the natural expression of green sulphur as impeding cycles of growth and rot. Leaden states impede growth and fiery red sulphurous states do not allow the time for earthly matter to rot down. Both depressive and manic states have their own purposes but they signal fixations and regressions: in psychoanalysis, depressive states to anality and manic states to orality. Donald Winnicott suggested that such regressions are a product of the child being unable to learn the first rule of play: that one shares and does not control (the basis to a genuine democracy). This transition is what Freud meant by “genitality”. It is the realisation of the erotic as habits of friendship and care of others. Fixations on orality and anality lead to patterns of control that have little sensuality. J. M. Barrie was the inventor of Peter Pan – the boy who wouldn’t grow up. Barrie himself idealised children as innocent and consumed by play. It is easy to read the invention of the character of Peter Pan psychoanalytically. Barrie’s brother’s death at age 13 led to his mother finding consolation in the idea that a dead son would remain a boy forever. In the process, she canonised the boy. Barrie’s idealised fictional boy who would not grow up was already a permanent, albeit ghostly, member of the household. But such childhood innocence of course is psychological rot from a psychoanalytic perspective, where children are already eroticised and sensualised, seeking skin-to-skin contact and emotional warmth. “It’s the darker things I find really beautiful” says the filmmaker David Lynch. On childhood, Lynch says, “I had an idyllic childhood. The only thing that disturbs me is that so many psychopaths say they had a happy childhood” (in Rodley 1997: 8). Freud’s account of a darker childhood sexuality, where libidinous desire is frustrated in its natural development, is echoed in portraits of childhood sadism and violence such as William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Kenzaburo Oe’s Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids, the legacy of the Jamie Bulger case and a Reservoir Dogs copycat crime where three teenagers savagely beat to death a fourth and sliced off his ear with a broken bottle. Here, fixations on the oral and anal are related to craving of power and control. Imagine Peter Pan as the Great God Pan of Nature, the hairy and horny half-goat, half-human creature in pursuit of nymphs, phallus erect, echoed in the UK’s infamous Oz obscenity trial, where one of the pieces of evidence said to be likely to corrupt youth was a cartoon of Rupert Bear with a Priapuslike erection. Of course, this cartoon did not set out corrupt youth but was itself a corruption of the idealistic fantasy of youth sketched by people such as Barrie and carried by his characters, insulated against the unsettling insights of psychoanalysis. The desire to hold on to the picture of children as innocent seems perverse in an era where young people who are not of legal age to have sex can readily access pornography online, that often includes domination, objectification and

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shaming of women and simulations of pleasure. This is red sulphur as scandalous thief “breaking in” without conscience or moral register. In these tangled and complex examples, the force of green sulphur – offering a substantial metaphor of innocence, healthy growth and normal development – has been corrupted. The force that drives our green age is realistically a dual energy: now smelling sweet and now stinking and overripe. Childhood, as Freud suggested, is already in experience rather than innocence, as the psyche is already sensualised, eroticised and potentially violating, focused on erogenous zones. First on the mouth through breastfeeding (orality) and then on the anus through toilet training (anality). We should further note that modern “childhood” (and words such as “youth” and “teenager”) are historical-cultural constructions. As Phillipe Ariès (1962) shows in Centuries of Childhood, pictorial representations of children up to the Victorian era show children dressed as adults and treated as immature adults, waiting to walk into an adult frame. The notion of adolescence for example is modern. The age at which women could marry for medieval peasants in Europe was 12 and for men 14, although of course life expectancy then was significantly lower. As Jung (1968b) pointed out, where “the child” is a social construct as much as a biological fact, we might turn our attention to how the child archetype is formulated and plays out across differing contexts. The contemporary “child” can then be read not developmentally, but genealogically, as the historical and culturally-situated emergence of an idea (Ariès 1962, Boas 1990).

Nature, red in tooth and claw, but raw green in appearance Where red sulphur’s power is corrosive – flaring up, hot under the collar, the rage to live, hot opinions, blasted relationships, acting out and acting up, missions, goals, programmes, burning enthusiasms – green sulphur’s desire is raw, sappy and insistent. Green sulphur is not instant, but an emergent property developing over time (Goodwin 1995). This presence, or efflorescence, is personified as the Green Man of folklore and the Green Knight in the Arthurian legend of Gawain (whose “head”, cut off by Gawain himself, is regenerated annually – an emblem of the changing seasons). In alchemy, green sulphur is sometimes portrayed, as noted earlier, as Eros the child embracing flame (figure 7.2). Like the green lion eating the sun, this is Nature’s eternal “flame” personified as Eros or Desire (life force itself ) set against the temporary flame of red sulphur that quickly burns out. The latter, again, can be read psychologically as “unnatural” compulsions and manic delusions. In contrast, sappy green sulphur is an emblem of persons “learning from experience”. The emblem is psychotherapeutically astute: symptoms of impulse and compulsion, in mania expressed as delusions, must be embraced before

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they can be understood. They cannot just be eradicated. The therapeutic move is then to find forms of expression of impulse that are productive. It may be imagined that within Nature there is a force that recognises, and reflects upon, the naturalistic fallacy. Nature provides its own “work against Nature” constantly surprising us. This is easier to understand at the subatomic level of natural life where, for example, particles can occupy two locations in space at the same time, each one contradicting the other’s presence. At the granular level of human experience, where light is composed of both waves and particles, so thinking and emoting follow this unnatural form of Nature: intuition as wave and logic as particle, co-existent. Necessarily an uneasy co-existence. Nature’s reflective capacity is a voice in the forest that is an echo of Nature, forcing Nature to self-reflect within its own display or showing the ability to spontaneously re-organise within a dynamic, open system at a higher level of complexity. Such voices have been personified in mythology and folklore as spirits of nature – dryads, fairies, elves, gnomes and nixies. Pat Berry (1982), in an essay on Echo, reminds us of the “echo” within the dense green of all-embracing Nature as an introspective taxis, a reflective turn. For Echo was chased by Pan but desired only Narcissus. As Berry suggests, to be “natural” one must also be psychological; or, things cannot be taken for granted (the literal), but are reflexively constructed and then open to deconstruction (the trope). Echo is “unnatural, contra-natural” (Berry 1982: 115), just as the child is not “natural” but archetypal, or an historical and cultural construction. The child is then both perverse and symptomatic (for example of “never growing up”). This makes psychological work on the “inner child” also perverse. Berry points out that to echo is to repeat, hence Echo embodies repetition or persistence (the alchemical iteratio) and there is value in this iteration. Where red sulphur is prone to flares and is liable to burn up, green sulphur provides repetition or constant renewal. Re-visioning would be hollow without re-visiting. Berry’s essay provides at first sight what appears to be a contradiction. She quotes Ovid’s description (from Metamorphoses) of Echo becoming “inflamed with love” for Narcissus (Berry 1982: 120 – 21) – the latter so focused on his own image that he rejects Echo’s call. Or, narcissistic personalities have no echo, a distinct lack of self-reflection and awareness of the impact of their behaviour. Ovid describes this moment of Echo becoming inflamed with love in alchemical terms: “as when quick-burning sulphur, smeared round the tops of torches, catches fire from another fire brought near”. Here, Echo seems impulsive, driven by red sulphur. However, Echo’s love for Narcissus is unrequited. She cannot act out what she feels because she is disembodied, a metaphor seeking embodiment. The inflaming red sulphur is not a contradiction to her green sulphurous consistency, but rather a reminder that persistency has a heart of fire that is object-directed. When Nature is efflorescent in the

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general sense (display for its own sake, as Adolf Portmann would describe biological life) the specifics of the world (this crimson flower, that sheet rain, this shimmering beetle, that piercing wind) are object-directed: pollen for bees, colour for eyes, wind for scattering seeds. Within green sulphur (the devouring lion) is red sulphur’s specificity (the devoured sun). Popularly known as the “balance” of Nature, systems biologists now refer to the emergent properties of a system, in feedback or cybernetic terms. “Nature” is a generalised term that demands specifics. Hillman (1970b: 85) remarks on the anthropologists’ Lovejoy and Boas’ work, that offers “more than sixty connotations” for “nature”. Nature can be read as a cultural construct. In Lacan’s term, the Real is always mediated rather than immediate. The Real is constructed through the Imaginary and Symbolic registers and is then both metaphorised and conceptualised. As noted, definitions and constructions of Nature change historically and across cultures (Hillman 1985: 52). Nature tends to be romanticised and idealised on the one hand, where we refuse its pathologies and afflictions; or reviled on the other, especially from a technological perspective. It was typical of the Enlightenment attitude, the rationalistic philosophical basis upon which technology flourished, to view Nature as an enemy, as savage and to be tamed; or as unhealthy (for example the dank forest, which should be thinned or cut back to allow its own enclosed vapours to escape and fresh air and light to be introduced and circulate). Hillman (1975b: 84) has defined naturalism as “the psychological habit of comparing fantasy events with nature”. For example, a dream’s content is discussed and evaluated using natural examples as the touchstone. This represents laziness, an inertia drawn from Nature herself, for we simply have to look around us to find our examples – we do not have to engage in psychological “work”. Naturalism leads to materialism and literalism, physis privileged over psyche. Things are then taken as they are (naïve empiricism), as if Nature were transparent, and imagination follows perception, rather than imagination shaping or forming perception. Alchemy and poetry are languages that flatly refuse the naturalistic fallacy. In a commentary on Wilhelm Roscher’s Essay on Pan, Hillman (1979) sees the goat-god – the personification of “wild” or untamed Nature – as the presence that brings body back to our abstractions of Nature, such as romanticising or idealising the natural world. This is similar to bringing embodiment to metaphor. Recall that the alchemists figured Pan as clasping flame so that green sulphur, as “growth” and “decay” embraces hot sulphur as its necessary “fuse”, but wraps it in slower growth. If “Nature” is a mediation, a construct, a representation, a text, can we get close to the raw presentation of the world, or the face of the world? Or are we forever caught in a representational world that Lacan calls “the Real”? Hillman’s suggestion is that Pan’s nymphs offer a personification of the sublimating

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force that returns us to the abstractions of Nature, as an echo, whereas Pan himself brings “body, goat body” (ibid.: xli) to that abstraction, turning the concept “Nature” into the experience of animal instinct. This is to not only embody metaphor, but to frame metaphor-making as instinctual. This makes sense if we expand the notion of metaphor to the extra-linguistic such as the nonverbal. Where Pan attempts to rape the nymphs, he “suddenly turns nature into instinct” (ibid.: xli). In contrast, the disembodied, spiritualised, impossible-to-pindown nymphs are the mental life of nature, or its reflective voice. However, bodily impulse needs reflective awareness, a distancing or cooling off: red sulphur’s encounter with mercurial green sulphur. As myth tells us, “Pan wants nymphs” (ibid.: xlv), or instinct needs its own reflection from within its own body and actions, just as an animal appears to change its mind in the midst of an action and gracefully changes direction, colour, or even form. The origin of “nymph” may be in the description of the swelling of the bud, where Hillman (ibid.: xlvi) suggests that “nymph” is cognate with “nubile” in this respect. “Nymph” is then not the bud itself, but the swelling. Where green sulphur is formative and self-expressive growth, it is also form reflecting upon itself or contemplating a self aesthetically, as both an unfolding and enfolding, or disclosure and closure. This is the swelling of metaphors, their budding and exuberant show. This apparently disembodied contemplation then paradoxically derives from within the body of display itself. Nymphs and Pan in one body. Robert Grinnell (1973: 27) refers to alchemy describing a subtle green sulphur, or “secret sulphur”, equating this with “the Holy Spirit, the life-spirit itself ”. Perhaps this is the reflective face of vegetable Nature that knows its own saps and growth – Dylan Thomas’ “green fuse” as budding metaphor.

An underworld of green The subtle light of Grinnell’s “secret sulphur” is the mercurial or animating spirit that touches green sulphur to promote its exuberant displays. This of course is sunlight, which is why the alchemists portray the green lion eating the sun. We know such displays as a range of greens, many of which are shades, or underworld greens. “Green” itself has developed as a byword for alternative culture to representing mainstream ambitions in the face of the climate crisis. For dyed-in-thewool Greens, this new adoption of the label is suspicious. Hence the term “greenwash” – this is red sulphur, as thief, entering through the back door intent on robbery. British and Irish mythology is awash with green idylls and tradition: the Emerald Isle, Blake’s “Green and Pleasant Land”, the Green Man, the green

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leeks of Wales, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Constable country, Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden in As You Like It. We should remember again that in England alchemy was a kind of Robin Hood occupation from 1404 onward when King Henry IV signed a decree making it a crime to create gold or silver out of thin air (The Act of Multiplication). Such a decree was still in force in Shakespeare’s time in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Shakespeare, writing at a time when alchemy was as popular as, say, underground alt-rock music is now, drew on the alchemical imagination to enhance his dramatic work. The Forest of Arden, for example, is an alchemical space where human interactions undergo deep transformations, just as “base matter” is transmuted in alchemy. We can think of base matter as literalism, technical language, reductionism, free from metaphor. The transmutation is towards rich, productive metaphors that are expressed as celebration of the natural world, personalities, emotional flux, love life, richness of experience, folly transforming into insight and wisdom, prejudice and greed transforming into love. Arden has no limits, no rules, no time: it is purely a poetic space or field where metaphor can flourish. Primarily it is an alchemical container for the Great Work of developing imagination, love and beauty. Together these make wisdom. Here, for example, the melancholic or leaden Jacques is nurtured in solitude to make something of his melancholy. Through Jacques, Shakespeare invents what Erving Goffman (1956) was later to make famous as a “dramaturgical” sociological theory (“All the world’s a stage”), or social communication as “impression management” (“And all the men and women merely players”). Each of us is an actor in a drama, with a series of scripts. This describes “identification” and “identity”. Jacques meets the optimist Touchstone in the forest and is immediately transformed, in an alchemical moment. Leaden depression is brushed by Touchstone’s sulphurous optimism, as Jacques, observer of people, becomes one of those persons, transformed. Melancholia does not disappear but is reframed. Lead quickens, depression incubates in-spiration. The Stone is softened. Marie-Louise von Franz (1980: 128 – 9), within a traditional Jungian analytical frame, suggests that facing any symptom requires a prior movement of imagination into a depressive or melancholic position. In this position, we do not eradicate the symptom, that must be initially anchored, but rather we ask of the symptom “what does it want?” from a position of vulnerability. Von Franz asks, through the alchemical imagination (and specifically one of sulphur): “How do we cook drives?”. In other words, how do we stir and then heat unconscious material so that it is activated in consciousness and releases (as “vapours”) the defences that previously tied or repressed the drive? “Cooking” such psychological matter requires first “going into depressions”: “you have to go into a depression in order to meet them” (unconscious drives). This is what is meant by “depth” psy-

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chology. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have argued, the vertical axis provides the ground for one of a limited number of key metaphors that work through tensions or oppositional categories, in this case “up” and “down”. Embodied metaphors of “up” signify wellbeing, or lifted spirits. But too much “up” is mania and delusion, grand schemes and grandiose personalities. Embodied metaphors of “down” include melancholia or depressive periods, particularly a reactive depression to loss or a mourning, but also digging and discovery as in recovered memories. In myth and shamanic descents (imaginative journies), these are visits to an underworld. Too much “down” is chronic depression, the “black dog”. For von Franz, “at bottom there is the drive” – or here is the hidden sulphur within the melancholic position, as Jacques discovers when prodded by Touchstone. “Anyone who has ever been deeply in love knows that” says von Franz of the necessary visits to depressive positions amongst the joy, to sort through doubts and uncertainties. An unacknowledged jealousy of another’s power, suggests von Franz, may be a sign that you have not realised your own alchemical sulphur potential, to flame, or develop laterally as vegetative growth in warmth and expansiveness. Again, we need to ask these drives what they want. Given that they speak in metaphors (both linguistic and pre-linguistic as Julia Kristeva insists) we need a metaphorical vocabulary to speak back to them. For the analyst, an alchemical imagination provides this, as von Franz illustrates. Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden is a field of possibility, a metaphorical green space. The hard reality of our planet however is one of red sulphurous inflammation. Within the ecology movement, “green” has come to be acquainted with verdure, vegetative sap, fresh budding life and healthy growth – the positive face of chlorophyll. This is caught by Lorca’s evocation of the goodness of nature: “Green I love you green. Green wind / Green branches”. Green is midway between the violent hot reds of the spectrum and the cool blues. The reds are anathema to the Green Goddess and green pacificism (although, as we have seen, myth reminds us that Mars and Venus are lovers – Venus takes Mars to her bed to cool out his warrior nature, to eroticise his impulses rather than let them take their more familiar route of deranged violence). The deep indigos and violets of night conceal the natural greens and so, from the perspective of these greens, night’s ground cannot be trusted. It is no wonder that we have anxiety dreams, soaked as we are in a naturalistic perspective, for we already feel psychic life, as the evaporation of “natural” reality. Our alchemical work is primarily one of living out the ambiguity that life is at once “natural” and “material” just as it is “unnatural” and “immaterial” or conceptual and imaginative. Psychotherapy must deal with the client’s real state and the fantasies concerning that state, both of which must be re-imagined.

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Again, as Lacan insists, the Real is a horizon of possibilities and not everyday experience; and Jacques Derrida shows that we live our lives in a contradictory and disconcerting positive lack, where there is always a linguistic “surplus”, another ever-receding horizon that remains untouchable, otherworldly. The natural and the symbolic must both be addressed, as co-existent. This is why reductive therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapies have short-lived outcomes – their pragmatism ignores the importance of fantasy and ignores the importance of surplus as a key driver for our desires. We are at once in the “green gym” of the local park and the Forest of Arden’s magical world. Green is usually employed in a generalised way and becomes bland: “ecological” often equating with homogenised tender-mindedness. We fail to embrace green’s radical spectrum, especially its shades. In a monoculture of green, we deny the full expression from the yellow-greens through to the blue-greens and then fail to discriminate through the correct shade of green. In therapy, a man says he is jealous of his wife and fears her possible infidelity. The therapist asks if he is not just jealous but envious. After a long pause he says, “yes, that’s true. I am envious”. Resting underneath this is a bed of anger. The spectrum ranges from green to red: but specifically, what tones are the jealousy, envy and anger? Are they hot or mild? How do they mix? The work of therapy here is discrimination, but to do this well the therapist needs a “colour chart” against which he or she can match the emotional tones. This is a diagnostic move in psyche paralleling that of clinicians as they look, in soma, at the colour of a urine sample, or of a patient’s pallor, finger nails or tongue. The yellow end of the spectrum gives us apple green, bladder green, boa, chartreuse, emerald, fir, glaucous green, jade, mignonette, Montpelier green, moss, mousse, Nile green, olive, olive drab, Paris green, pea green, peacock green, reseda, sap green, sea green, shamrock, Spanish green, verdigris, viridian and willow green. The blue end of the spectrum offers aquamarine, bird’s egg green, eggshell green, myrtle and turquoise. As Peter Bishop (1990: 4) observes, all greens are not the same green: “olive, emerald, moss, leaf, myrtle, ivy, avocado, lime, spinach, sage, lettuce, marjoram, sea, mould, and slime present us with both radically different hues and sharply contrasting metaphors. One large manufacturer of embroidery thread alone markets 81 different greens”. Bishop, properly, places emphasis upon the metaphorical nature of “green” language. How we talk about ecology frames our perception of Nature. Hypochromic anaemia can cause patches of skin to turn green. The symptom can then be read as an embodied metaphor, as the iron-deficient blood “speaks” its condition through a colour register. More obviously, we are plainly not literally “green with envy”. The phrase probably originated in Shakespeare’s Othello, where Iago warns Othello: “Beware, my lord of jealousy; it is the green-eyed mon-

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ster which doth mock the meat it feeds on”. In the Middle Ages, a pale greenish hue to the complexion was associated with an imbalance of the humours leading to illness, as this struck fear into a person. Such medico-folklore fed into the alchemical imagination, so that substances were humanised as they changed colour and tone, sweated, gasped, stuttered and so forth. Therapy has to get out of the consulting room and into the world to engage with a sweating earth, an iron-deficient green-bodied organisation, an artificial “green and pleasant land” whose canvas has been created largely by intensive use of chemical fertilisers. The bucolic scene of cows quietly grazing is plagued by an unseen methane cloud of cattle farts. This full vocabulary of greens offers quite a shift from ancient Greek Homeric vocabulary that had a restricted vocabulary of green, only grass green, leek green, pale green and yellow green. Often the single word chloros – the root of “chlorophyll” – was used as a catch-all for the green spectrum (Benz et al 1977). The range of greens we see in Nature and take for natural are often artificial, a product of pesticides and herbicides. We have a culturally constructed perceptual readiness – we want to see fields as green; it is in our history, language and culture and then in our vision. Within such a perceptual fallacy we fall back into the waiting arms of the Great Mother Earth, who keeps us in a developmental fantasy where we stay forever young, forever green, the idyll of childhood touched on earlier. Here, we are greenhorns, sappy youths, innocent, immature, inexperienced, unreflective, raw, unripe, callow, gullible saps. Again, here is a vocabulary, a set of metaphors, for therapists to use as touchstone when dealing with regression – either the patient’s spontaneous recall or a forced regression. The heart of Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalytic approach is to recover moments when natural transitions from childhood narcissism, logic and ethics (self-centredness) that are anti-democratic failed to set in, because of conditions such as lack of collaborative play, where both identities and forms of social exchange are learned. Here, stepping into the shoes of others and negotiating fairness is a normal condition of transition to adulthood, but can be severely frustrated, leading to adult authoritarianism, rigidity and narcissism. The unripe child here has suddenly ripened far too quickly into a parody of a caring human so that the sappy greenhorn has been contaminated by red sulphur’s impulsiveness and wish for flaming domination. There is lack of reflection and moral register. The childhood event of play, as a safe rehearsal space for democratic gestures, must be recovered so that the greens of life are integrated and not burned off. But there is symptom at work in a naïve embrace of such regressive psychodynamics. Green sulphur “hinders perfection” say the alchemists, meaning that we cannot be tied to the Mother’s apron strings, or to the naturalistic fallacy of reading characters and behaviours as “natural” when to act as a sappy youth in adult-

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hood is unnatural, except in mock play. We must not idealise verdure at the expense of the green under-shades and the Priapic nature of the goat-god Pan who will, as the name indicates, create panic (Hillman 1979). Again, as Freud showed, and many horror movies depict, there is a child eroticism that can be dangerous or dark when projected onto others. Regression is not just about recovery of play, but also facing and working through childish cruelties. An underworld of greens must face rot, decay, and the greens of natural poisons. We must face the verdigris of copper, called by the alchemist the “leprosy of the metals”, seen on things going off, untended: lack of maintenance in every sense, things left to rot, mildew on the walls, the underbellies and back alleys, rising damp, untended houses with their green slimes. And winding forward from childhood is the return to such underworld greens in the possibility of sickness: putrescence, infection, pus, phlegm, maturing bruises, green urine and the green shades of the body after death. These are the green promises of decay. Is it any wonder that free-floating anxiety is the commonest symptom reported to family doctors, where our existential condition is one of untethered development in the grip of entropy? While acknowledging the green shades, we should also, in defence of the Green Lion, remind ourselves of how the raging red sulphurs can so easily strip back the greens: the green canopies of rainforest removed through slash-andburn, echoed in the long historical association of defoliation associated with warfare: whole forests burned in ancient Greece in the course of battle; oak forests in Tudor and Elizabethan England disappearing under the demand for fighting ships; herbicides used by American troops to defoliate whole tracts of forest during the Vietnam war; the ongoing mini wars in South America between indigenous peoples and aggressive exploitations of mineral resources; Jair Bolsonaro defoliating an area the size of Belgium in the Amazon, over a period of just three years between 2019 and 2022. In an essay on “The Tree”, the late novelist and poet John Fowles (Fowles and Horvat 1979) points out that when we defoliate the forest, we defoliate ourselves; while the late Michael Perlman (1994) called for “the reforesting of the soul”, the subtitle of his seminal book on archetypal ecology. If red sulphur propels us into life, and compels us to suffer its fate, and black sulphur sticks us to life through tar-stink pathologies brought by fate, green sulphur draws us to life as miracle or, the life of green sulphur is in our shifting attentions, drawing us to the particularities of the world – places to capture interest both above and beneath the mossy stones. Green sulphur offers the rage to live, rather than living in rage – which the red sulphurs can bring – partly as an inhibition upon ripening too quickly. Without regressing to an immoral child-like innocence, or micro-dosing on magic mushrooms, we can stay with sappy enthusiasms as unsophisticated plans, like Shakespeare’s Lear reborn under the guidance of the Fool as “full-fed with fresh gas”.

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We post-industrial, post-human, post-moderns are “full-fed with fresh gas” in the sense of inflation – both personally and economically. Through our sulphurous desires, we cause the world suffering. We burn the black body of Dis as the world’s finite oil resources: impulsively, sul-furiously, flaming into being, lighting our darkness, fuelling our desires and compulsive consumptions. We discovered the rich, oily body of sulphur only to allow red Sulphur’s desires to flame its own rich body in burnout and cause the bigger heat of global warming. This has been the basis of our modern coal and oil economy, but we have not been economical in our sulphur-driven impulses and compulsions as we literally torch our underworld wealth for short-term profit. A worldly post-modern alchemy must also be an ecological alchemy, not just an alchemy of personal psychology or character. We must invoke green sulphurs as well as the red varieties where regard for Nature is placed above human compulsions. One of the most famous of alchemical texts, the Rosarium Philosophorum (the “Rosary of the Philosophers”), first published in 1550, sets this conundrum: “I am the true green and Golden Lion without cares / in me all the secrets of the philosophers are hidden”. Let us imagine that one answer to this riddle is the double metaphor of Nature herself and the naturalistic impulse (science’s desire to know Nature as she is, without interpretation) vying with Lacan’s view of “the Real”, that is Nature as interpreted by the human imagination: multiple “Natures” re-invented through history and across cultures (the anthropological, sociological and psychological filters). The alchemical imagination is surely the appreciation of such metaphor positions as equally tenable, where carrying the paradox of their co-existence is the psychotherapeutic Work of the contemporary alchemical imagination. Here, individual therapy and therapy on the world of objects and phenomena must co-exist. Not just eating disorders but also food disorders. Not just the extraordinary heats of mania and compulsive activity, but also the heats of global warming. The Green Lion has a voracious appetite.

Chapter 8 Salt Salt’s song: fierce, compact, brilliant and cruel The American author Patricia Highsmith wrote her 1952 novel The Price of Salt under a pseudonym because of its theme of a lesbian relationship, anathema to most publishers in America at the time and taboo in early post-WWII culture. The title refers to the price paid for pursuing one’s heart where that pursuit brings salt to a life, or creates flavour from the bland. The tale is autobiographical. Carol, a sophisticated older woman with a young child and in the midst of a divorce, is Christmas shopping in a department store. She is served by Therese, just nineteen, a wannabe theatre set designer who is working in the store as a stop gap. They are instantly attracted to one another, an erotic epiphany, and fall in love. The book is the story of them taking a road trip across America East to West, deepening this forbidden relationship. Carol discovers that they are being pursued by a private detective hired by her husband to get dirt on them that can be used by him to gain custody of their child. The salt is added to an otherwise bland encounter as they exchange pleasantries when Carol is buying a Christmas present for her daughter in the store, served by Therese: “What a strange girl you are” says Carol of Therese, “Flung out of space”. Salt begins to work immediately in their relationship, bringing substance and bite; turning chit-chat into real conversation: Carol looked at her. “How do you become a poet?” “By feeling things – too much, I suppose,” Therese answered conscientiously.

On the road trip East to West across America, it is just after leaving Salt Lake City and driving across the Great Salt Lake Desert when Carol tells Therese that a private detective, hired by her husband, has been trailing them. They discover later that he has planted microphones in their hotel and motel rooms. Therese prompts Carol into recollection – salted away memories – to try to piece together what sulphurous impulse is driving her passion now, and why it seems impossible for them both to anchor and reflect on the past, rather than living in the moment: But when they kissed goodnight in bed, Therese felt their sudden release, that leap of response in both of them, as if their bodies were of some materials which put together inevitably created desire.

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Eventually, they are torn apart by circumstances, their relationship stalled. But Therese thinks, “how would the world come back to life? How would its salt come back?” Talking to a male friend later about the relationship with Carol, he asked her if she was hurt, and would she go through the whole thing again? Of course, she insists, she would return to the very same wounds. She would be impelled to rub salt in them. It is, suggests Highsmith, the intensity of the experience that matters. Over just three pages in his novel The Rainbow (1942: 280 – 83), D.H. Lawrence views the burning and cruel intensity of a relationship through the prism of salt. Lawrence’s character Ursula Brangwen, within the deep emotional flux of relationship she has struck up with Anton Skrebensky – and as if possessed – embraces a particular and fierce kind of burning without fire that shows bitterness, rancour and emotional coldness so intense that it burns like ice. It is partnered by a wholly self-contained and self-serving compact isolation. In a moment in which she desires complete emotional control over Skrebensky, it is as if Ursula extracts and steals his soul so that he is just a shell. Skrebensky desires Ursula in a controlling manner, but is mesmerised, then pinned by her like a dead butterfly as she toys with him. After her moment of cold pleasure, she eases back into submissive role having proven her powers like a spider killing and eating her mate after sex. Not only is Ursula’s emergent obsessive, cold and calculating character suddenly and deeply overwhelming, but also Lawrence’s obsessive style of writing pins you and pricks you with repeated phrases and motifs. It is an acquired taste. The scene is set under a hard, cold and bright, metallic full moon with which Ursula identifies and which provides inspiration for her moment of lunacy. The surrounding is a field of haystacks, normally associated with harvest and the bounty of the sun; but here they are part of the brilliant night-time setting with their sharp, scythed ends likened to fires: “The stack stung him (Skrebensky) keenly with a thousand cold, sharp flames”, the sharp ends of the cut hay likened to Ursula’s emergent dominance and control. Returning obsessively to the same salt lick of embodied metaphors and images, rubbing salt in the wound, Lawrence describes the passionate entanglements of his characters thus: “There was a fierce, white, cold passion in her heart” “But still in her body was the subdued, cold indomitable passion” “She was cold and unmoved as a pillar of salt” “She was cold and hard and compact of brilliance as the moon itself ” “she was hard and bright as ever, intact” “She was bright as a piece of moonlight, as bright as a steel blade, he seemed to be clasping a blade that hurt him”

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“She … seemed to burn among … (the hay stacks) …, as they rose like cold fires. … All was intangible, a burning of cold, glimmering, whitish-steely fires” “his hands went over her, over the salt, compact brilliance of her body” “If he could but net her brilliant, cold, salt-burning body” “And always she was burning and brilliant and hard as salt, and deadly. Yet obstinately, all his flesh burning and corroding, as if he were invaded by some consuming, scathing poison” “her kiss seized upon him, hard and fierce and burning corrosive as the moonlight” “she had fastened upon him, cold as the moon and burning as a fierce salt” “she was there fierce, corrosive … like some cruel, corrosive salt … destroying him in the kiss. And her soul crystallised with triumph”

It is like a fierce hammer coming down again and again on a field of salt, compacting matter. The fat earth is hardened but given granularity and flavour. Of course, as noted, too much salt and earth is rendered sterile. We might think of Lot’s wife glancing back at Sodom – perhaps in regret or remorse, certainly in sentiment – being turned to a compact pillar of salt. All those scattered thoughts and desires are pulled together in one overwhelming desire to stay firm whatever goes on around you. This is obsession. Ursula’s triumphant moment of conquest, or complete control, is obsessive. Lawrence’s repetition of images, in the grip of salt, is obsessive – returning to the same salt lick, rubbing salt in the wound, Ursula Brangwen’s possession a fully crystallised, positive, empowering lunacy. I continue this chapter with Lawrence’s insistent passage because, while it has no explicit truck with alchemy it offers an encompassing mini seminar on alchemical salt, formulated as a binding metonymic chain: salt-corrosive-fierce-burningcold-white-indomitable-hard-compact-brilliant-bright-lunar-steel-cutting-destructive-deadly. Salt is “fierce”, “brilliant” or “bright”, “cold and hard”, “compact” and “burns” or is “corrosive”, indeed a “poison”. The language is alchemical. The effect is transformative, on character in the plot and on the reader. It is above all, memorable, for Lawrence salts the reader in the process, demanding that the reader look to her “taste” and sense of discrimination. Lawrence flaunts his talents. It is not to everybody’s taste. Salt’s work is to salt away or preserve, to burn into memory. But salt also brings out the flavour, adds the bite. Returning to Patricia Highsmith’s (1952) novel, The Price of Salt famously legitimised a female same sex relationship during a deeply conservative period in post-WWII America intolerant of lesbian relationships. Its genesis rested with Highsmith’s own twice weekly psychoanalysis to “cure” her lesbian preferences. To pay for the analysis, Highsmith took a job in the Christmas season at Bloomingdale’s department store in New York. It is in this same setting that the two main women protagonists in The Price of Salt first meet and later become lovers. Recall that Therese, separated from her

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lover Carol, wonders how “the world would come back to life? How would its salt come back?” Salting brings sharpness, flavour, zest; while, amply illustrated by Highsmith’s own turbulent life, salt brings obsessions and fixations. The Price of Salt is the social disapproval that comes with a life advertising zing, living on the edge, refusing bland habit. Highsmith herself would advertise the dangers of over-salting later in life becoming a resentful and sharp personality, an irritable alcoholic expressing racist and antisemitic views. There is both a salty imagination and an imagination of salt that steers between literal readings of salt as substance and commodity and abstractions of salt as symbol. This is the line, pioneered by James Hillman (2014: 54– 81), that I follow here. Hillman treats alchemical salt not literally, as chemical substance (sodium chloride, NaCl); nor as symbol abstracted from matter, advertised by Carl Jung’s ground breaking work on alchemical psychology, where salt is given a whole section of explication in Mysterium Coniunctionis (Jung 1970: 183 – 257); but rather as substantial and embodied metaphor. As with other substances and operations and following Hillman’s line, here I use alchemical salt as a medium, springboard and sounding board to better understand qualities of encounters in psychiatric and psychotherapeutic settings. Just as with fire and sulphur in the three previous chapters, metaphors of alchemical salt will provide a metaphorical medium to inform psychotherapeutic method. Where salty symptoms (obsessions, bitterness, rancour, fixity, purity) dominate and call for therapeutic attention, the theory of humours would say “treat with the opposite” (dry and cold with wet and warm). The Swiss father of medicine Paracelsus (c.1493 – 1541) – who introduced the salt-sulphur-mercury triangle to alchemy and medicine as a primary frame challenging the Galenic four humours tradition and who died in Salzburg, the “city of salt” – in contrast would say “treat with the same” (salt with salt). Hillman (2014) suggests that both of these methods are misguided analytically: do not treat sulphurous mania, leaden depression or salty regret with the same or the opposite, but rather, touch sulphur, lead or salt with mercury, bringing imagination and reflection to bear on symptoms. In other words, animate symptom by asking first, “what does the symptom want?” rather than by compulsively eradicating the symptom through hasty intervention. Move both the literalising and abstraction of psychological matters into a creative mesh of metaphors and wait for reflective insight. For the Medieval and Renaissance alchemists, again, “salt” is not literal salt, while the alchemical substance does take on salt’s main qualities; rather alchemists use “salt” to refer to a range of “salts”: of crystalline substances that readily take on water, but more of crystalline metaphors grounded in body and earth. Here, I am sticking more closely with the common salt that infects our language to produce metaphors such as “salt of the earth” (trusted and dependable, ethically

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sound), “hit with the salt” (on the receiving end of caustic comments or nasty gossip), “an old salt” (an ex-sailor or sea-man) and “covenant of salt” (a binding agreement). Where all therapeutic encounters are grounded in issues of memory, and in aspects of how and why memory matters, we find alchemical salt at work. Salt is, metaphorically, the active substance in memory, both laying down and re-activating memory.

Memory The running on and on of events without experience Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “Funes the Memorius” – first published in 1942 and translated into English in 1954 – (detour in text: as a sign of unconscious intent, when I first typed “translated” it came out as “transalted”) describes a teenage boy Ireneo Funes who, after falling off a horse and banging his head, suffered from the curse of not being able to forget, of remembering everything. Attention normally filters out most passing events. It is only when an event is turned into an experience that it is memorised and open to recall. It is only when events become experiences that psychic body is built – depth of knowing, understanding, feeling, imagining. While salt celebrates the mundane or ordinary (normally a series of events that fail to be experienced but pass by and pass on) it also salts away what is important. It stands for the psychological principle of selective attention. Funes, however, is unable to make meaning of all that he remembers, so that the symptom becomes a curse rather than a blessing. Much as he tries to classify his memories, meaning evades him. He is stuck in an intolerable welter of detail that has no connection or organising theme and cannot be abstracted. The fictional Funes himself is not an abstraction – cases exist of persons with such vivid memories. Every event fails to register as a meaningful experience in such a continuous rainfall of memory. What Funes needs is alchemical salt, to set memory. In some ways, living through the Information Age, we are in the position of Funes by proxy. Our “total” memories, a catalogue of events, are stored in cyberspace and information clouds. In the very early days of the Internet – hailed as a breath-taking gift – I worked therapeutically with a male client (let’s call him “Dave”) who was addicted to being online; not to content specifically (there wasn’t much content in those early days), but purely to the novelty of the informational event. Dave was disabled, unemployed and spending most of his day cruising online information just for the novelty factor. In no way was his life improving. He craved experience but was only getting information, “merely a running on and

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running through of events without psychic body” as described by James Hillman (ibid.: 60). How could such “psychic body” be made?

Case study: “Dave” Dave’s salty obsession was doing some good, where it served as a distraction from bouts of leaden depression, as now there were particulars to focus on, stuff to do. The alchemists say “remove the blackness with salt”, or transform leaden depression into a salty bitterness, for here at least you have some movement and promise. But the stuff was vacuous, going nowhere, and so addiction replaced depression and alcohol made at least some temporary Being out of Nothingness, albeit a numbing rather than an enrichment. Dave craved ever more sophisticated and expensive computing technologies to get the best out of the nascent Internet. Frustrated by lack of funds and gradually getting into serious debt, he started drinking heavily. So, the salt was excessive, creating thirst and while it had touched his leaden depression it was merely accumulating into rancour about his lack of satisfaction from his now obsessive interest. My therapeutic strategy was to touch the salt with mercury by re-imagining salt’s power rather than stripping it out – attempting to simply erase Dave’s obsessions. The first move in archetypal psychotherapy, as I have insisted many times already, is to ask “what does the symptom want?” Salt wants to bring out flavours by acting in small doses. Dave needed quality not quantity in his online time. Rather than browsing, with novelty as the stimulus (temporary at best, just like the effects of drinking, a short buzz), we looked at issues of quality and focus. How could the running on and on of information be channelled into the promise of specific, inspiring knowledge, even wisdom? His challenge was one of selection, of filtering. Not only was correct dosage of salt needed, but appropriate alchemical vessels or containers were required for the Work. Dave needed to distill and concentrate (figure 8.1) from his post-modern alembic, the primitive internet. With the correct dosage of salt, such an information-led parade of events, Funes’s curse described by Borges (above), is halted as significant events are turned into experience, or memorised. Dave needed his salty obsessions to be particularised, modified and focused. They needed to count and not just run on by. By keeping a diary, he tracked what really interested him and why, echoing D.H. Lawrence’s return (above) to key descriptors: “fierce”, “brilliant”, “cold and hard”, “compact”, “burns”, “corrosive”. Out of a flow of information a set of key topics and interests emerged akin to knowledge. One or two took on the status of wisdom, and this related particularly to the rhetoric of online content and the lack of focus on networking for disabled people. In time, Dave was able to set up his own online

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Figure 8.1: “Distill and concentrate”

site and became an advocate for disability issues and online support groups. Touching salt with mercury brought reflective focus without losing the power of salt that emerged in his obsession with a specific issue. This intervention, nevertheless, was functional. Over a longer term, Dave needed salt to be rubbed in the wound to find out exactly where the hurt was. In short, Dave was ashamed of his disability (he had lost an arm) and had long shunned public appearance. In this, he had lost contact with the natural world but more he had replaced a naturalistic outlook with a technical and simulated world. He was the first case of Internet addiction that I had come across. The artificial world of the Internet, a simulacrum, had replaced his link not just with Nature but with people. He had over-salted large areas of his world. Salt can be a killer to the green life of vegetation. When the Romans quit an occupied territory, they would salt the land making it infertile. This is a symbol of the whitened earth that the alchemists took as the death of the naturalistic outlook (to take things literally, thus missing the poetic vision). White salt destroys the green naturalistic perspective. Deuteronomy 29: 23 describes “a burning waste of salt and sulphur – nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it”. Over-salting produces a thirst. Dried out, living with regret and salty bitterness we drown our sorrows turning to drink, or cry endlessly. Dave needed to return to a naturalistic outlook to counter his world of the simulacrum (where map precedes territory), especially to the communal world of emotional exchange. In time, he set up a flesh-and-blood support group for people addicted to online activities, first enrolling on a counselling course where he gained friendships and re-ignited an active social life.

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Educating memory Life is a constant reconstruction based on looping between memory and anticipation. Memory is the filling in the sandwich where early childhood and old age provide the flimsy bread. As we live longer, so incidence of dementia increases while recovery of early childhood inevitably offers a screen memory, a fictionalised representation. Memory is composed of recognition and recall that work in tandem. It is rare to recognise something or somebody without recall flooding in. There are odd occasions when recognition happens and there is blank recall. It is hard for us, in the age of the computer in which “memory” is equated with hard drives rather than spongy cortex and hippocampus, to appreciate that prior to the printing press memory was essential for cultural continuity; and even more so prior to writing. Memory was revered as an art, an aesthetic construction, not just a takenfor-granted faculty; and as an art could be cultivated, refined, aesthetically formed. For early modern alchemists, the faculty of memory was registered symbolically as alchemical salt, referring not simply to the everyday crystalline substance, but again to a range of saline qualities and properties such as preservation, particularity, obsession and bitterness. And in relationships, salting is a metaphor for bringing out qualities in others. It is then key for psychotherapists to know their salt, that indicates their worth. Memory, itself often bitter, is simultaneously the psyche’s biggest gift and burden. We dwell on things, run them over and over in our memories, punish ourselves with them, rubbing salt into our own wounds. In mental health therapeutic settings, in the wake of psychoanalysis, long term memory’s archaeological exploration results in both accurate recall and fantasy recollection. Memories come with salty additions to bring out flavours. Freud termed these “screen” memories because they are selective, screening out unpleasant aspects. But here is the reason for psychoanalysis – not only to get behind the screen to dig for memories of trauma and psychological hurt, but also to deal with the everyday consequences of bad faith and consequential ego defences such as denial. The screen memory offers a bricolage of meanings that may or may not have therapeutic yield. Piecing together traumatic childhood events by recovering what is screened characteristically provides insight into current maladaptive behaviour patterns such as patterns of intimacy; but the other side of the coin is that “recovery” of such memories can itself be a fabrication – for example to please the therapist in a positive transference effect – so that such work of recovery may offer another layer of re-collection open to analysis. Psychotherapy doesn’t always go for the big catch. Major repressions may be less important than chronic, persistent habits that distort the ability to live as “the salt of the earth” – morally trustworthy, dependable and living in good

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faith. My own experience of working with clients has been much more about challenging everyday, chronic patterns of Machiavellianism and confusions over erotic fixations than, say, landing the big fish of major repressed episodes and trauma. For many of my clients, what was missing in life was a medium of expression, an art form – so that again life ran on as a series of events that failed to be turned into meaningful experiences. I would always challenge the desire for “personal growth” (what can I do for myself?) to focus rather on what can I do for others? And how can I build psyche, soul or imagination through an art form? The second move would be, not what does the art do for me, but what can I do for the quality of the art? The art is the gift to the world. Poetry enriches and changes the world, not the poet. Parents and families can be blamed for what they did not do or for what is misperceived in remembrance, becoming convenient targets for distress that may have its roots elsewhere. But also, genuine developmental patterns of hurt can lead to distortions of affect in adulthood that can be addressed through cathartic release leading to insight: repressed anger at a bullying father; a desire for affection that a cold-hearted mother never gave and so forth – all classic patterns within the psychoanalytic frame and all intimately connected with the embodied metaphorical workings of alchemical salt and its associated affect: regret and remorse for example (again, as Lot’s wife turns to look back at Sodom so she is turned into a pillar of salt). Freud’s archaeological method of recovery is analogous to Lot’s wife’s looking back in remorse. Here is Freud’s (1933/1957: 110 – 11) account of obsession: The agoraphobiac, for example, begins his illness with an attack of anxiety in the street. This is repeated every time he walks along the street again. He now develops a symptom – a street phobia – which can also be described as an inhibition or a functional restriction of the ego, and thus he preserves himself from anxiety attacks. One can observe the reverse process if one interferes with the formation of symptoms, as is possible, for instance, in the case of obsessive acts.

The symptom is created to protect against the anxiety, but then becomes a source of anxiety in itself. The cycle must be broken. Freud (ibid.: 111) says: “What one fears is obviously one’s own libido”. It is no good just treating the symptom alone because it only gets at the top layer of anxiety. The primary anxiety rests elsewhere. For example, “suppose that the agoraphobiac is always afraid of his impulses in connection with temptations aroused in him by meeting people in the street” (ibid.). Here, the “cure” is to salt the condition, to temper the sulphurous or potentially impulsive libidinous impulses (unrestricted erotic desire) by de-literalising eros, turning erotic fantasy into conviviality and connection. Freud prefigures Alfred Adler’s notion of a healthy “fellow feeling” or social affect. Freud’s own

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Art of Memory is a facilitated recovery of the repressed original trauma, so that it does not return in a distorted form, but rather affords a creative opportunity. Lore and myth prior to writing and print had to be preserved or salted. In preHomeric ancient Greece myth was embodied in oral poetry that was sung, accompanied by the lyre. The epics, later written down by Homer – The Iliad and The Odyssey – were sung from memory by rhapsodes (literally the “stitchers together of tales”). While improvisation was encouraged, and indeed marked the quality of the recitation (an epic would take several days to recite), memorisation of the songs depended upon certain mnemonic devices such as repeated motifs (“wine dark sea”, “wily Odysseus”, “fleet footed Achilles”) (Marshall and Bleakley 2017). One would think that the invention of writing and then of the printing press would have put paid to the art of memory that was necessary to, for example, singing ancient national epics across nations and peoples. But the Renaissance saw a renewal of interest in the Art of Memory presumably stimulated by an information explosion.

The Art of Memory Frances Yates (1969) and Paolo Rossi (2000) track the rise and fall of interest in the Art of Memory and note its basic techniques. Central to memorising is an imagination of strange or pathologised images. The first basic technique for memorising, say, a group of objects, is to imagine a room filled with pieces of furniture. Each object to be memorised is associated in imagination with the furnishings in the room (a hat sits on a plant-stand, an umbrella hangs from a picture hook). The more bizarre the linking, the better the recall. This is then extended to pathologised or fantastic image pairings (the hat sits on a flaming lamp-stand, the umbrella hangs from the neck of a skeleton that bleeds). These arts of memory activities are the salting away of images, their preservation and storage. What is fixed in memory are specifics and details. This is a good therapeutic technique in the treatment of those who can only access the world as literal and material, seeing fantasy as an aberration. Suddenly, there are perceived and experienced benefits in exercising fantasy. Of course, within a psychodynamic tradition, psychotherapy is coming from the opposite end of this process – not to lay down the memory, but to discover techniques by which memories can be brought back to life, with the assumption that what is repressed is not necessarily lost but, without effort, remains beyond access. It is repressed because it is painful. It is a psychoanalytic axiom that what cannot be tolerated in conscious life is parked in unconscious life – denied, repressed, sublimated. Recall of such material, however disguised, corrupted or confused,

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is carried out under careful midwifery within a safe space of the therapeutic alliance. The return of the repressed infects our daily life said Freud, but in a manner in which the purity of that life is corrupted. Repressed material distorts our habits and relationships in ways that we cannot see. It takes the skilled listening of another (the midwifery part) for repressed material to be allowed to return in a conscious manner, usually through a process of catharsis (emotional release) followed by insight, helped by the therapeutic alliance and subsequent analysis or interpretation (Heron 1988). Where repressed material offers itself in metaphorical forms, the interpretation is not to obtain a “correct” reading of what is poetic matter, but rather an appreciative reading that affords insight and stimulus for positive change. Having mined the salted deposits, the next therapeutic move is critical. Too often the salt is treated with its opposite, so what was dry and stored is prised out and treated with liquid. The tears flow, but there is no insight. Or, salt is treated in the spirit of like-with-like, a Paracelsian dose. Then, what is dry becomes drier and brittle; what is stored deep becomes driven even further into memory, so that the therapy achieves exactly the opposite to what it desires – not drawing memories out for contemplation, but digging the mine deeper and deeper so that the memories slide away. Or, the over-salting actually produces more recall, as false memories. Rather, what is needed is to ask: what do the salted-away memories want? How do they present themselves and how should they be greeted?

Obsessions Do not treat the symptom before asking it what it needs and how much it needs (dose). Such an approach is sceptical of the value of standardised psychiatric approaches according to pharmaceuticals manuals (National Formularies) and population-based evidence recommending standard doses. “Dose” is derived from the Greek dosis meaning “gift”. How can standardised doses be gifts when individual tailoring of treatment is demanded? Depressions, anxieties and so forth do not present in the same way but take on singular metaphorical shapes and identities in each person. Lot’s wife may be looking back in regret, remorse, longing, desperation, or relief. We need more questions to specify the motives (intentions) and motifs (pattern) of the backwards glance. Each person’s remorse in recollection is a unique signature. Here is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM-5) definition of obsessive behaviour, necessarily a standardisation and then a rejection of the unique:

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Recurrent and persistent thoughts, urges, or images that are experienced, at some time during the disturbance as intrusive and inappropriate, and that cause marked anxiety and distress. The person attempts to suppress or ignore such thoughts, impulses, or images or to neutralise them with some other thought or action.

Compulsions are defined as: 1. Repetitive behaviours (eg hand washing, ordering, checking) or mental acts (eg praying, counting, repeating words silently) performed in response to an obsession or according to rules that must be applied rigidly. The behaviours are not a result of the direct physiologic effects of a substance or a general medical condition. 2. The behaviours or mental acts are aimed at preventing or reducing distress or preventing some dreaded event or situation. However, these behaviours or mental acts either are not connected in a way that could realistically neutralise or prevent whatever they are meant to address or they are clearly excessive. These descriptors fail on two counts beyond standardisation. First, they take behaviours out of context, pathologising the everyday. Many, perhaps most, industrial tasks now largely taken over by machines were “repetitive”, “recurrent” and “persistent”; but such repetitive work is still common – it is the exploited labour of the @Amazon warehouse worker, or the till worker in a supermarket; and in a different way, the sex worker. Also, the obsession and compulsion rested not in the industrial worker but in the factory owner’s desire for profit. Second, the standardised descriptors above do not see value in the symptom. You need obsessivecompulsive behaviour for certain roles in life: cleaners, airline pilots, elite sportsmen and -women, precision engineers, dental hygienists, and so forth. The first rule of psychotherapy again might be to ask “what does the symptom want?” rather than “how can we eradicate the symptom?” “Skin-picking” and “hoarding” are new listed obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCDs) joining handwashing (fear of contamination), ordering and making lists (need for symmetry and completeness), censoring sexual fantasies and compulsive re-checking (on locks for example, for safety). Is there not a fine line between an obsessive collector (stamps, coins, matchbox labels, autographs, and so forth) and a “hoarder” for example? Psychiatry’s common mistake with obsessive symptom is to treat it with an obsessive approach such as rule-bound cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) that treats symptom and not cause; or to obsessively search for a neurological or hereditary cause. This is salt treating salt. It seems obvious that, just as a manic culture of consumption will inevitably lead to depression (“I cannot

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keep up”) or to mania (“ahead of the game”), so a culture obsessed with cleanliness and order will inevitably lead to fallout, either one cannot comply (such as lack of personal hygiene) or over-compliance (such as body dysmorphia). Here, salts and the salty imagination are used to understand and treat OCD, rather than touching the salt with mercury or the mercurial imagination (what purpose does the symptom serve; what is the cause?)

Case study: anorexia and salty obsessions A young woman came to see me accompanied by her mother. The young woman had been treated over the years for anorexia, often refusing to eat and becoming dangerously underweight and under-nourished. The overly-attentive mother kept talking on behalf of the daughter, more smothering than mothering, completely unable to understand why this condition had gripped the girl. I asked to talk to the girl on my own. Two things quickly emerged: the girl perceived the mother as controlling through smothering with love; and she perceived both menstrual blood and shit as disgusting – anything that came out of the bottom half of her body was seen as taboo. She was not interested in sex or eroticism, and feared that she could never bring up a child as she might emotionally smother it as her mother had smothered her. The father was absent. Not eating, she said, had given her a lightness of body so that she could float free of earthly stuff (seen as contaminating). She was also self-harming: cutting her wrists, but not deeply enough to cause alarm; and in ordered patterns. She showed me the faint patterns of scars. It was a form of control over her own body she said, where again she perceived her overbearing mother as controlling and could not challenge her. She feared growing up (so stopping her periods through not eating helped with the sense that she was frozen in early adolescence). Shit and menstrual blood must be controlled to maintain purity. She had been sexually abused as a girl (by her now absent father; her mother, she said was not aware of this, and it remained the girl’s darkest secret). The complex of symptoms pointed to pathologised ways in which she could both gain control over her own body (relieving her of her mother’s smothering embrace) and live out the shame of the abuse by de-sexualising her body. Over and over, she salted the symptoms, paradoxically preserving the memories of the cause in the process. I asked her if she had a favourite book or story. She said “The Princess and the Pea”. The slightest stimulus would irritate her, she had become so body-sensitive. She said she wanted to feel as if she could float just above the earth, because that too was contaminating. Naturally, in the process, she had scared away potential intimate friends. I didn’t “cure” her – the salty obsessions had already done that; but talk provided mercurial touches: insights, flashes of understanding, sparks of new meanings. What we avoided collaboratively was introducing more salt, more acrimony, into the psyche. The “cure” of course would be slow sharing of the history of her abuse with her mother, and the history of stifling and suffocation by her mother that needed to be challenged. The pattern of relationship needed to change so that she could reclaim her body. She needed to breathe her own air. I do not know what happened to her and the mother as they moved out of the area. I hope at least a door was opened for some reparation. They needed to be in therapy together.

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This girl’s “case” reminds me now that while her suffering is important to address, it is embedded again in the suffering of the world soul. Food disorders are perhaps more important than eating disorders: too much meat, fat, sugar, alcohol and salt; and too much food waste. Again, as James Hillman and Michael Ventura (1992) remind us, “We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy, and The World’s Getting Worse”. Our big crisis of salt is with diet. Producers of junk food as well as highranking chefs have radically over-salted us, rubbing salt in the wound by placing the blame upon “consumer choice”. Consumers are often children; while awareness of the links between salt and hazards such as raising blood pressure is a recent phenomenon and easily confounded by clever packaging. The world soul is over-salted. It needs not to be touched with remorse or bitterness (more salt) but with radical action (sulphur) based on radical insight (mercury). We need not preserve habits (more salting), or look back in regret trying to recover food disorders. We need a collective therapy of lifestyle and habits, a public alchemy.

Above and below the salt A psychotherapy oriented to world-soul, or a public psychology, was heralded by Alfred Adler’s community psychology (collectives have symptoms that need to be addressed collectively) that places individual symptom squarely in collective dilemmas and entanglements. This was echoed by radical psychiatrists such as R.D. Laing, who described “schizophrenia” as a logical response to illogical cultural patterns that present double-binds (public medicine says “take care of your health”, private enterprise says “life is short, enjoy yourself to excess, consume more!”). Food disorders as noted above present a classic double bind: “life is short, seek pleasure” // “comfort foods are a major source of obesity and related symptoms such as diabetes and hypertension”. Entertainment disorders trail close behind: “Watch extraordinarily violent television” // “If anything in this programme has caused concern, please phone this helpline”. As incidence of mental illness increases, particularly patients presenting to their primary and community care specialists with generalised anxiety and nonspecific depression, so we can see direct links to poverty and social injustice (Bleakley 2021). The alchemy of such symptoms rests with the sharp division between the rich and the poor: the salt of the earth suffer symptom through relative deprivation while the rich enjoy manic lifestyles and, relatively, suffer less psychological harm:

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It is well established that deprivation (a lack of money, resources and access to life opportunities) or being in a position of relative disadvantage (having significantly less resource than others) is associated with poorer health, including mental health. (www.gov.uk 2019).

This pattern of inequality, especially with mental health, is exacerbated through ethnicity. Not only do persons from the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) communities suffer greater incidence of mental health issues, they are also more likely to be referred through criminal justice routes than through medicine and healthcare pathways. It is the “salt of the earth” who carry the burden of illness and are most in need in particular of psychiatric and psychological intervention and support. “Salt of the earth” comes from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:13) where he places value on the common folk, ascribing virtues such as honesty and reliability to them. Marx ascribes virtue to their labour, that, once commodified as capital and sold on the open market for the benefit of the few, produces alienation for the worker (bad faith). “Above and below the salt” is a phrase first coined in the late 16th and early 17th centuries in England, to refer to a gathering of the noble and the poor, where a silver salt cellar was placed on the table to denote class identity. The poor sat “below” the salt to the left of the master of the house, while the privileged sat “above” the salt to the right of the master. Those above the salt say salt brings out taste; those below say salt speaks for the common tongue. We still do not have long-term psychotherapy for the masses – this role is now taken over by soap opera television helplines (“if you have been affected by any of the issues in this programme, please ring this number”). Therapeutic salt is already embedded in what we now call “popular” culture, that has a rich history and an idiosyncratic aesthetic (Rancière 2013). Such culture can be seen as a way of democratising wider culture through acts of resistance, subversion and mockery. We recognise this in folk music’s longstanding tradition of protest (Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan) and celebration of the common (sea shanties); and particularly in the birth of the blues amongst black slaves. The silver salt cellar on the table can also be read as a symbol that brings together, rather than separates, those above and below the salt. Salt acts as the aesthetico-political, turning democracy and its forms into art projects, the “making” of cultures. Cycling back to the issue of the relationships between social inequities and inequalities and health that introduced this section, we might say that the primary project of medicine, embracing psychotherapy, is political. Therapies must not salt the earth rendering them infertile (salty symptoms such as anxiety and obsession treated with equally salty, obsessive and formulaic interventions such as CBT), but rather – again – touch the salty symptoms with imagination. The psychological harm emanating from social inequities and inequalities (including issues of inclusion and disability) is so obviously only to be

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solved by major structural adjustments in society that all other therapies are rendered useless in comparison. Housing, food, a living wage, clean air and so forth are the salts of the earth that we must provide through re-distribution of wealth.

Dosage Ruland’s dictionary of alchemy says that “Nothing can be tangible without the presence of salt”. Salt brings embodiment to metaphors: particularity, granularity. But big results can be expected from small doses of salt. A pinch. Regulation is within the remit of salt, its own obsession with obsessiveness. So, salt “locks and unlocks itself ” says an alchemical text. It creates its own obsessions or fixations. James Hillman (2014) says that salt is “the sharp perception of inherent natures which brings out their individual properties so that we can understand the right dosage”. Salt purifies according to dose. Ezekiel 16:4 records that newborn babies were rubbed with salt, but this must be tender, gentle and with small dose. We have seen in particular that adding salt to salty symptoms merely irritates the issue, so that dose can be symbolic – the principle of homeopathy. Paracelsus says that salt discriminates the subtle from the gross. Salt refines, increases taste. Hillman (2014) notes that salt is “the sharp perception of inherent natures which brings out their individual properties so that we can understand the right dosage”. Salt is then the principle of dosage itself, across substances. Too much salt creates a thirst and also pickles us in fixations, cloying memories, obsessional behaviours. “How much salt?” was a literal, regular question for Roman soldiers, who were allotted money specifically to buy salt, an expensive but necessary commodity. Hence “salary”, from the Latin salarium. Our daily salty concerns with salaries and dosage are reflected in economic exchange: are you worth your salt? Contemporary life is soaked in economic imperatives, our moods dictated by the highs and lows registered through the Dow Jones: rampant and depressed markets. Economies show symptoms of cyclothymia, read psychologically – mood swings, impulse and euphoria sliding away as depression creeps in. Let us call mania, upswing, acute optimism and euphoria alchemical sulphur: the stuff of blinkered passions. The downbeat, melancholic and depressive we shall call alchemical lead. Sulphur is fire in the belly, heated arguments, hot-headed spontaneity, direct action; where lead is a heavy head, a fuzzy outlook, lack of get-up-and-go, deeply introspective, temporarily dead to the world. Alchemical salt is what sits between the sulphurous mania and the leaden depression. It is a stabilising and earthing force, a measured, or dose-related, matter of principles and realist caution – taking things with a pinch of salt.

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The economy asks for stability rather than wild mood swings. Salt placed on the tail of a bird, so the saying goes, slows it down so that we can catch it. We must control flighty desires. Salt too can be sentimental attachment – repetitions, the myth of the Eternal Return, licking old wounds, returning to the same salt lick, the alchemical iteratio, again obsessions and compulsions. Old wounds are rubbed and re-opened. As we return to old memories in the hope of catching past joys, we find that something else catches in our throats – remorse and bitterness at not handling the situation well, at missed opportunities. Repetition compulsion. Such suffering is a way of soul making. Salt is alchemy’s own therapeutic insurance against inflation. If the therapy seems to be running away with a kind of grandiosity, a supreme flow, it is certainly inflated or manic and needs a dose of salt. Alchemy itself invites salt as it is such a grandiose project. It must be brought to earth and particularised: what does this mean for here and now, for this instance? Again, the Rosarium says that the whole secret of alchemy rests with salt, or rather with dosage. Where timing is mercury’s realm, dose is salt’s realm. The irony is that the big claim of grand projects returns to the very thing that can temper that claim or bring it back to earth, to particulars, instances and specific experiences: not psychotherapy as grand scheme but case studies as particular instants. Salt again alerts us to the therapeutic instance of dosage – just how much can be said, should be said, at this time? In terms of technique, emotional, cognitive and behavioural interventions must take stock of dosage as well as timing. Where pharmaceutical dosages are crude approximations for individual profiles, dosages of listening and other therapeutic interventions (supporting, challenging, initiating catharsis, informing, question and answer) can be qualitatively tailored to the occasion. In contrast to our obsessions with dosage, in an essay on alchemical salt in Mysterium Coniunctionis Carl Jung (1970: 241) says salt “pervades all things”, and “can be found anywhere”. It is the Common, a common wealth. He goes on, in the same passage, to describe this ubiquitous substance as “the world-soul”, “an arcane substance”, “the feminine principle of Eros”, “the soul or spark of the anima mundi and “the daughter of the spiritus vegetativus of creation”. Five big mysteries in as many sentences! Dosage is ignored in a focus on ubiquity. If alchemical salt itself had been editing this passage of Jung it may have said – for alchemists equated it with the “salt of the earth” or the ordinary – too many pomposities, big ideas, or archetypal frames. Let’s get down to details – what does salt actually do in the world, specifically, and in the world of relationships and of therapies? Let’s have specifics, illustrative examples in language of the folk, the vernacular or domestic. Let’s do what Coleridge and Wordsworth attempted in writing a poetry that drew on the language of the workers they met daily on their walks and not the inflated language of High Literature, High Church or High Psychology. Salt has taxis to nobility only in drawing out the extraordinary

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in the ordinary. Our starting point is to listen to the client or patient on their terms, in their words and not to abstract out the concrete presentation into psychotherapeutic terms: transference, resistance, defence mechanisms, identity formation, and so forth. Alchemists distinguish “salt” from “common salt” by calling it “philosophical salt” or “our salt” – described as both acrid and balming, corrosive and purifying. It eats itself in solution and shows its beauty in crystallisation. It can purify, preserving and fixing, as well as corrupt. As the alchemist searches for the paradoxical oil that cannot be burned, so he searches too for the salt that cannot be dissolved. Without salt, other substances would not be present to the senses. Salt differentiates and discriminates, discloses and reveals. In salt’s eyes, the Work is in the moment and in the ordinariness of substance, a mixture of bitterness and wisdom. Salt is memory re-storied, or poetically restored as specifics. What, specifically, does the client say and do? Not how can the client be packaged into pre-set abstract “conditions”. Salt too, asks not just what we notice, but how we notice: is your psychotherapeutic ear tuned to specifics?

Salt’s vigour: a secret fire Salt shows us exactly where we are hurt as the “secret fire” of discrimination. It is not, like sulphur, a substance of outbursts, but one of constant nagging and niggling, the return of memory with conscience as an obsessive tic. Where lead is heavy and generalised, a permanent depressive cloud affording a numbing of the senses, salt brings the senses to particular concerns as noted above, sometimes corrosive and acrimonious. Lead has no focus, no hope and brings no blame, where salt is particular and self-accusatory. Where lead says “I can’t”, salt says “this is where it hurts”. Where lead demands time, patience and the bearing of weight, salt demands specificity and detail – particulars, obsessions. The leaden depressive is different from the crusty and bitter person who is salted by regret. An alchemical text says: “we have removed the blackness with salt” or treated the leaden with the particular and astringent. Salt bites into the wound and fixes in memory. It preserves. But it may preserve in a well-seasoned way. “Salt” in Elizabethan English meant “lecherous”. Shakespeare’s Iago (in Othello 111, iii, 404) says “As salt as wolves in pride” of a lecherous, hot-blooded person. Lecherous itself derives from “licking” and refers to lust, lewdness and sensuality. But let us not lose the value of the erotic charge in mis-reading “lust”. Psychotherapy is a love of soul and eros a love of life. The two are intimately connected. The bridge between them is a love of language, a lusty poetics, necessarily headstrong and risky. In language, salt’s medium is the

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aphorism or pithy saying that again is public property. The aphorism is pinched and yet brings out flavour. It challenges the over-explained. A modern master of the dark aphorism is the Romanian-born, French-adopted nihilistic philosopher E. M. Cioran, both mordant and ironic. His definition of an aphorism is “Fire without flames. Small wonder no-one tries to warm himself at it”. We take such pithy wisdom with a pinch of salt, for it is the universal applied to the particular and it may not stick. “There’s no fire without flame” says one aphorism; “yes there is” says Cioran, the fire without flame is the mordant aphorism. Salt warms as it gives flavour, turning abstractions and events into felt experiences. Aphorisms may be seen as “metaphor lite” but they can still pack a punch, as testified by their continuing use as a wisdom paralleling evidence-based practice in medicine (Levine and Bleakley 2012). In the mordant’s marriage to the erotic, perhaps we have a salty arrangement for a self-effacing psychotherapy.

Chapter 9 Transference Part I Dialectic and the chymical marriage The transfer of a feeling state – warmth, desire, affection, discontent, hate, malice – from one person to another is not straightforward. Tied in with what is said to or done with another, or what is felt in the absence of another, are feelings – both positive and negative – actually held for a different person than those towards whom the current affect is directed. This displacement of feeling for a primary person onto a secondary person is an everyday occurrence; it is part of the reason why ordinary human communication is so complex and why we have become so good at “reading through” a person’s talk and non-verbal activity to arrive at some sense of what is “really” going on. Such displacement of affect is technically called “transference” and is often unconscious or unacknowledged until recognised and brought to awareness. In a therapeutic context, this secondary person is the therapist, who “holds” the transference until it can be analysed or interpreted and potentially resolved. What is transferred is returned to the client for contemplation with the potential for insight: Client: I can’t believe that you can just sit there hour after hour looking so cold and distant, it really pisses me off! Therapist: Who are you talking to? Client: To you, of course! Therapist: No, who are you talking to? It isn’t me at all, is it? Client: Uhh … no … no … It’s my dad; he would just sit there, stony-faced and disapproving but never say what was on his mind … I began to despise him for that

The displacement process parallels the way that a metaphor works. Here, a source domain is typically concrete (“illness”) while a target domain is abstract (illness as a “journey”). The target domain lights up or increases the weight and value of the source domain. A wealth of idioms and resemblances illustrates this: “as right as rain”, “a face like thunder”, “under the weather”. The professional relationship between therapist and client is a dual metaphor, with the client and therapist at once both concrete source and abstract target. For example, the client creates a metaphorical moment where she idealises the therapist as the mother or father that she never had but wished for; while the therapist creates a metaphorical moment by analysing this transference as a concrete process, where in fact it was never https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-011

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acted out and is grounded in the abstractions of analytic technique, as a “good reading” of the situation, an interpretation. This is similar to “close reading” of a literary text: it is not “true”, but rather faithful to techniques and traditions of hermeneutics. A close reading is an aesthetic gesture, it enriches by beautifying and complexifying. It doesn’t tell you why and how thunder happens (the work of science) – it plays on “thunder” poetically, it “reads” “thunder” in an encounter as looming anger, imminent tempestuous outburst, overhanging rage. Transference – a form of both poetry and translation – is psychotherapy’s central process and also alchemy’s prime metaphor as “the chymical wedding” or “chymical marriage”, the coniunctio (figure 9.1). “Operations” on substances in alchemy (also the work of psychotherapy as non-judgemental acceptance of, and interventions on, another’s utterances and psychological states) are of two kinds: splitting apart and putting together, or analysis and synthesis (see chapter 11). The purpose of breaking things down, whether this is materially or psychologically, is to build something new that is better or innovative. This crosses, leaps, or breaks, a boundary to expand a network. Analytic process precedes synthesis that offers a deeper level of meaning and understanding through this expansion of network. The alternative is regression to the norm or to a fixed state. Entering into a psychotherapeutic contract means that you are choosing to break out of a fixed state because it is causing symptom that is a burden. Or, it may be that you crave education and change, to bring texture to your life.

Figure 9.1: The coniunctio or chymical marriage

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Feminists such as Luce Irigaray (1974/1985a, 1977/1985b) quite rightly baulk at such stereotypically gendered representations of the coniunctio that, in her view, support phallocentric world-views through emphasis upon oppositional thinking. I agree with poststructuralist feminist sentiment here and we could readily follow Irigaray’s alchemically-tinged alternative to the binary of male/female, as fire and water, that set out to “melt” “phallic solidities”. But I am sticking with the traditional representation of the coniunctio with feminist critique in mind, resisting reading the pairing as oppositional or gendered. The chymical marriage in alchemy advertises not oppositional and categorical thinking but rather Hegelian dialectic, as in the psychotherapeutic encounter (as Lacan claimed). In dialectic, there is a thesis meeting an antithesis with an outcome of a synthesis that is a new thesis at a higher level of meaning or innovation. This thesis meets an antithesis and a new synthesis is achieved, as a new thesis at a higher level of insight and so forth. For Hegel, this ever-expanding movement – that can also be described as the expansion of networks – ends in the ideal of “Spirit” or settled collective, an agreed wisdom across humanity. Karl Marx famously turned Hegel’s idealist on its head as a dialectical materialism, representing a movement through stages of collective management of capital (both material and affective) in which an equitable society is created where there is collective ownership of the means of production and where profit on capital is shared in a transparent and fair manner. For Hegel, dialectic is a movement of world soul or cosmos (“Spirit” or transcendental Form), where for Marx dialectic is a movement of human history as negotiations of power (material, coincidental forms). For Marx, human affective labour (the emotional element of relationships) would come to be shared through common decencies and sympathies, where emotional “labour” is the activity of empathising with another’s condition, while shared emotional capital is the common agreement to honour, respect and understand another’s affective states. This is a summary of the “therapeutic alliance” between client and practitioner. It is, as I will show, the heart of what the premodern alchemists called the “chymical wedding” as the dialectical movement of affect from base expression to refined, collective appreciation. It can be embodied, as we shall see, in a sensual and intimate relationship between lovers; or it can refer at the collective level to bargaining between interests such as finding a mutually beneficial trade-off between a transport system and the landscape that it traverses, mediated by the human voice (Latour 1996). Contemporary accounts of dialectic, such as Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Yrjö Engeström’s Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) have abandoned the teleological position of Hegel to adopt an open-ended, ever-expansive cycle of innovations of learning where “goals” are suspended in the manner of Jacques Derrida’s “horizon” project of democracy: a democracy-to-come. There is no end point, as Hegel

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insisted (as pure Spirit), as the “goal” is in the process of cyclical innovation. The goal is the process. Psychotherapy too could learn from this, to abandon “goals” in celebrating process and certainly to abandon notions of “personal growth” (where emotion becomes another form of capital). Therapy can be seen as a legitimate way to identify with the processes of world-soul (Whan 2014), such as the openended movement to democracy and the feeding of a collective imagination. Here, I have adopted a linguistic (and partly Lacanian) stance towards such projects in calling for the open-ended generation of metaphors as “knots” or generative conundrums. In this sense, psychotherapy’s goal is dual: relief of symptoms and education into tolerance of ambiguity. Tolerance of ambiguity can be restated as “what to do with metaphor production?” – is this relished as poetic possibility, or does one shrink from the responsibilities towards metaphors in returning to the safety of literalism and reductive instrumentalism as an overpowering value system? This can be summed up as a transference issue towards the creative process. The chymical wedding in a third incarnation is metaphorical – as the embodied but regulated conventions of the therapeutic encounter largely through talk and listening. This therapeutic transaction, read through the alchemical imagination, is the heart of this chapter and the following one. To understand its metaphorical exchanges, we must at the same time address the concrete meanings of the coniunctio configured as passionate engagement between lovers. Freud originally saw the transference process as a resistance to therapy rather than a facilitation of the work. Transference of affect from the client was seen as obstructive to the work of interpretation. However, Freud soon saw that transference was the key to the work and had to be held by the therapist rather than analysed away as a form of resistance. The transference process forms an alchemical vessel in which the client’s unresolved feeling states for another could be projected onto the therapist, acting as a “holding” alembic or vessel and could simmer in this vessel during the analysis as the client came to a realisation about the origins of the transferred affect. Thus, the affect is carefully cooked by the therapist in the analytic container as an alchemical effect; and is distilled and dripped back slowly (usually) to the client as interpretation of the transference. Lacan returned to Freud’s early notion of transference as resistance and suggested that transference acts in both a positive and negative way simultaneously. Where the therapist holds the transference, this generates a good deal of capital in the Symbolic realm of language, particularly through tropes such as metaphor. The therapeutic language systems (the therapist’s specialist psychological lingo) provide a framework of knowledge whereby the utterances of the client can be made sense of. Lacan suggested that in the linguistic Symbolic register this process is largely free from affect, but is cognitive and compulsive, as a repeated desire to

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understand what is going on. In the Imaginary register in contrast, the realm of ego identities coloured by fantasies and wishes, the transference process is laced with affect, often projection of negative affect on to the therapist by the client such as blame, resentment and anger. This is largely unconscious, but is easily “read” by an insightful therapist through aggressivity in images from fantasy content related to a wish for sharply-defined ego states. The Real for Lacan – a point of reference for both the Symbolic and Imaginary realms – is the wished-for “natural” state (see chapter 8 on “green sulphur”) that is beyond the cultural human and is then fantasised as a place of innocence, incorruptible. This is the ideal that clients must learn is a yearning and not a reality. We must forever live with neuroses, as Freud suggested, but we can get perspectives on our lives that allow creative living within the confines of neurotic fault-lines. Without neuroses, life would have no colour or texture; but if neuroses become pressing or burdensome (symptoms) then we seek relief. Psychological “wellbeing” is like democracy – for progress, sacrifices and bargaining are essential. But Lacan’s separation of the two kinds of transference is surely too simplistic: one cognitive and the other affective. They must interpenetrate. What bridges the two forms – transference as rationalisation and transference as catharsis – is the embodied metaphor that expresses both at once, where catharsis is the necessary prelude to rational insight. Alchemy’s bounty of such metaphors – green lions, sweating kings, walking into flames, moon trees, stoking furnaces, the king devouring his children and so forth – are surely far richer than our own psychological stock and its hick metaphors: anxiety “laced” with depression, a “dark cloak” of anxiety, the “sublimation” of want, emotional “exhaustion”, “burning” with desire, “cloaked” feelings, “burned out”, “ashen” and so forth. This approach through metaphor makes the therapeutic encounter an aesthetic or figurative one, where quality and value are central to the process. In turn, this requires a refined understanding and artistic application of “catharsis” (from the Greek katharsis referring originally to the audience’s “cleansing” through emotional release in early Greek theatre, particularly tragedy). The psychologist and therapist John Heron (1988) devoted much of his working life to an exposition of catharsis, noting how fundamental contradictions in life provide a ground for vulnerability, distress and resultant emotional lability, where we constantly seek to repair, reinvent, re-live, as we juggle identities. We gain nourishment from care, love and identification with valued others; but we also constantly juggle shifting affect and deal with disappointment as much as elation. In the previous chapter, I drew on D.H. Lawrence’s account of the first love between Ursula Brangwen, only 16, and the older Anton Skrebensky, a newly-recruited soldier. Lawrence draws on metaphors of salt to describe how Ursula – identifying with the moon – becomes temporarily possessed of a power she cannot

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understand that sucks the soul from Skrebensky and leaves him in her power. Ursula is just beginning to find her identity as a woman. Lawrence (1942: 249) describes how in passing from child to young adult “the cloud of self-responsibility gathered upon her … that she must go somewhere, she must become something. And she was afraid, troubled”. The passage shows both joy and burden. Identity is in flux. Lawrence’s idiosyncratic style is one of intimate exploration of the contradictions that make up our feelings: in encounters, his characters swing from wildly exuberant joy, passion and care to dark hatred, fear and unpredictable impulse. For this reason alone, as a biographer of the tensions of affect, he is a source of learning for psychotherapists beyond dry technical manuals. To understand the woman’s psyche, we can turn to poets such as Louise Glück and Anne Carson, for Lawrence sketches (and caricatures) women’s emotional flux without direct knowledge. In meditations upon the contradictory nature of the flow of affect, the alchemical imagination is helpful, because the alchemical Work is not about ideals, but rather the messy realities of experimental procedures on substances purely in order to move beyond current confines – to innovate and push through the boundaries one previously marked, in constant expansion and experimentation. Therapists should not work with others until they have personally been in therapy and then in ongoing supervision where their own cathartic experiences are primary grounds for learning. Catharsis can range from light relief (nervous laughter relating to embarrassment) to deep release (crying, shaking, wailing) and of course is subject to cultural regulation and shaping. The alchemists provided a metaphorical vocabulary for human catharsis through the transmutations of matter subjected to heat, dissolution, distillation, combinations and so forth. Thus, stones come to “sweat”, liquids “boil”, substances “stink”, fires “rage”, metals “transmute”, airs are “oppressive” and so forth. Alchemists teach analysts about a material imagination and the embodiment of metaphor central to Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) influential work on embodied metaphors that we “live by”: metaphors as styles of life, ways of being and bodily/affective expressions. It should be noted that the embodiment of metaphor model has been challenged on the grounds that metaphors still “work” when they are pure abstractions (Kompa 2017). Kompa calls embodied metaphors a “myth”, claiming that metaphors afford a conceptual and cognitive apparatus for deeper thinking, where we better appreciate conceptual notions through metaphor. However, Kompa confuses conceptualisation about metaphor with metaphor itself. He suggests for example that a metaphor such as “the tail is wagging the dog” cannot be embodied as we are not dogs. But this literalises the tail and the dog, rather than making them concrete. As James Hillman (1975b: 137) suggests, although “The body life is always concrete, it is not necessarily literal”. The physicality and sensuality of the dog and its

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tail are readily felt, and isn’t this the basis to empathy – that it has a felt-sense component? Now here is a central key to understanding the alchemical imagination, that to the newcomer to this field of study looks like so much fantastical gobbledegook. First, alchemical texts, with their repeated motifs such as green lions devouring the sun, are like Homeric epics that rely on repetition of coded phrases such as “wine dark sea” to provide a collapsed punctuation in the narrative where singer and audience both take a breath. These repeated motifs are like choruses in songs, allowing space for breath between verses. Second, alchemy relies on its exuberant sensuality to generate key metaphors that are memorable, engaging an embodied imagination, such as the “thief ” of “red sulphur” discussed in chapter 6. Psychologically, we translate this as “impulse” and “compulsion” and this embraces a host of embodied affective metaphors such as “hot headed”, “hot blooded” and “rash”. Such alchemical metaphors carry over into modern literature. Here, again, is D.H. Lawrence (1942: 292) describing Ursula Brangwen’s awakening: “her sexual life flamed into a kind of disease within her”. In contrast, in saying goodbye to her first “flame” Anton Skrebensky at the railway station as he goes back to his army post, she felt “the cold imperturbability of spirit” and a kind of leaden deadness (ibid.: 291). Lawrence could have described her rising passions as “warm” or “simmering”, but no, they “flame”. We saw from chapter 5 that there are many kinds and grades of fire in alchemy (“a fire that dries linen” and so forth) and these descriptors provide a metaphorical vocabulary for both symptom recognition and treatment in psychotherapeutic work. Returning to the link between the transference, the alchemical coniunctio and dialectical process, I mentioned above the contemporary examples of Hegelian dialectic Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT). In ANT, meaningful interactions between persons, objects and symbols (all “actors”) create new networks (innovation) or expand existing networks to deepen meanings. A network is a flow of information across “actors”, such as persons using artefacts (for example computers) and linguistic codes (for example, metaphors) for innovation. Persons, artefacts and symbols are necessarily historically situated and culturally-sensitive. Any network that does not innovate will crystallise or collapse. CHAT repeats this model, focusing on how “translation” actually occurs and can be facilitated across differing networks to expand a “system”. An expansive system is necessarily open, complex and adaptive, making leaps towards greater complexity as the system is transformed through contact with other systems. Systems can falter or fail if they fall into chaos (over-complex) or if they fall away to minimal complexity to transform into a closed, linear system reliant entirely on feedback mechanisms. A closed system is predictable but not innovative. The psychotherapeutic encounter is necessarily open, dynamic and complex

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and works best at maximum complexity this side of chaos. Such systems engage persons, artefacts and languages/symbols in exploratory and innovative or creative ways. Reductive forms of mental health therapy such as short-term cognitive-behavioural methods and pharmaceutical treatments are bound by their inability to generate innovation. They are rules-based, protocols-based or chemically-limited and metaphor-lite. Complex systems of psychotherapy such as analytic approaches, following the expansive models of ANT and CHAT above, are metaphor hotbeds. Embodied metaphor is the linguistic/semiotic “pharmaceutical” of analytic approaches but has greater lability than material drugs. Key to the work of such metaphors is that they are closely tied with emotional or affective life as an expression of interacting bodies. Passions, libidinal flow and the education of deep interest (attentions) are key to therapeutic engagements. And the core process here is the transference effect, described early in Freud’s career as analyst with his patient “Dora” in 1901. She cut off analysis prematurely in Freud’s opinion, and in hindsight he saw that she had transferred emotional feelings to him as a father figure. To recap, in psychotherapy transference is classically described as the transfer of feelings associated with persons or activities in a client’s life (now or in the past) on to the therapist. Thus, positive transference occurs where a patient comes to idealise the therapist or place her on a pedestal. Negative transference involves the client or patient (irrationally) blaming the therapist for something the latter has not done, or expressing negative feelings towards the therapist that are actually meant for somebody else (or a social group, an object, or an ideology). Positive transference can often involve charged, erotic or sexual feelings from the client towards the therapist. Clients often bring gifts for the therapist and these can be read symbolically as representatives of transference. Where negative transference (necessary for resolving the therapeutic encounter) gets intense, the client may threaten to cut off sessions with the therapist. Transferences are particularly intense if the therapist reminds the client of a significant person in her life and there is unresolved emotional material existing in the client’s relationship with this person. Where feelings centred on transference are stirred, they must, alchemically, be allowed to mature and be expressed as work of distillation. The client does not “really” fall in love with, or despise, the therapist and does not “really” idealise or resent her, but rather the eros, desire or libido raised in the therapeutic encounter embraces the flame, arousing positive or negative passions. There is genuine enthusiasm, often from a previous melancholic position, where catharsis or release of feelings leads to insight. Where the transference is fully resolved, the therapeutic relationship returns to co-existence of trust amongst two people. The therapy is finished at this point in psychoanalytic tradition.

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Clients will express resistance towards interpretations or other interventions made by the therapist. This is a natural part of the analytic process. Resistances in alchemy are shown by lack of transformation in substances beneficial to the overall Work. Again, we are in the territory of embodied metaphor, where a resistance is always concrete, but not necessarily literal. In resisting a psychotherapist’s interpretation or insight, for example, the client may be metaphorically deflecting, refusing, denying, trivialising, resisting, reformulating and so forth what the therapist is suggesting because facing up to the insight is painful or embarrassing. The awkward point of such therapy is where the transference process itself is resisted by the client who sees it as a therapeutic trap, a folly, a danger and so forth. Thus, as the transference is managed, so is resistance through careful exchanges of metaphor: Client: “you remind me of my father but he was more elegant and insightful”. Therapist: “what do you mean by elegance?” Client: “sharp-witted; and I see you as dull in comparison” Therapist: “what would your father say to you if he were here now?” Client: bursts into tears

Transference of feelings or affect is central to any encounter, such as a doctor-patient or healthcare practitioner-patient relationship, however brief. At its core is trust. Trust is a complex phenomenon that resists easy definition, but it is easily recognisable, or rather its absence is impossible to miss. Trust can be seen as a “soft,” “tender-minded,” optimistic condition fighting for survival in a “hard,” “tough-minded,” or jaundiced world that is traditionally patriarchal, individualistic and resistant to encouraging democratic, collaborative habits as it socialises its young into hierarchical structures, or eats them whole. Yet trust is a key mental health intervention as it encourages authentic democracy, or collaborative habits. Increases in trust lead to greater tolerance of uncertainty, key to delivering social justice agendas, addressing links between social inequalities and compromised physical and mental health. Where lack of trust is associated with cynicism in people, increasing trust loosens dependence upon suffocating control mechanisms. This allows us to take on the moral concerns and uncertainties of an adulthood that also promises emotional warmth, guidance, support and improved communication with clients. Psychotherapy must embrace trust as its matrix. Confounding the transference is counter-transference from therapist to client. Unresolved issues on the therapist’s part (for example, the client reminds her of a person with whom she has or has had issues) tangle with the resolution of the transference for the client. The therapist may have sensual or erotic feelings towards the client that he or she fails to analyse in the context of the professional and ethical standards of the encounter (see for example Allen Wheelis’ (1988)

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The Doctor of Desire for an animated account of the possible entanglements of botched counter-transferential affect). Such counter-transference should be taken to supervision. In alchemical terms, the Work here would be spoiled. The Library will be consulted, the Laboratory cleaned and re-set.

The resurrected body Let us return to James Hillman’s (1975b: 137) suggestion that although “The body life is always concrete, it is not necessarily literal”. This is a compact way of saying that the body speaks through embodied or concrete metaphors (“tears of joy”, “she couldn’t stomach him”, “muscle memory” – all reference concrete matter but remain metaphorical and then not literal). Bodies in action (behaviour) are bundles of metaphors, necessarily embodied. The body symptomises in ways that catch us by surprise or bamboozle us. Each body is also inscribed by its culture and its historical moment, concretely but not literally: 19th century “women hysterics”, 1950s “men don’t cry”, the noughties “snowflake” generation. Often, cultural inscriptions put the body to sleep through, for example, the gender stereotypes expressed above and further inscriptions have to be suffered before the body reawakens or resurrects. The resurrected, consciously inscribed body is currently the fashionable body: pierced, branded, tattooed, the object of cosmetic surgery, the product of the gymnasium. This body is also the primary object of contemporary art: eroticised, fetishised, commodified, pathologised: “Grimness and gore have lately become the familiar motifs of cutting-edge art” observed the art critic Adrian Searle (1996) nearly two decades ago. Bodies at the edge and pushed to their limits: and bodies displayed at the limits of tolerance, often through what itself has been marginalised – freak shows, fringe theatre and performance art. From a functional, medical psychotherapeutic perspective (whose goals are well-being and normalising), body mutilations such as self-harming – common amongst young anorexics – offers a symptom profile to be cured through eradication. This, rather than asking “what does the symptom want?” The body artist Orlan (https://www.orlan.net/) – a Professor of Art at the School of Fine Arts in Dijon – chose to film plastic surgery performed on her own body as the ultimate offering in somatic art. She has had implant surgery on her temples (two small horns), and her chin, eyelids and lips have been injected and moulded in a conscious echo of other works of art such as Botticelli’s “Venus”. She gradually created an otherworldly being out of her own physical substance, that she does not see as mutilation, but mutation. Central to her questioning is the confounding of patriarchal ideals of feminine beauty. Her body and self-presentation are her choices.

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The self-mutilating anorexic who refuses food so that she can shape her body like a wafer and feel no sense of weight or internal distension, makes dozens of incisions on her arms with a razor blade as ritual scarification. To the medical and psychotherapeutic community, she is clearly a suitable case for treatment. But can we read the scarification and the self-starving as aesthetic or religious statements, as ritual denials of the normalising forces of culture? Can we read these “symptoms” as we would read an artwork, not as pathologised and in need of cure, but as statements inviting appreciation, and then questions of meaning and understanding? For this, we would have to push through the culturally adapted medical response that health and well-being, characterised in terms of development and improvement, are automatically good, valuable and desirable. Second, we would have to challenge the conventional psychological response that normality and adjustment – a strong ego – are automatically good, valuable and desirable. Further, we would have to push beyond the conventional realms of aesthetics in art that beauty is automatically good and desirable, to the world of the sublime, whose business is extremes and extremities that challenge conventions of the good, valuable and desirable. It is in the realm of the sublime rather than the beautiful (see the following chapter 10 for an account of distinctions between the two) that extreme performance art, and movements of the psyche in psychotherapy, sit. This applies to psychotherapy at the personal (“eating disorders”) and cultural (“food disorders”) levels. In this realm of the sublime sits alchemy with its strange iconography and cryptic instructions, a premodern performance art inviting analysis but also acting as a setting in which the performances of psychotherapy may be understood and expanded. The sublime expresses in depth – beyond the beautiful as both a terrible or “awe-full” beauty – as well as the highest pinnacle of beauty. The sublime represents the aesthetics of the body – sense impressions – at its limits: dis-torted, distended, dis-tressed. Dis is the Roman god of the Underworld (Greek Hades), once associated particularly with the fertility of soil and the under-earth’s gifts of mineral wealth. “Dis” is the most used prefix (acting as a metaphor) to shift register from the worldly to that which has slipped from the world into symptom: disguise, dis-tort, dis-regard. In the tradition of the alchemical imagination that distorts and challenges conventions, the cutting edge of art some time ago abandoned preoccupations with formal aesthetics and ideals of beauty and took up an engagement with the sublime – whatever is in the shadow or penumbra of the sensible and of beauty. Psychotherapy, however, is still pondering whether or not questions of aesthetics have a legitimate place in its theories and practices in an age of wholesale resort to technical or instrumental, short-term therapies based on fuzzy neuroscience involving brain scan data. Further, psychotherapy now treats symptoms of the sublime

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rather than learning from it as Freud’s pioneering work did. It is the alchemical imagination that can bring psychotherapy into the shadows of beauty and the realm of the sublime. Meanwhile people, especially the young, will continue to symptomise in ways that in other cultures or other periods of history may well be read as attempts at religious or spiritual initiation, or as attempts to configure one’s identity aesthetically rather than in a utilitarian way, such as defining ourselves by how much we earn or how much status we have acquired in a profession. Both the spiritual and the aesthetic configurations, with the literal inscriptions such as scarification or piercings, create value in the eyes of the participants and question normative ideas and practices of beauty through an introduction of the sublime. Is the anorexic creating the angelic body – so light that it floats; so sensitive that anything ingested feels like dead weight; so exteriorised that the interior must be opened to air, light and space; so disgusted with its raw meatiness that it must be blanched, starved of colour? The body then slips its earthly chains to achieve the purity of the angelic, in a continued refusal of what is seen, or rather tasted, as poisonous and disgusting – matter itself. The anorectic refusal of ground in a move entirely to Spirit and transcendence then cleanses the body of Soul, or depth and its metaphorical horde. Emergency treatments (hospitalisation, feeding tubes) provide such grounding but in a rather brutal way that ignores any psychological dimensions to anorexia. Surely, we can learn something about “eating disorders” and “body dysmorphia” from the radical ways in which body-based performance artists feed their own desires? Orlan promotes herself as having achieved sainthood through the sufferings of her body, and so to have resurrected the body – this is familiar from practices worldwide of ascetics, yogins, fakirs and shamans. She has died to mundanity and her post-modern relics – bits of her flesh preserved in formalin – are sold for large quantities of money as art objects to believers/collectors. There is no conclusion implied in these remarks other than noting that radical body artists have exquisite control over their bodies that differs from the anorexic, whose psychological desires overtake the bodily frame that should house those desires. The contemporary anorexic is almost certainly influenced by not just ideal models of women’s bodies, but now by social media sites that encourage eating disorders as a way of taking control of one’s life. But this is misplaced if it is the social media site that actually retains control. Starving oneself should offer a means of control – and indeed it does rid the girl of menstruation – but what is necessary therapeutically is to know the source of the need for such tight control. It may be a controlling or over-loving mother. It may be that food itself has become the controlling Mother, so that we have a food disorder rather than an eating disorder. Alchemically, there is an abundance of fiery sulphur at work burning out the body

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and person. While paying close attention to what the symptom wants in each individual case, a therapist can inform herself by absorption in the contemporary alchemy of body performance art, where the body is the alchemical vessel, because eating disorders themselves are forms of performance art that are mis-placed, misdirected or lack an audience other than other persons with eating issues. The 1996 obituaries marking the untimely death of one of our leading UK artists Helen Chadwick (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/helen-chadwick-2253) remind us that she “was one of the first British artists to develop what has now become an almost obsessional preoccupation with the human body as a means of exploring identity” (The Times 19/03/96). Other tributes reiterate this concern: “Her work focused on the body; on sexuality, disease and unease, growth and decay” (Searle 1996). Chadwick, “from the mid-Seventies tapped into her own physical form to extend and dissolve accepted limits of physical and mental existence” (Buck 1996); and “In her exuberant, wild, open imagining of sex, she blazoned all manner of unmentionable parts with a kind of smiling pleasure in the peculiar character of desire and the sheer lumpy, bloody fleshiness of flesh” (Warner 1996). Shifting from the body beautiful to the body sublime Chadwick disturbed expectations by using animal flesh and innards to imply the human body and its sexuality, stressing the peculiar eroticism of the inner body, of soft tissue (Chadwick 1994). A touring exhibition – “Art, HIV and You” – offered Barton Benes’ (https:// visualaids.org/artists/barton-lidice-bene) assemblage of 144 red AIDS charity ribbons coated with the ashes of a recently dead HIV-positive woman prostitute and drug addict. Benes, HIV positive himself, filled plastic water pistols with his own blood and caged them behind chicken wire and glass. Blood squirts innocuously/dangerously in a thin stream from each nozzle. Ron Athey (www.ronathey.org), also an HIV-positive performance artist working with live audiences, stabs his head with needles, and hangs from a meat hook. Many tribal cultures involve such body piercing and the suffering of extreme pain through mutilation or scarification in their rituals. An article in Time Out (17– 24 April 1996) on access to “extreme activities” advertises “body piercing excursions”, where you might “have the opportunity to fish hook yourself all over, thrust skewers through your tongue and cheeks” via participation in the Malaysian religious festival of Thaipusam! No tongue-in-cheek offer, but the promise of a skewered cheek or tongue. The performance artist Karen Finlay (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Fin ley) smears her naked body with chocolate, and then explains that this act is inspired through hearing of the discovery of a murdered 16-year-old girl who was smeared with her own faeces and dumped in a plastic sack. In another performance, Finlay expressed breast milk onto black velvet as a spoof on (male-dominated) “action painting”. A parody of striptease reverses this process, so that Finley

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begins naked except for shoes and hat, and erotically puts on her clothes until fully dressed. A review describes her feminist, body based, performance art as expressing “what women really want, as opposed to the idea that what women need is caring, sharing and aromatherapy”. What Mona Hatoum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Hatoum) wanted was to film an endoscopic exploration of her body’s interior, set to a soundtrack of sucking and gurgling intestine. In a scathing attack on the interest in the body and cultural theory in the arts, Cunningham (1996: 15) suggests that “Our insistent bodilessness is a necessary consequence of secularism”. Yet the examples above seem to challenge this view. To offer the body as ultimate signifier, in the way that these artists do, seems less a search for personal identity and represents more an interest in the sublime and its associations with spirituality as a limit phenomenon – the awe-fulness of pleasure, and beauty as terrorising. Such a fashion may actually be deeply engaged with the sacred as the following chapter explores in more detail. Each of these performance artists, again, shows exquisite control over the body, so that we cannot claim that their art is a symptom of a bodily “disorder”. Again, in what sense is the person with an eating issue subject to a disordered body in which sublimation of desire has not led to distillation of psychological insight, as it has with body-based artists? The suggestion here is that the therapeutic encounter can provide the container in which symptoms are re-imagined as aesthetic performance, so that the performer can retain control of the performance (and it is not in the hands of the smothering puppeteer-mother or purely functional healthcare services). The re-inscribed body, that is the body resurrected (or possibly a body exhumed) and not a body ascended, is one that has been (literally) terrorised, affected, shaken to its roots by the immensities of particular life events, or scrutinised beyond conventional limits. This resurrected body is not then the literal body, the first-born flesh, but the lateral body, the coming body, the embodiment of desire: “Literal meanings are spirits solidified into matter … like … stone maidens, Caryatids”, suggests Norman O. Brown (1966: 223), perhaps the most astute of cultural post-Freudians. The resurrected body is not “passion petrified” in Al Lingis’s term (1983: 67), but matter eroticised. Literalism kills the body, suggest Brown (1966: 223), but “The incarnation of symbols gives us a new heart, a heart for the first time human, a heart for the first time, or is it the second time, made of flesh”. This resurrected body is, for Brown, a body conscious of spirit, a body inspired, that is realised or made by spirit; a body rediscovered through the word, a poetic body: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will give you a heart of flesh” (II Corinthians III, 7). Hillman (1975a: 174) calls this “a subtle body – a fantasy system of complexes, symptoms, tastes, influ-

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ences and relations, zones of delight, pathologized images, trapped insights … (where) concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors” (my emphasis). The sublime moment is then not a sublimation (spirit ascending) but a de-sublimation (flesh inspired, body on fire, stuff realising its nature through passion; the body mapped, pocked and etched by its fantasies), the sulphuric body, leading to the experience of “the body here and now, as an eternal reality” (Brown 1966: 214). This is the body recovered in love, or resurrected through the erotic imagination. Brown calls this “divinity in the body”. It is a movement “as psychoanalysis might say, from the abstractions of sublimation to the reality of the body”, as “incarnation not sublimation” (ibid.: 221– 2). This is not a body inhabited by pale ghosts, a sex-negative body in Wilhelm Reich’s term, but a winged body whose bloody self-presentation is poetic and sexy, and a body that concretely (but not literally) draws breath. Metaphors of course can “draw” breath in a second sense, managing to articulate what is not visible. These attempts to resurrect or reinscribe the body may be more attempts to exhume a sleeping body, a sleeping giant, a sublime body that is neither signifier, signified nor self-signifying and moves in a space beyond cultural inscription. Nancy (1994: 24) describes such a “corpus” as “given”, prior to subject and discourse. Such a body “has the same structure as spirit, but it has that structure without presupposing itself as the reason for the structure”. Is this a body without theories – perhaps Artaud’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs”? Is this a good definition for an embodied metaphor – a de-territorialised body that is nomadic rather than settled; an alchemical body in working order? Certainly, there is one place and time where and when the simultaneous gravity and levity of such a body is felt – at the timeless, unbounded, nomadic and sublime moment of orgasm. Where the alchemists describe the coniunctio or successful fusing of opposites, and psychoanalysts describe the resolution of the transference, is this not the equivalent of post-coital reverie? The first-born body is resurrected and inscribed through an erotic imagination – indeed through what Susan Sontag, bravely, in 1967 called the “pornographic imagination”. First, let us nip in the bud knee-jerk responses to that word “pornography” which originally refers to sacred prostitution. When we talk of “pornography” that is unacceptable, involving degradation or manipulation of women for example, what we mean, according to James Hillman (1995) is “obscenity”, meaning “senseless” or “out of the senses”. This kind of obscenity extends to senseless violence, negation of the aesthetic, ugly town planning, dull utilitarianism and so forth. Sontag (1983: 205 – 33), in discriminating between kinds of pornography, articulates a pornographic imagination that is legitimate for art, as it aims for “psychic dislocation” in the viewer through treatment of “extreme states of human feeling and consciousness”. The pornographic imagination as Sontag describes it is not

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exploitative, nor does it point a sexual deficiency or lack, but celebrates the possible in desire through “the voluptuous yearning for the extension of one’s consciousness”. Expression of this erotic imagination is also not a secular indulgence, but rather offers a spiritual risk and involves one in “the dark and complex vision of sexuality that is far removed from the hopeful view sponsored by American Freudianism and liberal culture”, by which she means the orthodoxies of wellbeing and social adjustment. For Sontag, sexuality is necessarily tortuous and moves so often beyond beauty into the sublime. Here, Sontag fully recognises the moral obligations we bare in the maintenance of social order through “humane contact with other persons” where erotic and sexual encounters are consensual. Public engagement with art is taken as consensual if somebody chooses to visit an exhibition or attend a performance. The imagination of the artist should not be stifled, where her purpose is not so much to entertain, but to make complex, refuse, confuse, raise difficulties and questions, and shock sensibilities: “one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there” (ibid.: 212). Artists are “frontierspersons”. By and large, such a challenging and dangerous task has been abandoned by mainstream therapy, where the therapist now attempts to cure or normalise those who would wish to take such forays within utilitarian and unimaginative frameworks. Therapists would usually not describe themselves as artists. Art would criticise psychotherapy for its insistence upon “adjustment”, and for its general cultural timidity. Imagine, however, the frisson around Freud’s early psychoanalytic sessions in uptight middle-class Vienna; or Sabina Spielrein’s sessions as one of the trailblazing women psychoanalysts in Switzerland and Russia in the early 20th century. These were performances, ground-breaking forms of art. Indeed, Freud bleeds the performance of analysis into his case studies and wider writing that is literary, never mundane. Freud, already noted, did not win a Nobel Prize for Science, but rather the Goethe Prize for Literature. As contemporary art, rather than psychotherapy, engages the sublime, we might characterise such engagement by Sontag’s term “spiritual risk”. Sontag, who as long ago as 1966 in her well-known polemic Against Interpretation, suggested that “in place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art”. Since then, an erotics of art has not just blossomed, but exploded. Perhaps the mainstream of depth psychotherapy could consider that its fascination with interpretation may well be occluding the potential value of an aesthetic/erotic imagination; and we do not need therapy on imagination, but through imagination. In this respect we can learn much from alchemy, particularly the 16th century Rosarium discussed in the next section.

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Bodies in the Rose Garden The illustrations in figures 9.2– 9.7 constitute a part of the series that constitute the pictorial side of the Rosarium Philosophorum (Frankfurt 1550, revised in the Basel text of 1593). They will be familiar to those who know Jung’s (CW 16, 1966) classic work on the transference. An alternative sequence to the series is given in Fabricius (1989). Let us interrogate Jung’s psychological reading, which avoids appreciation of the Rosarium as a western Tantric text – plain enough from these illustrations. The couple meet (figure 9.2), touching with their left hands rather than their right – a sign of the left-handed or Tantric path. They disrobe (figure 9.3) and enter the bath (figure 9.4) blessed by the descending dove. They make love (figure 9.5) and disengage (figure 9.6) where they have grown wings. In figure 9.7 they have conjoined and the child of their marriage ascends in figure 9.8, returning as a refreshing rain in figure 9.9 that awakes the “hermaphrodite” who is shown in figure 9.10 as the lunar light – standing on the moon while next to them is the moon tree with its 13 fruits or lunar months. I use “hermaphrodite” guardedly as it is a politically incorrect term, where “intersex” is preferred, but I am drawing on the term as used by Early Modern alchemists.

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From the positions of the couple’s legs, we see that disengagement takes place between figure 9.5 (coitus) and figure 9.6 (fermentatio), where in the latter there is clearly tension release after sex – the faces and bodies of both partners are relaxed and they tenderly touch. The angelic wings offer a marvellous image of the afterglow following orgasm. In pre-political correctness film sex, this is where the couple shares a cigarette; in tantric sex, this is where the couple feel the ferment of post-coital reverie. Visionary capacity expands, and the couple may feel as one, reborn within a common body in a sublime moment, creating the alchemical vessel known as the “double pelican” (figure 9.11) in which circulation of energies and images between the couple is guaranteed. The single pelican (figure 9.12) is based on the form of a mother pelican pecking her own breast in order to raise blood from her body to feed her young, a symbol of introverted self-sacrifice. The single pelican vessel works as a sublimating flask, in which the operation is contained wholly within the one vessel or this is what Jung refers to as “individuation”, the solo proc-

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ess. The double pelican is a vessel that offers circulation between flasks or persons, the collaborative process.

Figure 9.11: The Double Pelican

Figure 9.12: The Single Pelican

In the partnership of the double pelican, one sacrifices to the other, to create a third – the visionary relationship, the metaphor-producing marriage. In psychotherapy this is de-literalised, as the point of resolution of the transference. The relationship is then Other, constituted by the mourning of the deaths of individuality on both sides of the partnership. In a double sacrifice, a common vessel is created through which energies circulate or are exchanged in lovemaking, tangibly and nonverbally as sexual fluids, sweat, pheromones and electrical phenomena at

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the skin surface and through conversation and sharing of images and ideas. In therapy, the eros is not acted out or literalised but charges the transference process where the effect is concrete change based on catharsis and subsequent insight. So, the couple undress, bathe, make love, share post coital reverie becoming as one body in a shared experience and then die to that experience, to resurrect through the common body of shared relationship – the erotically sublime. What the Rose Garden series suggests, as a Tantric text, is that actual sex, bodily awareness and the abandonment of individuality to the commonly felt and commonly made relationship can become sacred endeavours, producing a “child” of the shared imagination arising from desire, that must “rise” to be appreciated and must be drawn back into the bodies to be further experienced. This “child” can be taken as the birth of creative impulse and expression, out of the consciously sacred sexual act; as well as it can be taken as a child of a conjunction of imaginations in a therapeutic container, charged by eros but not literalised or acted-out. A 16th century alchemical text notes that, It is the body which retains the soul, and the soul can show its power only when it is united to the body. Therefore when the artist sees the white soul arise he should join it to its body in the same instant, for no soul can be retained without its body … The body is stronger than soul or spirit, and if they are to be retained it must be by means of the body. The body is the form, and the ferment, and the Tincture of which the sages are in search. (Petrus Bonus, in Nicholl 1980: 127).

We can read this Renaissance passage in two modern ways: first, images gained from the reveries of sex should be drawn back into the body in concrete ways, for example as preparing the ground for creative work such as poetry; second, in the therapeutic chymical marriage of the transference, images are drawn back into the embodied metaphors that constitute the therapist’s interpretations and the client’s emotional flux and subsequent insights. I will illustrate this drawing on the poetry of John Donne. The English poet Donne, in “Philosophy of Love” (1612), says “spirit doth inhere in the body” – or, as Donne’s poetry testifies all too well, metaphors are embodied. I take “spirit” to be Shakespeare’s Ariel from The Tempest, a creative imagination or intelligence in whose hand language erupts as a “rose garden” beyond the confines of the ordinary. Ariel says: “I come / To answer thy best pleasure, be’t to fly / To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride / On the curled cloud”. Here are recurring alchemical images (“to dive into the fire”) and alliterative wonders (“curled cloud”), the latter the product of the alchemical Work. John Donne continues: “blood labours to beget / Spirits”; indeed, the spirits are “the thin and active part of the blood” (Donne 1971, Sermons 11, 261– 2). The spirits are not mental, cognitive, “airy-fairy” but of blood, a life source, bodily.

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Where Bonus generalises the body as the secret alchemical Tincture, Donne focuses us upon the Renaissance convention that the spirit “inheres in the body”, again specifically in the blood. Jung (1966: para 398) notes that the Tincture is sometimes referred to as “a spiritual blood”. A 17th-century alchemist, John Pordage, in a letter to his sorora mystica, or Sister in the Work, Jane Leade, gives explicit location for the tincture of the alchemical work: This sacred furnace … this secret furnace, is the place, the matrix or womb, and the centre from which the divine Tincture flows forth from its source and origin. Of the place or abode where the tincture has its home and dwelling I need not remind you, nor name its name, but I exhort you only to knock at the foundation. Solomon tells us in his Song that its inner dwelling is not far from the navel, which resembles a round goblet filled with the sacred liquor of the pure Tincture” (in Jung, ibid.: para 507).

This could not be more explicit. It is a celebration of menstruation. Just what does Solomon tell us in the Song of Songs, that wonderful liquid love poem and celebration of eroticism denying the Old Testament’s normally desiccative, patriarchal morality? The Song refers to “navel” as a round goblet filled with sacred wine: “Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor” (7:2). This is the “navel” of the Queen of Sheba that Solomon compliments. In their ground-breaking work on the power of menstruation, Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove (1978: 20) suggest a “navel” is a modesty and that the writer is referencing to “pudendum”, “vulva” or “cunt”. Recall what Pordage sensibly translates for us – that the source of the Tincture is not literally the navel but “not far from the navel”. The Tincture is neither a unicorn in a Grove, nor an elaborate Koan, but entirely of the body, sexually sited and cited as sexual, not a secret but about secretion. The sublime moment for Donne is the infusion of the spirit into the sexual body, not the escape from bodily desire into abstract idea. Donne describes lovers “whom love’s subliming fire invades” (Valediction: of the Booke), and in the “Extasie”: “To our bodies turn wee then, that so / Weake men on love revealed may looke; / Love’s mysteries in soules do grow, / But yet the body in his booke”. Thus, suggests Nicholl (1980: 182), Donne “draws down spiritual meanings into the sphere of sexuality”. We can reverse this to say that, rather, sex is elevated to Ariel’s dive into the fire and “curled clouds”. Sex becomes a co-mingling of metaphors. Donne’s poem links sex and death in the same manner as the Rosarium series. For Nicholl (ibid.: 127) “The Extasie” “is not just a celebration of the love as a mystic union of souls, but rather a highly philosophical incitement to love as a philosophical union of bodies”, where “it is sex that consummates the mystic ecstasy” (ibid.: 124). Donne reads “spirit” sensually and erotically. “The Extasie” is spirit illuminating body in descent, not escaping body in ascent (the taxis of the anorectic body). As Donne says: “So must pure lovers’ souls descend / To affections, and to

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faculties, / Which sense may reach and apprehend, / Else a great Prince in prison lies”. The “great Prince in prison” is unfulfilled “extasie” or desire; failure in the coniunctio; and missed opportunity in resolving the transference where the “extasie” is in concretising the coniunctio as felt experience in a welter of embodied metaphors, without literalising the erotic tension in acting out. Both the actual union of opposites and its therapeutic cousin are intense dramas or forms of performance art. John Donne’s “The Extasie” offers a manifesto for engaging the sublime through sexual alchemy – ecstasy as a revelation of the unity of spirit and body (whose site is the “blood” or passion) achieved through the erotic imagination, as the creation of one body out of two – a body that is eternal: “My body then doth hers involve” says Donne of himself in “The Dissolution”, for the body of love “hath no decay” (Donne – “The Anniversary”). The coniunctio, and its product the alchemical intersex or double pelican vessel, is directly echoed in an explicit Madrigal from 1539: “then bound / With her enfolded thighs in mine entangled; / And both in one self-soul placed, / Made a hermaphrodite”. What could be more explicit? (Again “hermaphrodite” is now politically incorrect, where “intersex” is preferred).

Chapter 10 Transference Part II The sublime body – are you out of your mind? The first century A.D. treatise by Pseudo Longinus on the sublime as a literary form emphasises the ecstatic (literally “out of place”), the out-of-body, the mind, the idea (Longinus 1965). The sublime is characterised using on the one hand metaphors of ascension (spirit, height, transcendence, the metaphysical) and, on the other, freedom from contamination (impurity, taint). Longinus equates the sublime with “the expression of a great spirit” associated with flame, the flare-up of genius, a rising aerial spirit, the fire that destroys the body or reduces matter. The sublime works “to raise our faculties to the proper pitch of grandeur” says Longinus (ibid.: 99). This conforms with the standard dictionary definitions that stress height: lofty, towering, belonging to the highest regions of thought, reality, or human activity (Shorter OED). For Longinus then, the sublime is a mind out of mind, a transcendence of thought in pure thought. Let us bring the sublime down to earth from these lofty heights, back to the body where it belongs, in the realm of the senses, as we saw from the previous chapter. Here, I will reverse Longinus’ account to suggest that the sublime represents being out of one’s mind, ecstatic. Here, the sublime is a body of metaphors. There is already a contradiction inherent to the “sublime”, for the word has two possible roots. The first is consistent with raising up: the Latin sublimare, “to elevate”. Here, Freud’s notion of sublimation sits, as the defence mechanism that translates awkward, obscene and ill-guided impulses into upright (and uptight) socially acceptable activity by repressing the former and substituting something uplifting. In alchemy, as we saw from chapter 5 on fire, when the flame – as Longinus above exhorts – burns up matter, there is nothing left but residue and waning heat. It matters that a fire can burn without consuming whatever it is burning – the core of the analytic approach to treating impulsivity and its constellated addictions such as gambling and substance abuse. This is the “Work against Nature” of alchemy: a fire that does not consume its body of origin – an enduring passion. In contrast to the above, the second meaning of “sublime” offers the compound “sub” and “limen”: literally “below the threshold”, cognate with “subliminal”. This second etymology – what is below the threshold, down, deep, undiscovered; or what is pushing from below to reach a threshold – is a perfect description of the unconscious, or the workings of absence upon presence. This is an earthy definition, bringing us back to a common ground of sense and body. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-012

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When heating a substance, so the alchemists say, keep your eye on the nature of the fire and the changes to the material being heated. Do not be caught by a fascination with what is given off from the substance – the vapours – for this will distract you and you will let the fire die or flare up excessively, ruining the work. In psychotherapy, this is keeping one’s eye on the client’s base transformations, rather than getting distracted by what is given off – the vapours that side-track attention (trivia, false leads, deflections, bringing into play a host of defence mechanisms such as displacements, fancy and over-elaborate interpretations that miss the point). There are two main possible equivalents in therapy to getting distracted by the vapours given off during heating in alchemy. The first is to mistake theories informing the work for the work itself (concept fixation); the second is excessive fascination with fantasy images, or in Jung’s term, “anima fascination”. Such distraction by the purity of the heights leads to fascination with the all-encompassing theory, the revelation of the symbol, the click of the insight and the oh-so-brilliant piece of analysis, dry as dust but crystal clear, blinding – and inflated. Again, what we miss here is an earthing, something substantial. These aerial fantasies are pathologies of Spirit in the realm of the Holy Fool, who steps out confidently at cliff ’s edge trusting in the lightness of being, reminding us of Tom Paine’s (1794) point in The Age of Reason that, “The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related, that it is difficult to class them separately. One step above the sublime, makes the ridiculous; and one step above the ridiculous, makes the sublime again” (Paine 1981: 179). Note Paine’s movement: upward, ever upward. This is Hegel’s dialectical movement to one common Spirit, a shared vision, that Marx brought thumping back to earthly concerns in his dialectical materialism. Here, the most spiritual thing we can do is to wipe out poverty and inequity. Hegel’s Spirit, suggest Lingis (1983: 118) offers the death knell to Nature – thought abstracts itself from matter in order to rule over matter and preside over its death: “This spirit of negativity, this negativity which is the spirit, no longer lives for material sustenance, earthly food and safety and comfort, does not seek pleasure or happiness. It requires truth”. Is this not the same Spirit that starves the anorexic body or impels anorectics to their unbearable lightness of being (to poach from Milan Kundera)? Similarly, for François Lyotard (1994: 55), the spirit is “fascinated by its own excessiveness”, caught by its own inflations. The Fool is also a windbag (from the Latin follis). The Spirit is capitalism’s self-congratulatory gesture, clinging on to the false belief that where the very rich reach the dizzy heights of untold wealth they bring all the other boats with them on this rising tide. Economists now know that this model is faulty – the very rich get richer as they untether from all other boats, while the common and the poor sink.

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In fairness to Longinus (1965: 100 – 02), he does warn us that although the sublime is realised in “elevated language”, it needs “ballast” and is not “high flown”. Early in his text, Longinus equates “sublimity” with “profundity” and we are suddenly plunged into the depths, as dictionary definitions of “profundity” suggest: “Depth, in a physical sense”, “the deepest part of something” and “an abyss” (Shorter OED). This can mean depths of thought also. No longer lofty abstractions and aspirations, but sinking, abysmal experiences: ballast, anchor, fear of falling, the pits. As noted previously, Marie Louise von Franz (1980) suggests in her seminal book on alchemical psychology and psychotherapy that analysis begins with leaden states, with depths, with some substantial ground that holds symptom. From here, the psychotherapeutic encounter builds, bringing illumination and insight to the compacted stuff of symptom. During the Enlightenment, in which Reason claimed dominance over Passion, the German philosopher Baumgarten (1714– 62) nevertheless established aesthetics as a legitimate study within philosophy, stressing a sensory and feeling basis to aesthetic judgement, or resisting a grounding of aesthetics in the mind. Edmund Burke (1729 – 79), a political reactionary, distinguished between the aesthetic and sublime, where the sublime is predicated upon affect, particularly terror. In Burke’s account, the solely beautiful is not sublime. Where terror is introduced into beauty, then the sublime is experienced; indeed, terror is a necessary component of the sublime. Baumgarten and Burke follow the vertical axis downward, equating the sublime with the profound – not as spiritually uplifting but as a terrible or awe-inspiring occasion revealing depths, offering a strange, polluted pleasure. Depth resists the sweetening of the sublime, but more so, it automatically taints the purity of experience. Contemporary accounts of the sublime, such as that of Lyotard (1994: 228; also see (undated) in Appignanesi), follow Burke in describing the sublime as a movement swinging from “joyous exaltation to terror.” The heights first, then the crash, the coming to earth. Symptom is embedded in the terror, where treatment of symptom finds value in that terror and moves out to gain perspective on symptom. All symptoms have meaning. Kant (1790/1970, paras. 23 – 29) mainly stays in the heights of Spirit rather than the depths of Soul with its material roots. Kant distinguishes between the beautiful (aesthetics) and the sublime, but predicates the sublime in the mind, not in passions. Further, he says that beauty depends upon the (necessarily limited) form of an object in Nature, where the sublime is provoked by “limitlessness”. Such limitlessness, often realising a “negative pleasure”, is not in the object itself, but in the mind as it conceptualises the object, where, “the object lends itself to the presentation of a sublimity discoverable in the mind. For the sublime, in the strict sense of the word, cannot be contained in any sensuous form, but rather concerns ideas of reason”. Indeed, suggest Kant, the sublime operates only “because the mind has

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been incited to abandon sensibility and employ itself upon ideas involving higher finality” (ibid.: para 23). Kant is surely misguided here, describing reflection upon the sublime rather than the sublime experience itself that is laced with affect. Kant seems to be mistaking the still centre of the tornado for the rational mind. What cannot be apprehended sensually is limitlessness, which, as an idea, excites the mind at its highest level of intensity. But this is to make a rift between the sensory and the sublime and to restore the fantasy of ascent: the sublime again as spiritually uplifting, as the finality of Idea, also located in the person and not discoverable in the world. Thus, Kant concludes that “Sublimity, therefore, does not reside in any of the things of nature, but only in our own mind” (ibid.: para 28), in a “faculty of mind transcending every standard of sense” (ibid.: para 45). Try telling that to Iris, Greek goddess of the rainbow; or to the growing flower. Lyotard (1994) notes that Kant orients us to the limits of aesthetics, and it is here that the sublime may appear. The sublime is powerful precisely because it is at or below the threshold of “normal” experience. The force of the sublime does not present comfort or spiritual sweetness, but rather “the feeling of something monstrous” (Lyotard 1989: 24) and is then necessarily involved with transgression: “the retreat of regulation and rules is the cause of the feeling of the sublime” (ibid.). Thus, the sublime, revealed in sudden immensity, equates with a sudden withdrawal of the known, the rule-bound. This signals “the death of God” (ibid.) rather than the appearance of deity or theophany. As a negative capability, the sublime may then be characterised as a sudden, intense, absence of all that is dependable and predictable, all that gives comfort. The sublime can then also be seen not as an absence of God, where that very absence leads to terror, but as an overwhelming presence of the terrible deity: a fearful surplus, a thunderous theophany. In Hindu Tantra, this dreadful face of deity is experienced through celebration of the erotic. One must sacrifice to Her as Other, and not defend against Her in heroic stance, so the sublime is experienced not through tension, but relaxation – the parasympathetic rather than the sympathetic nervous system; the loose-limbed rather than the pumped up; the bliss of sacrifice rather than the pleasure of battle. Alphonso Lingis (1983: 49), describing the “left-hand path” of sexual Tantra, notes that the sublime moment “spreads immensity over the small but so troubling and decisive spasm of love”, offering a “communion in the immense, at such a moment of common pleasure”. Thus, “Making love with his wife, a Hindu thinks of God of which she is an expression and a part” (Michaux, in Lingis, ibid.). It is here, surely, that the cosmic order of soul and the human search for meaning, beauty and love collide? The eros of humanity is surely an integral component of the logos of soul?

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Where, asks Lingis, might we find a historical example of a culture in which eros is not conceptualised but lived in a loose-limbed manner of everyday pleasure, that would offer an “eroticism that would sensualise the mind … that would infect the political order, that would intensify through artificers and in art, and that would be nowhere dissimulated or dissimulating, but discover its climatic intensity in the most sublime forms?” (ibid.: 58). His answer is the 10th and 11th century Hindu temples of Khajuraho in central India, remnants of the Chandella Kingdoms, whose friezes offer variety of sexual activities as a spiritual form and a form of nobility that is “physiological”, “vital”, rather than based in “civic virtue” in Lingis’ words (ibid.: 62). The assumption is that the gods themselves make love, passionately and by this means is the cosmos created and maintained. It is by grace that humans participate in this world-creating/world-destroying event. It is surely this grace that Jung (CW 16, para 469) refers to when he says that the coniunctio is not “personal” or “subjective”. The sublime moment is the sexual intensification of the vibrant field that is at once body, relationship and cosmos. At this moment the sexuality of one partner is defined by the transcendent Other: “There are Tantric bronzes in Nepal and Tibet where one would see, if one separated the embraced couple, the man now bearing vulva and the woman penis” (Lingis 1983: 67). This moves significantly beyond Jung’s conceptual model of contrasexual types and brings us to contemporary identity conversations concerning gender fluidity.

Those women With reference to alchemical texts, Jung (CW 16, para 518) says that “unfortunately, we possess no original treatises that can with any certainty be ascribed to a woman author. Consequently we do not know what kind of alchemical symbolism a woman’s view would have produced”. He remarks, however, on notable partnerships in alchemy such as John Pordage and Jane Leade, and Peronelle and Nicolas Flamel (ibid.: para 505). Nevertheless, woman is cast here as “muse” (soror mystica) rather than initiator or leader. Contemporary work on Early Modern women alchemists concentrates primarily on their contribution to the emerging field of chemistry (Chowdhury 2021). This work shows a sadly neglected corpus of work by 16th and 17th century women alchemists. Did Jung not see his own relationships as alchemical, as contributing to the Work? He dedicates The Psychology of the Transference to his wife Emma. Surely women with whom he had intimate relationships would have demonstrated to him a woman’s view in the alchemical work? Critical and intellectual biographical interest in Jung (for example Kerr 1994; Shamdasani 1990, 1995) offers an alternative to a previous generation of biographers who lionise Jung, raising him to the

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status of prophet. Hall (1988: 13) describes “those women” who gathered around Jung as acolytes, maenads to Jung’s Dionysus, as a “fiercely maintained community of believers”. In contrast to these women as followers, there is an emerging focus upon other women who acted as leaders, as inspirational, as initiatory sexual muse, from whom Jung derived significant ideas for his psychological theories and therapeutic practices – and an experiment in living. In the case of the latter, Toni Wolff was “for nearly thirty years more or less openly Jung’s mistress” (Kerr 1994: 138). In 1915, during a near-psychotic phase in Jung’s life, “Jung’s condition has so deteriorated that his wife allowed Toni Wolff openly to become his mistress and sometime member of the household, simply because she was the only person who could calm him down” (ibid.). Women, it would seem for the man who “discovered” the anima for psychology, were potentially dangerous, not to be trusted: “the anima … seemed to me to be full of a deep cunning” says Jung (1977b: 211). He recalls an early childhood feeling connected with being troubled by his mother’s absences through illness and subsequent hospitalisation: “The feeling I associated with ‘woman’ was for a long time one of unreliability”. While he goes on to say that “later these early impressions were revised”, he nevertheless concludes: “I have mistrusted women” (ibid.: 23). Jung’s first analytic case in private practice, as an orthodox psychoanalyst following Freud, was a woman – Sabina Spielrein. She is said to have first introduced the idea of “anima” to Jung. They fell in love within the confines of a continuing therapeutic relationship. Appignanesi and Forrester (1992: 204– 05) suggest that Spielrein was Jung’s “first analytic muse and mistress, in a relationship which moved unevenly between sexual and mystical registers”; and Kerr (1994: 230) notes that “at one point Jung had tried, astonishingly, to introduce Spielrein into his own household”. There is evidence that Jung also had an affair around 1912 with Maria Moltzer, who had also analysed him. Moltzer led him to his discovery of the “intuitive type” (Shamdasani 1995). From this analysis Jung claimed to be free from neurosis. Freud wrote to Ferenczi: “The master who analysed him could only have been Fräulein Moltzer, and he is so foolish as to be proud of this work of a woman with whom he is having an affair” (ibid. 1995: 128). Jung thus fell in love and had an intense erotic relationship with his first private client and, subsequently, had an affair with what he describes effectively as his most successful analyst. So much for managing the transference! Much later in his career, Jung (CW 16, para: 464) warns against such potential entanglements as “too much therapeutic enthusiasm”! Gripped by alchemical sulphur and impulse early in his career, Jung is salted, brought back to earth and musters mercurial insight. At the time of his relationship with Spielrein, Jung was under the influence of the radical analyst Otto Gross, with whom he conducted a mutual analysis. Gross was a sexual libertarian and during 1907– 8 Jung became “a fervent sexualist” (Ap-

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pignanesi and Forrester, 1992: 210). Kerr (1994: 507) suggested that Jung had to “sublimate” his relationship with Spielrein, lest he go mad, because he had seen a “truth” from her. This “truth” may have constituted Spielrein’s initiation of Jung, consciously or unconsciously, into a new kind of sexual awareness, into appreciating sexuality as a spiritual endeavour, essentially a Tantra and as a basis to creative inspiration in the circulation of images and ideas between partners found in erotic tryst. Such a tryst is the very thing one must suspend and sublimate in the ethical exercise of one’s duty as a psychotherapist. So, the very thing one must displace in psychotherapy, Jung and Spielrein embraced as the most therapeutic of activities and interest and thereby resisted its sublimation, ruining or putting on another track the alchemical work. Sometime after their relationship had ended and Spielrein was pursuing her own career as a psychoanalyst, in a letter written to Jung in 1918 she raises objections concerning the potentially sublimatory nature of analysis itself: “analysis of the ‘unconscious’ can rob the analysed material of its energy”. This is a wise insight and perfectly describes the cliff edge that psychotherapies are always navigating. Psychotherapy may not be the best choice for facing life’s issues. Spielrein makes a crucial distinction where, “the subconscious can be encouraged to work through a problem in either a real or sublimated form” (ibid. 1994: 484– 85). Jung (CW 16, para 328) was later to say that “what is real, what actually exists, cannot be alchemically sublimated”, although we can suggest that this is precisely what his later alchemical psychology does. Here, Jung strays into the territory of the Real as described by Lacan – as an idealised psychological space that is forever unreachable as it is tempered by and filtered through the dynamics between the Symbolic (language registers) and the Imaginary (the fantasy world of the ego, imagining the ego is in control). Spielrein’s own career appears to have led her to take more seriously than Jung, or more concretely, the place of bodily sexuality in analysis – and this is why she ultimately rejected Analytical Psychology for a Freudian approach. As Jung in 1907 is attracted temporarily to the radical sexualism of Otto Gross, so in mid-1907 Spielrein comes across a 1905 book by August Forel – The Sexual Question – in which Forel discusses eroticism in the arts. He uses the word “poetry” to describe “amorous intoxication” and, for Spielrein, this becomes the codeword for her intimacy with Jung. Kerr (1994: 227) suggests that “‘poetry’ was Spielrein’s word for what happens when a couple both enamored of mysticism, move backward from it to a sexual realisation – and keep psychoanalyzing”. Recalling the relationship between poetry and sexuality in John Donne’s work discussed in the previous chapter, “poetry” is actually a rather beautiful expression for a consciously adopted sexuality informed by the Spirit. The implication is that Jung and Spielrein fell into an intense

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erotic relationship that could be read generously as a sacrament and, cynically, as a confused therapeutic entanglement. Spielrein eventually developed a view that “the creative process itself was sexual” (ibid. 1994: 506) and that the creative does not arise out of sublimation of sexuality, but offers a celebration and expression of sexuality where: “The basic process of artistic creation mirrored lovemaking” (ibid.). What gave Spielrein’s view an interesting twist was that she saw sexuality as at once both constructive and destructive, life and death drives intermingling in the one act. She brought sex and death together before Freud’s formulation of a “death wish” or Thanatos. Eros or lifeforce had to encounter the death of the ego in sex, where the private self is destroyed in a fusion or identity with another, or the making of relationship through the sexual act: “out of the destruction of two individuals a new one arises. That is in fact the sexual drive, which is by nature a destructive drive, and exterminating drive for the individual” (ibid. 1994: 217– 18). In love, suggest Spielrein (in Appignanesi and Forrester 1992: 218) there is a “dissolution of the I in the lover … The I lives anew in the person of the lover”. Spielrein stresses the imminence of the sublime in the sexual act: “it is the sexual drive that forces individuals to transcend and transform themselves, impelling them towards inevitable creativity, destruction and death” (ibid.). In 1908, Spielrein had expressed the desire to have a “child”. Jung interpreted this literally, that she wanted to have a child with him. They code-named this child “Siegfried”. In 1912, Spielrein wrote to Jung: “Dear one, receive now the product of our love, the project which is your little son Siegfried” (Carotenuto 1982: 48). For Spielrein, this is a child of the imagination, the product of the circulation between the couple of images and ideas. This is the baby arising after the conjunction in the alchemical marriage (figure 9.8 in the previous chapter). The “project”, the “child”, is also a significant academic paper by Spielrein entitled Destruktion, which puts forward her idea of the “death instinct”. Spielrein recognises her idea as arising out of the erotic intensity of relationship, or is a meta-metaphor for the metaphor of the “little death” of orgasm. Jung makes no such acknowledgement of the influence of significant relationships as he marks a watershed in his life: “All my works, all my creative activity, has come from those initial fantasies and dreams which began in 1912” (1977b: 217). In 1912, Jung enters what he calls his “confrontation with the unconscious”, a period of semi psychotic disequilibrium, out of which he establishes his main therapeutic technique – active imagination. In 1912, he receives the news from Spielrein that the “child” of their relationship has finally “come of age”. In the same year, he allegedly enters into an affair with Maria Moltzer. Spielrein is now left to bring up this “child” of imagination on her own and develops her progressive ideas concerning the links between sexuality and creative life, somewhat freeing herself from transferential relationship with Jung. The con-

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iunctio has gone from synthesis to analysis, or is once more split in a dialectical turn. On Christmas Eve 1913, Jung (ibid.: 204) has a dream in which he and an unknown “savage” kill Siegfried, the solar hero. Jung’s interpretation is intrapersonal not interpersonal – that his own heroic ego must be sacrificed to the primacy of the unconscious. He does not relate the dream to Siegfried the “son” of his encounter with Spielrein, yet it may be that in killing Siegfried in this dream, Jung also finally shatters the “double pelican” vessel that he had created with Spielrein, that had contained and intensified his desire, leading perhaps to some of the most important formulations of modern psychology. Some of these cannot now be solely attributed to Jung and his dangerous introverted journeys (the received wisdom of Jung’s (1977) autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections), but appear to be products of dangerous liaisons, in which erotic partnerships there is inevitably a circulation and swapping of images and ideas, a cross-ferment and commingling. Here, psychology and alchemy meet in the transference configured in alchemy as the coniunctio. As we shall see, Jung was to sublimate and rationalise these physical relationships in framing the alchemical coniunctio as abstraction – a symbolic act.

Does Jung abandon the left-hand path? In Tantra there are two paths – the right-hand path transcends or denies the realm of the senses in the pursuit of asceticism. The left-hand path remains deep within the realm of the senses – in the sensual and sexual, in de-sublimation and embodiment. Jung knew of this Tantra of the left hand but either refused this way or masked it in his later work that adopted a transcendental tone. In a description of the “King and Queen” (figure 9.2 of the Rosarium described in the previous chapter) Jung says that “the two give each other their left hands, and this can hardly be unintentional since it is contrary to custom. The gesture points to a clearly guarded secret, to ‘the left hand path’, as the Indian Tantrists call Shiva and Shakti worship” (CW 16, para 410). This path unfolds to reveal the secrets of the biological realm (no “secret” at all, but our common birth-right). Jung (ibid.: paras. 411– 12) says that the Rosarium text to the figures of the Queen and King making love gives a warning that “the secret of the art may not be revealed to all and sundry” but, gnomically, that the secret is “the work of Nature and not of the worker”. The alchemical text that Jung compares to Tantra is, however, from the 16th century and European. Is Jung then pointing to a western Tantric tradition known to Renaissance alchemists, or is he retrospectively projecting a knowledge of Tantra on to this alchemical

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text? Jung would surely have recognised the biological secrets of the left-hand path, for he quotes the Rosarium, that, as the Queen and King make love, so “In the hour of conjunction the greatest marvels appear” (ibid., para 458) – at the sublime moment of climax, visionary capacities expand. “Sexuality does not exclude spirituality, nor spirituality sexuality” says Jung (CW 14, para 634) in his last book, written between 1941 and 1954. He warns the reader against the dangers of abstract, psychological or mystical readings, as “one-sided interpretations”. In some occult texts, says Jung, we will find explicit reference to sex, where we should not assume that “the obviously sexual language has no basis in real sexuality”. As Jung (CW 16, para 455) confirms, what is uppermost in the Rosarium is “the sexual libido which engulfs the pair”. The text is explicit: “And yet you need me, as the cock the hen”. And the gloss: “White-skinned lady, lovingly joined to her ruddy-limbed husband, / Wrapped in each other’s arms in the bliss of connubial union, / Merge and dissolve as they come to the goal of perfection, / They that were two are made one, as though of one body” (ibid.: para 457). Here, we have the frankness of John Donne’s love poetry. Such remarks, however, while they constitute my focus in this discussion relating the sublime to sexuality, actually constitute only a small part of Jung’s overall account of the alchemical coniunctio. Mainly, his interest in the concrete is overwhelmed by the incursion of the sublimatory voice of conceptual psychology that he helped establish. In the Foreword to The Psychology of the Transference (ibid.: 164), Jung already says that “sublimation” is “a process closely connected with the transference”. And Jung concludes, contra his previous views, that the sex displayed in these alchemical illustrations is not “real”. These two bodies making love are “really” “aerial beings, creatures of thought” (ibid.: para 459). But can we not think of them as embodied metaphors – concrete but not literal? Are orgasm and post-coital reverie not concrete moments in which the literal can be transcended? Jung here may be warning that the transference should not be acted out (we have seen that he already transgressed on this ethical front) by saying that the Rosarium images should not be read literally, but that is not the point. As I have argued, the alchemical coniunctio is concrete in a personal relationship, but must remain multi-metaphorical in a psychotherapeutic encounter. Jung’s U-turn, I think, is either heavily coded, or abandons sensual reality for an archetypal world of symbol. The transference is now read through a sublimatory or conceptual Symbolic and not with an aesthetic eye that would already recognise the sublime (and poetic) in the sexual encounter’s erotic of transference. The psychotherapist’s task is to bring this rich imagination to the transference without acting out. Jung suggests that the real meaning of the Rosarium series is “Goethe’s ‘higher copulation’”, a spiritual coupling whose bodily representation is a dissimulation (ibid., para 462). In this representation of the coniunctio, “the

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sexual aspect deludes our judgement”. Jung continues: “the more … one concentrates on the sexual aspect … the less attention one pays to archetypal patterns” (ibid.: para 534). But this is too stringent a distinction between the bodily and the archetypal, where the embodied metaphor provides a better description of what these alchemical images are about – surely an archetype in action, muscular and breathing. Jung plays the pseudo-alchemist watching what is given off from the substance being heated – the vapours – thus losing touch with the transformations of the substance itself. He is not attending to the fire, but is in the grip of an anima fascination of his own invention. And privileging the theory over the experience that the theory is supposed to explain, Jung drives a wedge between what the alchemists had always seen as inseparable – the work of the library and the work of the laboratory. Jung elsewhere hints at the secrets of sexual alchemy, the Tantra of the lefthand path, as noted above; but now – in an about-face – suggests that “the real secret lies in the union of the right hands” (ibid.: para 411). This “solves the problems created by the sinister contact” as a “revelation of … higher meaning” (ibid.: para 416) where the union of King and Queen is taken to reveal the Anthropos, the original androgynous or biune being prior to sexual division. The “secret” is revealed as a discovery of the contrasexual type – woman in man, man in woman, anima and animus. But this conceptual revelation has now been severed from any basis in experience. Further, the secret is personal individuation and not individuation of the relationship: the “incest” shown in the coniunctio “symbolises union with one’s own being” and “means individuation or becoming a self ” (ibid.: para 419), highlighting Jung’s preference for personalism despite his interest in a “collective” unconscious. Jung then proceeds to contradict himself, or perhaps reclaim the ground he appears to have lost, for the individual is never complete “unless related to another individual” (ibid.: para 454). Again, the chymical wedding is surely not a singular internal process, but an explicit union of a couple, or the completion of a dialectical move between persons: thesis, antithesis and movement to synthesis. This is then realisation of authentic democracy: the key to successful management of the transference. Psychotherapy is not the realisation of Self (Jung’s fantasy) but the establishment of authentic democracy, as Alfred Adler suggested. Marx was right to bring Hegel down to earth, to face the realities of inequity and inequality, rubbing the idealists’ noses in the realists’ dirt. In turn, we must translate the gender stereotypes repeated throughout this analysis of the alchemical coniunctio into contemporary terms to include same sex relations for example.

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Praxis: transference is everyday Jung, whose authoritarian views are widely known, does however democratise psychotherapy on occasions: “The transference itself is a perfectly natural phenomenon which does not by any means happen only in the consulting room-it can be seen everywhere” (Jung CW 16, para 420). An article on psychoanalytic practice written for the general public (Brearley 1996) states authoritatively that “people … see others in … personal ways (which derive from our versions of earlier figures in our lives)”. Do people really see each other in this way – retrospectively – derived from significant figures in childhood? Of course you do if you are a psychoanalyst – this is the cornerstone of that theory. But life predicated upon such theory, any theory, could be seen as not a life lived, but a life interpreted. Michael Whan (2014), in a perceptive essay on alchemy applied to post-Jungian analysis, makes the bold – and I think justified – claim that such application is a “simulation”. Drawing on the work of Wolfgang Giegerich, Whan suggests that Jungians and post-Jungians both occlude and misrepresent history when they draw on early modern alchemy. First, the historical climate within which alchemy emerged, a pre-scientific climate, cannot be fully appreciated by our times, a mixture of modernism and post-modernism moving into post-human AI-augmented realities. The key issue here is the rise of secular humanism and the emphasis upon the insular “self ”. Subjectivity and alchemy simply do not mix. The alchemists were not “working” on the self, individuation, personal growth or such like, but on substances, on stuff of the world. Their view of transformation was not to turn leaden personalities into golden ones (!), but to “illuminate” substances so that their interiorities would be revealed to us – we could see the world in its splendour: in the Christian worldview, “post-Creation”. Where the alchemists worked against Church dogma – and then had to code their work, as noted previously – they celebrated the beauty of matter as the immanent Spirit, fundamentally a position of heresy. Second, archetypal psychology in particular turns to the Classical pantheon of Greek gods as a background against which to imagine psychotherapeutic work. But this era has a completely different worldview to the monotheistic Christian and Islamic faiths that fed the development of Medieval and Renaissance alchemy. Thus, contemporary uses of alchemy make fundamental mistakes such as comparing the spirit mercurius with the god Hermes. Where the classical mind is mythical, the modern mind is psychological. Our conflation of the two produces, in Whan’s view, a simulation of both historical world-views. We do not “get” alchemy or polytheism, but re-invent them for modernistic purposes of strengthening the ego and developing character and for post-modern purposes of “anything goes” pop psychology or “pick-and-mix” spirituality. As Whan (ibid.: 178) suggests, “Leave the gods alone to rest in peace”. He might have added that we should leave alchemy

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alone too, except something must be done about alchemy’s insistence to inhabit the imaginations of certain psychotherapeutic schools. For Whan, as for Giegerich, the work of soul is quite a different project to everyday psychotherapy for our common neuroses such as anxiety and relationship issues. We are witness to the work of soul in a way that we can never be witness to personality issues or personal trauma (my parapraxis here was to first type “personal trainer”). The former is an aesthetic revelation of what matters in matter (the “stoniness of the stone”); the latter, in our current historical era, is to align personality with culture. Whan quotes James Hillman’s perceptive comment that today’s interest in therapeutic application of alchemy to late modern life (“doing the work for one’s nature”) is necessarily Promethean, stealing from the gods, stealing from history, where we become “a gold digger”. Whan (ibid.: 182), drawing on what he sees as an error in Jung, concludes: “Analytic psychology errs if it asserts it is ‘we’ who ‘embody the secret in ourselves’ (CW 12, para 564), adorning and inflating our all-too-human inner life with the fetish of alchemical meaning”. I applaud Whan’s critique, and ask any reader who has been trying to squeeze lessons in “personal growth” through alchemical readings from the book you are now reading to pause, go back to the beginning, and re-read. My primary reservation about this clear cleaving of the divine from the mundane is however the experience of the sublime, especially in the “little death” of orgasm and post-coital reverie and in a variety of spiritual practices. This, I agree, is not a factor in secular humanist psychotherapy whose primary goal, it seems to me, is to produce a working political democracy. (A project I applaud). Theory and theory-making are absorbing. However, one does not theorise a relationship in the face of its dual passions, its unpredictabilities, its confusing talk, in the manner that a psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapist would theorise the practitioner-client relationship. When such therapists “resolve the transference” they are in fact acting out the normative narrative of psychoanalysis and not contradicting its central conceptual tenets, thus shoring up their practices. The satisfaction of the desires of theory may take precedence over the unexpected, which is absorbed into that theory, interpreted by its tenants. As Nietzsche suggests, the ethical question is not how we might be responsible for the future (the impact of theory upon life realised as goals or developmental plans, or strategies for living), which psychotherapy tends to educate; but how we might be responsible to the future, which must take into account the unpredictable, the unknowable, life’s aporias. In the great alchemical disaster that is global warming and the subsequent climate crisis, post-Industrial Age generations have been responsible for the future. Generations born now will be responsible to the future. The classical model of the transference introduces a theoretical account of relationship that basically nullifies the “perhaps”, the uncertainty, indeterminacy or

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unpredictability of events. The slow but inevitable movement towards the analysis of the transference as a resolution – making conscious what is temporarily projected onto the analyst – brings the therapeutic relationship into the realm of calculation (decision with no risk). Psychotherapy itself then becomes a practice of sublimation. Psychodynamic psychotherapies grounded in psychoanalysis paradoxically may offer an institutional system of surveillance: controlling, dissolving, or concealing the unpredictable while claiming to raise unconsciousness to consciousness – in order to administer utilitarian happiness. Brearley (ibid.) suggests that “to analyse, the analyst … does need to be able to give himself room to think, and not get entangled. In everyday life, both parties bring their own problems and idiosyncrasies”. Precisely – “everyday life” is necessarily inclusive of the messy tangle and does not reduce relationship to a technical calculation. Of course, the analytic relationship is of a particular kind. But is it one that necessarily admits the sublime? The sublimatory language of analysis places emphasis upon purity, upon lack of contamination or poisoning in the relationship (the technical dread of counter transferential bias and blunder): “the analyst needs to be, in certain ways, unobtrusive. Only by this means is there a chance of a sufficiently uncontaminated field of enquiry” (ibid.). Psychoanalysis’ use of “sublimation” (turning potentially anti-social urges into socialised activities) is not the same as aesthetics’ use of the term “sublime”, although they both come from the same root, meaning “to elevate” as noted previously. If you brought the phrase “uncontimated field of inquiry” into therapy to describe your intimate relationships you’d be diagnosed as emotionally insulated! An early 17th century alchemical text quoted in Jung (CW 16, para 499, n.20) says that the magical child of the sublimation “clothes itself with heavenly nature by its ascent, and then by its descent visibly puts on the nature of the centre of the earth”. The coniunctio involves the reanimation of the body, so that an identification of body and spirit is achieved. Jung notes that numerous sublimations are necessary to create the corpus mundum, the purified body, so that the body may be united with the soul. He compares this work to a psychological “self-education”, and says that, as alchemical symbolism shows, a radical understanding of this kind is impossible without a human partner. A general and merely academic “insight into one’s mistakes”, is ineffectual, for then the mistakes are not really seen at all, only the idea of them. But they show up acutely when a human relationship brings them to the fore and when they are noticed by the other person as well as by oneself (my emphasis, ibid.: para 503).

Here, then, is a lay analysis between partners, where “confessions made to one’s secret self generally have little or no effect, whereas confessions made to another are much more promising” (ibid.). The spiritualising of the bodies is achieved

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through circulation between them, in preparation for the re-entry into the matter of Soul, through which medium Spirit descends back into the body as a resurrection and re-inscription of what the alchemist called the body’s “form” and “ferment”. We have seen that the entry into the Soul is possible when the “double pelican” vessel is made between two partners in sexual relationship, where this offers a fertile ground for the creative impulse. Jung (ibid.: para 504) suggests that “The ‘soul’ which is reunited with the body is the one born of the two, the vinculum common to both. It is therefore the very essence of relationship”. It is remarkable how analysis may displace everyday life, instead of becoming an aspect of life, or offering itself up in post-modern times as redundant or quietly narcissistic in the face of the development of a virtually therapeutic culture (Bleakley 1996). Yet we find highly respected analysts such as Jacoby (1984: 105) grudgingly admitting that a love relationship outside analysis can be a “fuller experience” than analysis itself, “and might have even more impact on the individuation process”. Jung (CW 16, para 471) admits that “knowledge of one’s partner” is essential to the opus psychologicum, the individuation process – and this goes hand-in-hand with “self knowledge”. But here is the essential difficulty in psychotherapy’s pursuits, in contrast to the meanings of radical performance art of the sort that I engaged with in the previous chapter 9. Whereas this kind of art seeks to engage the sublime through sacrifice of the personality, psychotherapy generally defends against the sublime through sublimatory moves, the central one of which is the realisation of the personality, now commonly described as gaining an identity, the bolstering of the person’s fragile unity in the face of overwhelming powers of disintegration. This, as noted above, is our current historical epoch’s fascination and so psychotherapy must engage with it, critically. But this cult of personality, or an associated slice of identity politics, is not the first concern of alchemy. Rather, alchemy can shed light on the potential shallowness of such a cult, as a simulacrum – a copy of something where the original has been lost or obscured.

Chapter 11 Operations

Figure .: The Sulphurous Thief

The return of the vile sulphurous thief The Work of alchemy consists of operations on substances to promote transformations in a revelation of the beauty, wonder and sublimity of the world. This can be (reductively) read chemically, as literal transformation such as solid to liquid and liquid to gas; or it can be read (again reductively) psychologically as the work of feelings and mind as these affect behaviour and constitution. Our third way is to read both chemistry and psychology through an alchemical imagination, poetically and metaphorically. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-013

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In psychotherapy, the “operations” can be thought of as interventions or technique. We saw, for example, from Chapter 5 how the operation of calcination, or the use of fire, can be configured psychotherapeutically. This centres on the vicissitudes of impulse. In turn, we saw from chapter 6 that spiritus sulphur, a form of red sulphur known as an unconscionable or vile “thief ”, represents impulses that one might later regret. The thief breaks in to the psyche and then breaks in to other people’s worlds. This vagabond, however, can also be a blessing in disguise, for the root impulses that the thief embodies are revealed through parapraxes, or slips of the tongue and of behaviour. They are unconscious desires, implicit in us all and explicit in symptom such as Tourette’s Syndrome. Why we should value parapraxes is that slips of language are the seeds of new metaphors. When Jacques Lacan claimed that the unconscious is structured like a language, he meant a language in constant re-invention and not a language of habits. Habits, as fixities, become symptoms and these are precisely what draws people into psychotherapy as habits become hardened into neuroses. Such habits are no longer helpful for living, but hinder living; they provide barriers for others and create despondency in oneself as life fails to be re-invented or refreshed. They become a burden on healthcare systems, where the most common reason for people to visit their doctors with psychological symptoms are anxiety and depression: mood “disorders”, with meanings and potential for change within those meanings, that are so often treated with pharmaceuticals before those meanings can be discovered. Again, first rule: what does the symptom want? Jacques Lacan’s model of subjectivity is fluid, as subjectivity is not a question of a settled identity but rather of an intolerance for a fixed identity. The subject is both “precipitate” and “breach” (Fink 1995). From the fluidity of encounters, a person becomes super-saturated with meanings, out of which a central set of guiding metaphors precipitates. But these breach the previous set of metaphors as they are innovative and challenging, bringing on a new set of precipitates. Lacan is thinking consciously in terms of Hegelian dialectic but unconsciously in terms of the language of alchemy. Each new metaphor complex acts as linguistic signifier where the signified is the metaphorical meaning: for example, Chronos (Saturn) devours his children in the face of the prophecy that one child will usurp his authority; the metaphor is the uselessness of parental dominance, because ultimately our children will outlive us. From this, the parent learns to foster the gifts of difference between parent and child. As Fink (ibid.: 70 – 1) notes, the world – and then the world of language – is an ever-changing source of signifiers within which the mind is located and with which it participates. What is signified is meaning. But, says Lacan, this is also a neurotic world as meanings become stabilised and habitual, where signifiers become self-referential. Metaphor – often radically – disturbs

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such meanings, in Fink’s explanation to “jolt one out of the easy reductionism inherent in the very process of understanding”; moreover, … metaphor’s creative spark is the subject; metaphor creates the subject. … As metaphor’s creative spark, the subject has no permanence or persistence; it comes into being as a spark flashing between two signifiers. … A new metaphor brings new meaning into the world. It alters the subject as meaning. (ibid.)

So, Lacan’s radical vision is of a troubled, unstable or constantly irritable self – a spiritus sulphur – that acts as gadfly, resists settlement as unproductive habit and sparks creative development as an ever-expanding dialectic. This is jouissance – a state of desire that can be fevered, even overwhelming, but is necessary for the creative imagination as a combination of pleasure, disgust and overwhelming fascination. In this chapter, using metaphor creation and application as the framework, I return to the previous two chapters’ foci on the coniunctio or the analytic transference, to consider some more aspects of splitting and combining, or separation and conjunction. I will look briefly at why it is important for psychotherapy to, first, articulate the kinds (or instances) of splitting and combining that are going on in the therapeutic encounter; and second, to consider styles of splitting and combining. These offer an aesthetic approach to psychotherapy: what is a quality intervention, or what is aesthetically pleasing? I then look in some depth at a key alchemical operation as this can be applied to psychotherapeutic work: dissolution, or the breaking down of substances in liquids. Here, a host of metaphors helpful for therapeutic occasions will be considered and I touch on why clients’ dreams afford a helpful, as well as aesthetically rich, metaphor bonanza. But first, I briefly trace why psychoanalysis can be applauded for its insistence upon metaphor production as a key therapeutic strategy that goes beyond the person to enrichment of language and culture. And isn’t enrichment, as a disturbance of the status quo, the key therapeutic aim?

Psychoanalysis as a metaphor hoard Metaphor literacy is a primary quality needed by psychotherapists in an age of short-term, reductionist and functional therapies that serve to increase metaphor starvation and conceptual aridity. Such models are dominated by instrumentalism and offer non-analytic processes aimed at temporary symptom reduction, rather than understanding of causes. They are engineering models, legitimised by resort to a neuroscience in its infancy, where reduction to brain functioning – fascinating

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though it may be – completely excises the importance of context and history. This shift is driven by values of economic efficiency, where longer term therapies are resource-heavy. However, this misses the value of psychodynamic frameworks and methods used in shorter term contexts, as “brief therapies” (Messer and Warren 1995). Over many years of developing and running professional training psychotherapy courses; working intensively with clinical psychology trainees, medical students and doctors; and having a private psychotherapy practice, I have seen short term psychodynamic approaches working with great effect. I have come to the conclusion also that learning technique is not enough – one must have an overarching quality permeating the work, a primary value. Again, I see this as metaphor literacy – the capability to understand how embodied metaphors in particular work and how they are generated and maintained (Bleakley 2019). Metaphor innovation is key to the process of psychodynamic therapeutic work. We must generate an aesthetic, rather than a mechanical, imagination of the Work. When Freud coined the term “psychoanalysis” in 1896, on the back of Joseph Breuer’s work in particular, it was based on a complex metaphor: that the “repressed” returns from the “unconscious” in a “distorted” form causing symptom (such as anxieties, impulsiveness, depressions and so forth). Freud’s method was to attentively “listen through” the surface talk of patients to spot the eruptions and irruptions into the conscious mind of unconscious material. This would occur particularly in dreams, daydreams, fantasies, jokes, errors, slips of the tongue (parapraxes), tics, hesitations and mismatches between what was said and how the unconscious would speak simultaneously through the body as nonverbal and emotive signs. The longest-running BBC radio entertainment show “Just a Minute” is based on talking for one minute without “hesitation”, “deviation” or “repetition” – three signs that Freud would have taken as the unconscious seeping into consciousness. The main voices of the unconscious for Freud were those of dreaming, daydreaming or reverie and fantasy. All of this material would be interpreted by the analyst for its meanings and fed back to the patient. Freud began to see that, often, early childhood trauma was repressed as too painful or shameful to admit to consciousness and the leakage of this material into consciousness, often disguised, formed a picture of the nature of that early trauma. Its meaning would be recovered in therapy. This would gradually be pieced together by the analyst and patient in a process of recovery in two senses: recovery of repressed memories leading to recovery of the cause of a symptom. The “talking cure” (a wonderful metaphor in its own right) for the patient is a watching and listening process for the analyst, leading to interpretation. It is vital to appreciate that interpretations are a “best fit” hermeneutics: an aesthetic and ethical

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gesture that does not seek “truth” but “resonance”, making the familiar strange as “defamiliarisation” (Bleakley and Neilson 2021). Just what metaphor complex may have informed and shaped Freud’s model of the analytic process, such that this metaphor complex is fed and develops, has been a concern for Freud’s interpreters and biographers. Clearly eroticism in its widest sense (not simply limited to sexuality, but also embracing sensuality) was Freud’s main pivot. The Oedipus myth explores how such eroticism is founded; and the development of culture is taken as a bargaining – culture is developed at the expense of a now repressed polymorphous sexuality, channelled into acceptable behaviours. Oedipus unwittingly kills his father and marries his mother. The Oedipus complex relates to the resolution of the boy’s jealous rivalry with his father as a means of gaining an identity; for girls, the Electra complex relates to the resolution of the girl’s rivalry with the mother, to gain the father’s love. Whether or not these specific, gendered transitions hold water, Freud is correct in recognising that early adolescence presents a time of conflict in the face of the development of a sexual identity. It is not uncommon for adolescent boys and girls to form samesex deep friendships that have sensual cores. Rubén Gallo (2010) argues that as a schoolboy aged 15, Freud had tender, even erotic, feelings for his closest friend Eduard Silberstein, a Romanian boy. (As I typed that sentence, in good Freudian fashion, I first typed “closet” friend, a good slip). They studied together at the Vienna Gymnasium, but Eduard left to study in Leipzig not long after they met, while they kept up an intimate correspondence. They would write each other long letters and poems. The strange part of the friendship was that in Vienna they taught themselves Spanish together, without tuition, forming what they called a secret Spanish Association in which their correspondence was couched in what they saw as the most passionate and romantic of languages. This budding homo-eroticism was never admitted by Freud. For example, Freud showed intense jealousy when Eduard wrote to him to say that he liked a particular girl. Freud maintained his interest in Spanish and this focused into a guiding metaphor complex of an imaginary or fantasy “Mexico” (ibid.). Freud’s ideas suited the Mexican temperament and psychoanalysis and its ideas flourished in Mexico (especially within Surrealist art circles) despite the fact that Freud never visited the country. It was as if Freud had connected at a level of what Jung would call the “collective unconscious” to plug into a fantasy world of an imagined Mexico that would act as the metaphor container, generator and sustaining source for his “wild” ideas of psychoanalysis. Gallo’s book is subtitled “into the wilds of psychoanalysis” and here already is a twin metaphor: Freud’s work becoming influential at the fringes of psychological work, but also offering an untamed and inventive expression that recognised the raw and natural forces of unconscious (and some-

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times unconscionable) expression. Freud collected some Mexican artefacts amongst a large collection of Egyptian and Classical figurines, as the open face of his Spanish fascination, but his Mexican fascination as a guiding metaphor for psychoanalysis was held secret. Psychoanalysis would be like Spanish – sensual, fascinated with eros, poetic and embodied. Freud’s “Mexico” may be viewed as a realm of Soul-making that has its own dynamic and independence, an aesthetic and spiritual sphere of unworldly existence – a noumenon beyond the phenomenal world – that nevertheless must impinge on the everyday. It is both poetic inspiration and wisdom. With his interest in archaeology (psychoanalysis is an archaeological dig into the depths of the mind) and his collection of artefacts that he sometimes employed as fantasy objects for patients in analysis (the seed for sand play therapy), Freud could just as easily have chosen ancient alchemy as Spanish “Mexico” as his metaphor hoard for psychoanalysis, but this was left for Jung to realise. Freud maintained contact with this sphere beyond the personal through his collection of artefacts that provided for him an object-oriented ontology, a means of existence in an otherworld beyond the consulting room. Thus, Freud used his artefacts as stimuli for conversations with, or free associations from, his patients. The reader will by now be clear that in this book I am using premodern alchemy as a transitional object – not to investigate a personal childhood incident or trauma, but to link to the extra-personal worlds of soul, natural matter and collective experience (history, culture, language) that inevitably shape the personal and our interests in therapeutic approaches. In the following section, I look in more detail at overlaps between specific alchemical operations and psychotherapeutic interventions. Here, I am setting out the territories in which such operations can be apprehended as embodied metaphor production with possible therapeutic consequences, a metaphor cache that I would recommend as a template for psychotherapeutic practices (but also for life in general and in particular for writing poetry).

Operations on “substances” While Jung specifically related alchemy and psychology, Freud had developed a vocabulary of both patient expressions and analyst’s techniques, as we have seen from previous chapters, that can be paralleled with the premodern alchemists’ “operations” on substances. “Analysis” (solve) and “synthesis” (coagula) characterise the rhythm of the whole Work – in alchemy called the “spagyric art”, from the Greek span (to stretch out and separate) and ageirein (to collect together or assemble). This is also the rhythm of poetry.

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The poet Louise Glück, in “Prism” (2006) says: “I’m in a bed. This man and I, / We are suspended in the strange calm / sex often induces. Most sex induces. / Longing, what is that? Desire, what is that? // In the window, constellations of summer … “. The poet sets up a rhythm of wondering straight out of the sensual coniunctio that is like the rhythm of breath: analysis as out-breath (breaking up, speaking out), synthesis as in-breath (absorbing, keeping whole). “I’m in a bed” – exclamatory out-breath, statement. “This man and I” – reflection, pause, synthetic inbreath. “We are suspended in the strange calm” – in-breath, reflection, that “sex often induces” – out-breath exclamation, statement. “Desire, what is that?” – reflection, pondering, in-breath; “In the window, constellations of summer” – active looking, breaking the chain of introspection and focus on the lovers, an out-breath of noticing. So an alchemical rhythm of solve et coagula, dissolve (analysis) and congeal (synthesis), is set up through a reflection on a moment. A Hegelian dialectic is set in motion, in-spirited. This is poetry as lived experience. Turning to other operations, the alchemists’ projectio and multiplicatio resonate with Freud’s defence mechanism of “projection” and are familiar symptoms of what Freud called “hysteria”; while “sublimation” in alchemy is a purification process, as it is in Freud’s system where highly charged erotic or aggressive impulses are sublimated or refined by the ego. Cibatio in alchemy is “feeding” the alchemical crucible with fresh matter during operations – precisely what analytic interpretations do. Putrefactio, or allowing to rot, is a fundamental process in psychotherapy as pathologies – expressed as symptoms – are examined.

Coniunctio and separatio Let us return to the coniunctio that was the focus of the previous two chapters 9 and 10. It is, as I argued, the most important operation in alchemical psychotherapy as the transference effect. How are things brought together or put together? Jungian psychology emphasises the problem of the union of opposites, especially the big moral questions of good and evil, light and dark, conscious and unconscious. Alfred Adler suggested that speaking in such oppositional terms is itself a neurosis. Once we oppose, we tend to take sides, to moralise, where the Other becomes inferior. We could think instead in terms of “tandems” as paradoxical meetings. This, rather than also trying to reconcile opposites, looking for balance or compromise, or a transcendent third of the sort that I discussed in previous chapters as Hegelian dialectic. Jung described sudden enantiodromia, or phenomena turning into their opposites. Alchemy offers an aesthetic approach to conjoining: to explore the particular ways in which things meet as styles of conjunction or joining and then styles of separation.

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Styles by which things may be joined Substances are brought together in differing ways in alchemy through heating, dissolving and so forth. These offer metaphors for the ways that people interact or make relationships to the things of the world, including the built environment, organisations, institutions and the natural environment. Styles of coming together are reflected in styles and manners of transference effects. Things come together through stitching, coincidence, mutual attraction, persuasion, attraction of opposites, force, aggression or vigour, hard work, effort, time, osmosis or slow interpenetration, gradual warming, patience, or through sudden intense hot passions, as: 1. Fusing and welding: through the uses of slow, gentle or more intense heat. First, permanent welds: the heat is right and maintained for long enough, the solder is of the right consistency, the weld holds. There may even be a symbolic connection such as a wedding ring, denoting permanence. Second, impermanent or temporary welds: a flash in the pan; not enough heat; the solder is inconsistent. 2. Glueing: a bond is formed, a mutual coagulation, a commitment and binding, a deep dependency. 3. Stitching: while stitching is good for softer material, sometimes one gets “stitched up”. 4. Hinging: things are held together loosely with relative independence; an open contract. 5. Riding tandem: unlike hinging, one depends upon the other; there are common interests and goals, tensions lived and paradoxes tolerated. 6. Patching: things held together much more loosely than stitching, and faults may be patched over. This may be a very open patchwork affair, a covering up of rents, tears, gaps and holes, or imperfections. Patching may demand tolerance of the imperfect.

Coincidence of opposites Coincidence is another way to bring together opposites. There is no forcing, but trust in serendipity. One is educated into living with and tolerating paradoxes. A style of imagination is developed that tolerates the stress of tensions, rather than trying to resolve, transcend, deny, compromise, achieve balance and harmony, reconcile differences, or look for a way out through a third or intermediary. Alchemy is a sustained education into tolerance of ambiguity and intolerance of stability. The symbols of the paradoxical connection include the Stone that sweats, the

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Rebis or “two thing”, Mercurius as winged person, a homunculus, a blue dog, the Philosopher’s Child, the Spirit in the Bottle, and The False Bride. Alchemists warned about false or forced conjunction as well as too hasty separations. The patient grabs at the first thing that comes out of the analysis and tries to make an early synthesis. The “ideal” partner, job or house is found too quickly. Things are rushed. We bring into the new relationship too much of the old. There are poor welds, hasty fixes, trusting the rusty hinge, patching without glue or cement. This can lead to the child of Frankenstein, the monstrum. The monster (Shakespeare’s Caliban, Richard III) as the product of a too-hasty conjunction, is an offspring of union with the false bride. The Rebis, or “two-thing”, is unnatural, sterile, but psychologically rich and virile. The chemical alchemists who would only inhabit the laboratory and not the library are naturally fertile but psychologically impoverished. We need the two. Psychotherapies need sensitive practices based on rich theory. Where is the rich theory in behavioural or stimulus-response methods, or in mindfulness as a watered-down European version of Buddhist meditation? Shakespeare’s Caliban is all Nature, raw, uncooked, instinct, animal and must be “cooked” or brought to culture. But first, tolerate the monster and ask it what it wants. Archetypal psychology calls the product of the marriage of opposites “soul”: psyche or imagination – participating in both mind (abstraction, symbol, image, model, idea, ideal, spirit, literalism) and matter (nature, material, concrete). Let us again think of this paradox as embodied metaphor. It is the heart of psychotherapeutic method. Without it, the method is mere mechanics. Finally, the conjunction is the precondition for putrefaction. The tolerance of a paradoxical meeting also provides the conditions for attending to pathologies that arise out of that meeting. Indeed, it is only through the conjunction, the relationship, that such pathologies or symptoms come to light. Partners are mirrors for each other’s symptoms. The coniunctio is the precondition for the development of a metaphorical consciousness – for the natural to be dissolved and the imaginal to emerge. Putrefaction, a stink, marks the death of the naturalistic fallacy. When we let go of our literalisms, our fixities, there is the stink of a lingering corpse as symptoms are addressed. There may be suffering too. But this is a precondition for revelation.

Styles by which things may be separated Freud pioneered a psycho-analysis and not a psycho-synthesis (the latter can be credited to Roberto Assagioli). However, as we have seen, the therapeutic endeavour is a work of interpretation that makes sense to a client such that a shift in consciousness and habit happens. This is synthetic. To get to this point, analysis must

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happen. The alchemists saw iteration (iteration) as key to the Work – patiently going over and over the same ground, revisiting, revising, reworking. So too with psychotherapy – cycles of analysis before a synthesis can be reached. Analysis is also what we do with texts, close reading (watch the fire, not what the fire gives off ), critically dissecting them to gain meanings. Alchemy has two primary forms: dissolving in liquids (dissolution) and separation into parts as a solid (falling apart). These are the two main metaphor complexes for therapeutic work: catharsis or emotional release (followed by insight), most often in sadness or regret, as shedding tears; and body re-alignment as emotional and cognitive blockages are shifted. Such “bodywork” has its origins in Wilhelm Reich’s practices, a psychoanalyst who departed from Freud’s static reverie and talk on the couch to engage the body more fully through breath and movement. For Reich, emotional blockages are registered as shallow breathing and muscular rigidity leading to poor posture. Things come apart in different ways: 1. Calcining or burning off (see chapter 3 where a variety of fiery or combustible conditions are described: impulses, compulsions, rages, burning out). 2. Dissolving or slipping away when wet (erotic adventures; weakness of spirit and muscle). 3. Caustic solvents (the alchemists called these – such as acids – dragons and secret fires; we can think of bitter recriminations and name-calling, or hasty caustic solutions to knotty issues). 4. Putrefying (falling apart with a stink; pathologies or symptoms do this). 5. Tenderising (bruising, meat falling off the bone; the aftermath of arguments and accidents). 6. Drifting apart (lost loves, passions burned out, dissimilar interests). 7. Forced apart (somebody or something steps in the way – is it an impediment or an opportunity?) 8. Splitting when dry (dried out and fragile, no eros). 9. Unhinging (really coming apart; fits of bizarre thoughts and behaviour). 10. Coming apart at the seams (as above, but slower). 11. Crumbling, collapsing (dried out, no cohesion, no foothold and no binding through moisture; a residue of bitterness, an ash; crumbling when touched – overcooked, old and stale). 12. Unhooking (a sense of freedom). 13. Unstitching (as above but with flamboyance). 14. Ripening (falling from the tree, falling from the home). 15. Repulsion (no magnetism left). 16. Differentiating (noting and acting on differences). 17. Loss of container (spilling, drifting away). 18. Lack of glue, balsam, connective tissue (nothing to hold on to; no trusted links).

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19. The subtle rises above the gross (stick to an ethical position). 20. Extracting (removed, taken away, sectioned, taken into care). 21. Separation in self (competing sub-personalities or identities; or identifications; the image in the mirror is not me, unrecognisable). 22. Cutting (ties, bonds). 23. Migrating (by choice or forced through conflict, poverty, climate change). 24. Gone into hiding (excommunicated; carrying guilt).

Dissolution A therapist meets a client who brings a torrent of water metaphors to the early sessions: all at sea, drowning in sorrow, liquidity in her speech and association of ideas. The therapist’s best means of empathy and close attention are to engage with water itself: get to know specifically the kinds of waters and forms of dissolution that the client experiences – what kinds of thirsts are described and how will they be slaked? What “solutions” has she tried? The therapist would benefit for example from reading Ivan Illich’s (1985) masterful H2O and The Waters of Forgetfulness, a historical meditation on water’s place in culture, including key issues for therapy such as the history of the water closet (WC), essential for understanding the psyche of anally-fixated cultures where cleanliness is next to godliness. Illich notes that water has gone from being a magical fluid to a cleaning fluid. Common motifs for clients in the metaphors of their speech and dreams are blocked drains and loos, toilets that flush back and cause an unholy mess, drownings, bogs – places where the psyche is stuck or blocked and life takes on the same form. In the same vein, an anima mundi therapy, or world-soul therapy, may attend to our environmental crisis by asking how we got to a position where water once purified, but now we purify water. I have seen in therapy alcoholics who dream of clear, running waters where their own lives are governed by the thick spirits, intoxicating waters that are fires in disguise. “Alcohol” has its roots in the Arabic alkuhul or al kohl (literally, a “body-eating spirit”) that refers to a fine black powder used for eye makeup that we still call kohl or coal. Al kuhul was well known in Arabic alchemy, obtained by sublimation from mercury. The intoxicating demon with beautiful eyes – no wonder that we cannot resist a drink. Repressed waters (never allowing the tears to flow, losing fluidity in life by stiffening up) return as images and metaphors in dreams such as floods, acid rain and rising damp. In D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow (as we have seen from previous chapters, a marvellous alchemical novel of personality transformations set at the height of the English Industrial Revolution where once pure waters become contaminated and now need purification) the patriarch of the Brangwen family

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Tom Brangwen, sensing his own mortality, gets drunk during a fierce storm with torrential rain and floods, and stumbles into a river to be swept away to his death: He went to meet the running flood, sinking deeper and deeper. His soul was full of great astonishment. He had to go and look where it came from, though the ground was going from under his feet. … The water was carrying his feet away, he was dizzy. He did not know which way to turn. The water was whirling, whirling, the whole black night was swooping in rings. … In his soul he knew he would fall. … Something struck his head, a great wonder of anguish went over him, then the blackness covered him entirely. In the utter darkness, the unconscious, drowning body was rolled along.

Lawrence captures the greatest of alchemical experiments – the point of death. The patriarch of the family has already imbibed, is drunk. The waters that always fascinated him have their last say. Lawrence (2006) was fascinated himself by psychoanalysis (see Fantasia of the Unconscious and Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious). John Turner (2020) notes how the Austrian analyst Otto Gross’ ideas on sexuality influenced Lawrence, as they did Jung. In the passage above, the unconscious speaks in Lawrence’s sentence “In the utter darkness, the unconscious, drowning body was rolled along” where, if we add the definite article “the” before “drowning body” then it is as if Tom Brangwen is tumbled by the moving waters in the dark towards an unconscious. It is a fantasia of the unconscious. Brangwen enters a dreamscape. The rising waters become a metaphor for the gate to the unconscious. No wonder “His soul was full of great astonishment” as he enters the unconscious with eyes wide open. Note that this was a product of fascination: Tom Brangwen “had” to enter the waters that are swirling in rings. This is his alchemical dissolution. It is pre-ordained. At this moment the smaller work of the personal search for meaning joins the larger work of the Soul’s machinations. For Tom Brangwen, fascinating waters become dangerous waters – a common theme for clients showing extreme emotional flux during a marriage breakup involving another relationship. Sometime waters pool, or somebody becomes fascinated by or dreams of swimming pools, where the water is contained. Perhaps the waters are seeking to flow. The pool is beguiling but is a place of possible stagnation. Dreams offer spontaneous metaphor hordes of a kind that rational exchanges often suppress. A woman brings a dream to therapy that seems to play on her relationship to the four elements. The dream begins: Bobby, Daisy and I are all in the field with the horse when I notice the whole hoof is split horribly and the shoe bust off. We were grooming her when I noticed it. Daisy was not unduly concerned but I am very worried and must get the horse to the vet. There is a whippet with a lump of weed in its mouth which I am tugging at.

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The woman seems to have a very grounded relationship with animals, whose presence increase the power not just of her senses but also of her compassion: when I get close to the animal, then I notice. The same thing happens with the whippet: when the whippet appears with a lump of weed in its mouth, then the tugging starts. The woman seems bound to these animals, close to earth. Note the parallel with Tom Brangwen in another elemental sphere: when I get close to the water, then I notice. More, when the water grips me, then I must notice. It is the substance of the world doing the work. In the woman’s dream, the horse brings her to notice, as do the whippet and the weed. The dream continues with an abrupt change of scene: There is a large natural pool which is very blue but has a sandy or muddy bottom with bits of scrap metal half covered under the water. It is dangerous. There is a man in the water with a baby who he is dunking and the baby is enjoying it. The man has a beard. Somewhere in the dream is another man who is baptising himself.

Now she switches base, from safe and sustaining earth to more puzzling waters. She is in Tom Brangwen’s territory, but here the waters are still, yet beguiling in their tranquillity. The beauty of the water and the seemingly playful and spiritual acts of its male occupants are set against an earthy and dangerous contamination of mud and scrap metal. The more mundane elements seem to sing out “notice us”. The woman dreamer does not enter the male-dominated pool. She is observer to the baptisms, not participant. Where “common” earth seems safe to her, the introduction of the apparently spiritual waters turns the earth into a common dump. In the third part of the dream, the woman enters “a large department store”. She makes her way down some stairs to a back exit and is followed by a woman acquaintance and her friend who whisper, loud enough for her to hear, “that she can’t stand me”. The dreamer makes a retort about “north country bitches”. She cannot find an exit and ends up in a “greasy kitchen” where, “I climb back up steep wooden stairs into the store, higher and higher and end up on a shelf construction very high and cannot get down”. She starts to panic and to try to work out a way to get down from the height: “There is an open shelf arrangement full of bric-a-brac, buttons and haberdashery which I know I will have to knock over and scatter if I am to get down”. Here, moving from safe earth to unsafe air, the dream ends, with her suspended. She has carried the tension of the spat with the women into this predicament. This spat can be taken as the element of fire, smouldering and ready to spark. From safe earth, to mystical waters, to sudden fire to unsafe air, she traverses the elements and marks each one with value. This was indeed a very grounded person, completely at ease with practical tasks but who had no confidence at all in her

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intellect and had a spiritual yearning. Her emotions were easily roused by jealousies of others’ intellectual capacities and sureties in spiritual practices. Our lives are marked by water: baptisms overseen by Mnemosyne, the goddess of the well of memory and creative inspiration; and death’s journey via the river Lethe, the waters of forgetfulness, a tributary of the river Styx that signals our final destination to the Underworld. The Romans did not bathe to clean themselves, but as a form of purification. The Celts introduced soap to the Romans, along with the idea that bathing should be for cleaning. Ivan Illich (1985) notes that where types of waters were once named and known (how they flowed or pooled, how they tasted and so forth) and each had a presiding spirit (wells in particular were given presiding gods, goddesses and spirits by the Greeks, Romans and Celts), now water is a chemical substance: H2O. Our imagination of water and our associated metaphors become impoverished as we imagine water chemically and know it by its additives: carbonated in fizzy drinks, purified in bottled water, “on tap” in homes. The visit to the well and the remembrance of the spirit of the well is extinguished or thought to be a fancy, trivial. Water is not blessed but stressed, filtrated and chlorinated. Our streams and rivers meanwhile become polluted from intensive agriculture and this washes into the sea. In turn, air pollution causes acid rain. Our daily contact with water is then through industrial process and we wave goodbye to water as we flush our shit down the loo, so the “workings of water” are out of sight. Water of course is a socially divisive marker: the rich have access and the poor do not. When the water closet was introduced to richer households on the banks of the Thames, waste was flushed straight in to the river and polluted the water source used downstream by the poor. As calcination determines where the thirst is (what type) so dissolution determines the style of separation. A dissolution is both a breaking down (analysis) of matter, but also a holding of matter in suspension and then a kind of fixing and synthesis. Water ab-solves, or purifies. Soil, shit, dirt, filth, dung, glue, mud and blemish all have the same root meaning as “miasma” – whatever can be dislodged and washed away, or dissolved. Hercules cleans out the Augean stables by diverting a river through the building. John Wesley said that “cleanliness is next to godliness” (a phrase he stole from the ancient Hebrew Rabbi Phinehas Ben Yair). But, to clean out is also to impoverish. We may just lose the baby with the bathwater. We scrubbed and perfumed post-moderns would not have been able to bear the stench in Classical and Medieval cities and towns, where chamber pots were emptied straight onto the streets and pigs were free to roam to clean the streets. Ravens, kites and vultures were protected animals because they could scavenge waste. Louis XIV brought in an ordinance to clean the corridors of Versailles weekly from deposited waste. The Royal Palace of Madrid in a 1772 survey did not have a

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single privy. By the mid 17th century, “scavengers” were paid to clean the streets of London. It was not until the late 18th century that the English upper class adopted water closets in the home. Two outbreaks of cholera in 1849 and 1853 – 4 killed 20,000 people in London, spread by waterborne faecal contamination. Between 1848 – 55, six Parliamentary commissions investigated water pollution in London. Now, water was no longer a treatment; rather water must be treated. In the early 19th century in the USA on average 1– 3 gallons of water were consumed each day by each individual. This has risen to 100 gallons, and industry uses at least 10 times more. In this potted history is a multitude of “world soul” alchemical transformations, reinforcing my insistence that alchemy in the personal realm is really secondary to alchemy in the world. Every-day or “tired” metaphors can provide a folk wisdom or a common therapy. Draw up a list of corny sayings and you will find a rich source of therapeutic wisdom: drowning in our tears, getting into hot water, and so forth. Every-day waters are important: the washing up left in the bowl from the night before; the bathtub fails to be drained; the loo is blocked and a flood occurs – all the shit comes back at us, in the wrong direction. We crave water but all we get is constant sweating from anxiety. As an alternative to problem-solving and seeking solutions, often for insoluble issues that require tolerance of ambiguity, is to imagine through liquids or draw on liquid metaphors. When something is dried out or has dried up, is desiccated – a relationship, a job, a friendship, an aspect of personality – it calls first for specific articulation of the kind of drying out that has occurred and the form of that drying out is in the symptom. First, we must ask the symptom what it wants. Understanding the drying out requires calling on the resources and metaphors of calcining (use of fire) discussed in chapter 5. Sometimes a dry state is necessary and further desiccation may be needed. But often, drying out calls for treatment from its opposite: adding water, or dissolving. Dissolving in liquids is a form of separating materials. Clients dissolve in their tears. The psyche produces images of dissolution, often in dreams of drowning. The water may however be a mirage – the thirst is so strong that the psyche produces a false hope. A man on the verge of splitting up from his partner dreams that he is a fish, but there is no water around. Then he has a series of dreams about “rectangular pools about a hundred feet by fifty”. These are set – rather awkwardly – in idyllic, rolling countryside: “I am slightly below the level of the pools where there seems to be some sort of race going on”. Water is elevated in the dream – it wants to be noticed. The race is frantic and moves from pool to pool “adding to the general hubbub”. The following night, he dreams of a large map on which the earth is coloured in browns and greens, but the oceans are “real water”. Later, he dreams again “there is a race in a swimming pool. When the race is over, the pool is suddenly

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empty and is being used for ballroom dancing. I lift a dark lady from the pool side and we swing into a dance”. Here, the man, a fish out of water, seems to be searching for some natural force of water in a world of artificial waters, the latter attracting competition. When the artificial waters recede, then the “dark lady” appears and every sense of awkwardness disappears, as he “swings” into the dance. The fish out of water finds his rhythm. This man was hamstrung by his boring job and conformity. He needed to break out of this and discover a little more of his wild side: the promise of the oceanic “real water”. Here also was a pragmatic man who said that he never remembered his dreams, while “imagination” was for fools. Suddenly, he was drowning in imagery. What is important in such therapy is to discriminate between different kinds and styles of dissolution – to be specific about the metaphors. Are waters soft and comforting, such as milk? Or are they corrosive, such as seawater, acid, urine, and vinegar? Perhaps they are fizzy such as carbonated waters, sweet sodas or beers. To be in “solution” (in the double meaning) is to be out of fixity, fixed positions, dogmas, compromising positions and so forth. Further, is the dissolution felt as dangerous (flooding, drowning) or comforting (desperate for a drink)? Are waters fascinating, acting as mirrors (Narcissus gazing at his reflection in the pool)? Do they arouse curiosity, provide relief, endanger lives? “Solutions” come in different forms and often not as “solutions” but as further conundrums, reinforcing Lacan’s view that no analysis comes to a logical “solution”. Rather it makes things more complex by bringing depth and intensity. But the complexity is vivifying. “Nonsense!” says the client who comes into therapy because her life is too complex and she wants to clarify where she is going and what she is doing. But her chaos is her stratification and defence, a style of order or settlement: an untidy house maybe, but a house nevertheless with boundaries and not a nomadic existence. For this particular person, we sought to find the “best fit” “solution”: the chaos is a defence mechanism against commitment. Asked “what is commitment?” she immediately bursts into tears – the most common form of dissolution. I cry because I am sad. My chaos is a form of sadness. What if we didn’t try to rid her of the sadness but saw this as a resource, a direct route to a style of commitment? Behind these therapeutic manouevres tailored to the person, the psychotherapist can benefit from an alchemically-tinged language of types of dissolution – ways of coming apart (breaking fixities) that are paradoxical “solutions”, styles of liquidity: 1. The relief of a calcined state: just one drop of liquid is needed to turn an ashen state into a solution. There is reactivation through moisture such as dissolving in tears. Confessions melt the ice; fluidity is gained out of fixity; liquids provide support for heavy matters.

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

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Thinning the body: a solvent for coagulated matter; while acidic remarks and manners can be hurtful in other contexts, here a certain acidity may be helpful, like the acidity of fruits, giving an “edge”. Melting the solid and dependable: suddenly falling in love with another in the middle of an established marriage; overwhelmed by sentiment. Melting the hardness of the heart: melting pride; making confessions; eros visits and sensuality is appreciated. Separation of what was previously conjoined: melting the glue, dissolving the fixative; dissolving ties and contracts. Dissolving fixations: as above, but the dissolution is over a longer time period. Purification: ablution – getting out the stains; or shifting the big shit (Hercules diverting a river to clean the Augean stables); redemption: allowing the aerial soul to release itself from matter and move freely into solution. Aerating: carbonating waters to give them fizz, a lift. Saturated solutions: something is ready to crystallise out. Where the thirst is dictates the manner of slaking and the kinds of waters needed: tired, bitter, desiring – wet behind the ears, sleeping in our own urine. Getting in and out of hot water and cooking in our own juices: the balance between risk and regulation. Regression: becoming a sap, wet behind the ears, fresh dew, returning to waters of the womb, oceanic bliss, animal sweetness and comfort – expressed breast milk. Frolicking in Aphrodite’s froth: sexual moistures, playfulness, yeasty moments. Recall that Aphrodite is born in the sea’s foam from the castrated genitalia of Chronos. When the daughter resolves mis-placed love for her father, she can let loose a little without judgement. Drowning our sorrows: social drinking slides into solitary drinking. The return of repressed waters: rising damp, floods, acid rain.

Discriminating between differing kinds of solutions depends also upon knowing what caused the thirst. One is bored and boring, dry as dust, dry as a bone, burned out. Burning up inside, inflamed, ashen, desiccate, taken by the wind. Warmed over, some old stuff re-heated. Tempered in the fire until the heat has no effect – immune to passion and to old and new flames. These fiery states call for specific kinds and qualities of dissolution to reactivate matter. However, watering a sunbaked earth where the water immediately evaporates is not the same as devising an effective irrigation system. Interventions as solutions cannot be haphazard, short-term, or ill-conceived. The client is the guide, she dissolves in tears, laughter, embarrassment, or confession. As a calcined substance (her chronic impulses) is heavier or more intense,

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water may be needed to distribute the weight and dissolve the intensity. The dissolution is the resolution of any substance that has been calcined. The dissolving agent may be soft like water (support) or corrosive like acid (confrontation). To be in solution is to gain fluidity, to get out of fixity. This may offer a resolution of a problem. Defences and resistances may be dissolved to allow for adaptability. The habitual is dissolved, the stubborn is melted, the hardness of heart becomes more fluid. The coagulated, the clogged and congealed are attenuated. Old fixities become more fluid. Melting what was solid and dependable now creates a runny fluid. This oozes and loses shape that is alarming to the client. Intensities of heat cause solids to become liquids. Alchemy provides an education into sensitivity to the states of matter – what matters to a person comes in lumps, fluids, flakes, delicate layers, putrid ooze, perfumed odours, strange airs, fiery outbursts, heated arguments, cold detachment, boiling breath, curdled words, snaking stares, woolly gestures, damp squibs, hot sex, looks that bore into the soul, piercing cries and warm embraces.

Cibation Cibation means “feeding”. This has literal and metaphorical meanings: eating, feeding one’s young, feeding the world, feeding your mind. Cibation is full of contradictions: we have enough food to feed the world but too much of the world’s population is starving. High income countries have a problem with mass obesity. One third of food produced is wasted. You can feed your mind, but you might just do this through ingestion of junk food (bad information). Psychological tensions around food create epidemics of anxiety, fed by diet fads and regimes – this brings many people into therapy to “work” on their food issues, usually linked to body perceptions (too fat or too thin). Food books and food fad diet books are best sellers, outselling serious novels, poetry and factual books that could perhaps better feed our minds and imaginations. The key to the practical alchemical Work (the work of life and the life of work) is to keep the fires stoked, or well fed. This operates on all levels – the personal, the worldly and the transcendental. How will we carry on unless our passions move us to action coupled with reflexion or contemplation? We must “feed” the fire – cibation, again, is feeding. But in turn the fire is heating something, it is warming our desires, and fuelling our cultural developments; it is branding the hippocampus and cerebellum with memories; and erasing histories through blaze. Our first questions must be, have we got the right kind of fire (see chapter 5) and is it the correct intensity of heat? Are we warming the bath or scalding the stone? Our biggest existential dilemma is that we have lit a fire through industrial devel-

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opment that is now out of control through global warming; we are close to dropping the stone that is too hot to handle – a world on fire. We can maintain the fire and recover the stone, but not at current intensities and not through fossil fuels. The same kind of thinking applies to the small fires in our chests and bellies. In psychotherapy, the practitioner’s first question must be “what kinds of heat can be applied?” What the fire heats – the substances of the Work – in turn need to be “fed”. This is the alchemical process of cibation – feeding with fresh material. This is a metaphor for invention. It is central to psychotherapeutic work as therapy can feed or starve a complex or set of symptoms, and feed or starve a strategy for attending to symptom. The world is plagued by cibation – literal over-feeding leading to an obesity pandemic in the post-industrial world, as literal under-feeding leading to starvation across worlds subject to poverty, agricultural problems from climate issues, and access to food from issues of conflict and mass migrations. Cibation is a global and personal concrete issue as well as a metaphorical one – how shall we be “fed” bodily and nourished emotionally? Where the “vessel” needs to be “fed” we can see a parallel to alchemy in psychotherapy where the client craves to be fed: information, ideas, interpretations, but, above all, nurtured or looked after emotionally and intellectually. Such “feeding” must be regulated and not contaminated by counter-transferential feelings where the therapist uses “food” as a means of winning the client’s adulation. Similarly, in a negative countertransference, the client must not be punished by unconscious withholding of cibation or “feeding”. For example, clients with eating disorders (anorexia, bulimia, binge/purge cycles, overeating) can be seen through an alchemical imagination to be coping with food disorders and body-image disorders that are in the culture first and in the person secondarily. They may crave institutional nourishment in the form of certain kinds of attention as compensation for the perceived disordered nourishment they have received from the home. Adult, developed sensualities (“taste”) has failed to develop as they regress to oral and anal fixations. Metaphors help: they must “spit out” what is really bothering them, and “chew over” differing interpretations of their conditions. More, rather than focusing on the client, it is useful to focus on the foods – what is tolerated or liked and what is disliked and hated. What taboos do certain foods carry? What foods are forbidden and what taboos are associated with which foods? We focus on what the person does with food, but not how foods mess with the person. There is an evidence-base that Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (Wisniewski and Ben-Porath 2015) is helpful for people suffering from a variety of eating disorders. At core, the therapy works with what R.D. Laing would have called “knots” and what philosophers might call dialectical conundrums grounded in contradiction; while the therapy is group- or family-based. The therapy setting might be seen

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as the alchemical flask or alembic. The shape of the vessel matters in alchemy – differing vessels for different operations. The psychotherapeutic equivalent is: one-to-one, group, community. For example, the single pelican vessel (figure 9.12 chapter 9) is based on a mother pelican feeding her young on the blood she pecks from her own breast. This is a model of the anorexic stuck in a cycle of self-harm. A double pelican (figure 9.11 chapter 9) shows circulation between two vessels, a model of the therapeutic encounter. Such therapy, nevertheless, is a long way from the beauty advertised by use of alchemical metaphors. The Wisniewski and Ben-Porath article referenced here is entitled “Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Eating Disorders: The Use of Contingency Management Procedures to Manage Dialectical Dilemmas”. You would have to work hard to produce a more functional title, reinforced by a double use of “manage”. All metaphors are driven into the wilderness. Here is an alchemical setting: a group (vessels) gathered around the fire (symptoms) in which certain operations are happening, such as cibation, that are grounded in contradiction: both this and that; both/and. The dialectical movement is to see the synthesis of thesis and antithesis as containing elements from both. Milton Erickson’s psychotherapeutic approach classically draws on such contradictory scenarios (Haley 1985). A man who wants to give up alcohol and wants to lose weight at the same time is asked by the therapist to make two unbreakable covenants or rules: he must walk at least two miles every day to pick up his booze from the store and he can only pick up a very limited amount of drink. What happens is a contradictory compromise: the man doesn’t want to walk two miles a day, there and back to the store, so he only buys a limited amount of drink over a longer period and thus halves his drinking habit. At the same time, as he does not want to give up drink, he must walk say every other day or every three days to buy his drink, so he does get exercise. The cibation is calculated: the therapist feeds the habit but the client is doing the work to change habits. Most importantly, the rules of the therapy must not be broken – this is the covenant of the transference. The man does not want to be seen by the therapist to have cheated. After all, this would be letting down his own father or mother. Alchemy, psychotherapy and cookery share the same conditions: the ingredients must be weighed and measured and must mix well to produce a good end result. The obese person must learn that cutting down on calories is a matter of cibation, a matter – paradoxically – of more, not less, “feeding”. But the feeding here is one of the client feasting on her own complexes. You can eat as much as you want, as long as you eat what is eating you! More Ericksonian conundrums. In a family setting, members are asked to look at the logical contradictions that they set each other that produces a sudden freezing in the headlights, fear, even terror and ultimately distaste, a variety of double-binds or knots. Classically, the

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parent offers love at the same time as they push the child away; they give the child freedoms by making rules; they are leaving the house just as the child wants to ask a question; they mistake smothering for care; they forgive the child for the wrong things and they don’t allow the child to make enough mistakes. Cibation too is the constant feeding of solar brilliance with lunar reflection. Sulphuric impulse (chapter 6) gives energy for life, but demands reflection – pause, insight and considered thought. Without reflection there is no change, no innovation, just ruts and repetition, endless solar brilliance with no tonal variety. The alchemists describe the ground for the Work as a “white, foliated earth”, an earth under moonlight. Foliated means made up of thin layers. The layers provide texture and corruptions of the light. So, the work of psychotherapy is patient layering of insight, working in the dark, lit by the moon – on a rhythm, the light often gone or dim and then increasing to a brilliance within the dark. And is the moon not always a surprise, a gift? This is not problem-solving, but problem-stating and problem-layering such that insights gradually become sedimented and start to make sense. The therapeutic goal is to educate the senses, to bring them to fine points, to cultivate discrimination. This is finding your voice. A woman oppressed in her relationship gradually finds her voice. She brings a dream close to closure of her sessions: “I am looking down my own throat and on the right are three round lumps like translucent jellyfish or frogspawn. They are greyish with a brown blob in the centre”. No, she didn’t have throat cancer; and who can guess at their symbolic meanings? That is a receding horizon. What she did was to paint the scene. She took the image literally, or as metaphor: “let’s get a voice”, wobbly, lumpy, specifically tonal. She painted more of the scene and some beautiful abstracts emerged. She had found a voice at the point of swallowing by feeding her complexes, represented visually as wobbly and not too showy – brown and grey. Let’s do that sentence again – she had found a voice. In art, in visual poetics. The alchemical imagination gives a voice to the unsung matter of the world, and what matters, through rich, embodied metaphor. We should not take alchemy literally, but seriously, as an opening up of whatever matters.

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Index Active imagination (free association) 23, 26, 203, 216 Addiction 75, 134, 138, 160 f., 196 Adler, Alfred 10, 89, 163, 168, 206, 217 Aeneas 139 Aesthetics 1, 184, 198 f., 209 – beauty 6 f., 11, 24 f., 33, 45 f., 50 f., 62, 76, 80 f., 149, 172, 183 – 185, 187, 189, 198 f., 207, 211, 223, 230 Affective labour 176 Alcohol 101, 160, 168, 221, 230 Alembic 94, 160, 177, 230 Anality 21, 44, 132, 140, 143 – 145 Analysis (as solve) 11, 18, 29, 38, 53, 62, 64, 85, 87, 103 f., 119, 139, 157, 162, 165, 175, 177, 181, 184, 189, 197 f., 201 f., 204, 206 f., 209 f., 216 f., 219 f., 224, 226 Analytical Psychology 27 f., 34, 42, 202 Androgyny (chymical wedding) 175 – 177, 206 Anger 66, 96, 102, 108, 112 f., 121 f., 151, 163, 175, 178 Anima 42, 129, 139, 201, 206 – anima fascination 197, 206 Anima Mundi (World Soul) 30, 125, 131, 137, 171, 221 Animus 42, 206 Anorexia 75, 167, 185, 229 Aphrodite (Venus) 27, 31, 106, 108, 227 Appignanesi, Lisa 198, 201 – 203 Archetypal Psychology 27, 29, 35, 42, 61, 66, 80, 119, 129, 207, 219 Ares (Mars) 106, 108, 150 Ariel 54, 138, 193 f. Ariès, Phillipe 143, 145 Aristotle 7, 115 Artaud, Antonin 188 Art of Memory 79, 164 Art therapy 3 Ash (also cinders) 52, 83, 85, 89, 91, 94, 96 f., 100 – 103, 117, 126 – 128, 132 f., 140, 178, 186, 220, 226 f. Atalanta Fugiens 65, 129 f., 140

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111157368-015

Attention 4, 9, 30, 35, 44, 56, 69, 72, 80, 85, 87, 92, 94 f., 98, 102, 124, 131, 134 f., 141, 145, 153, 158 f., 181, 186, 197, 206, 221, 229 – Selective attention 159 Bachelard, Gaston 33, 82, 89 f., 92, 102, 118, 142 Bacon, Francis 140 Barad, Karen 37 Barrie, JM 144 Barthes, Roland 38, 43 Base metals 10, 14, 26, 52, 63 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 198 Benes, Barton 186 Benzene ring 36 Berry, Pat 146 Bile – black bile 62 f. – yellow bile 62 f. Bioenergetics (post-Reichian bodywork) 120 Biomedical science 2, 5 f., 59, 73 – biomedical reductionism 4 f. Bipolar disorder 68, 134 Bishop, Peter 151 Bleakley, Alan 1, 4 – 6, 8 f., 11, 25, 30, 33 f., 41, 61, 67 f., 72, 86, 89, 109, 116, 118, 123, 131, 135, 139, 164, 168, 173, 210, 214 f. Blood 7, 17, 62 f., 65, 70, 76, 91, 98, 106, 112, 114 f., 122, 125, 128, 131, 151, 161, 167 f., 186, 191, 193 – 195, 230 Body dysmorphia 15, 72, 167, 185 Borges, Jorge Luis 159 f. Brearley, Michael 207, 209 Breuer, Joseph 9, 66, 214 British National Formulary (BNF) 68, 74 Bromley, Roger 125 Brooks, Gwendolyn 55 Brown, Brian 3 Brown, Norman O. 187 Brunelleschi, Filippo 31 Bulimia 75, 229 Burgess, Anthony 129

Index

Burke, Edmund Burke, Kenneth

198 58

Cage, Nicholas 126 f. Calcination 83 – 85, 96, 100 f., 212, 224 Caliban 219 Callard, Felicity 37 Canguilhem, Georges 74 Carlin, Nathan 4 Carnal hermeneutics 118 Carson, Anne 179 Carson, Rachel 113 Carson, Ronald 4 Case, Anne 8, 11, 20, 35, 59, 61, 76, 121, 129, 134 f., 137, 144, 150, 159 – 161, 163, 167 f., 171, 184, 186, 189, 201 Catharsis (Greek katharsis) 87, 106, 115, 120, 124, 129, 165, 171, 178 f., 181, 193, 220 Causticity 102, 119 Celts 224 Chadwick, Helen 186 Charcot, Jean-Martin 9, 38 – 40 Charise, Andrea 3 f. Chekhov, Anton 7 Chemistry 10, 20, 22 f., 32 f., 47, 50, 52, 54 – 56, 61 – 63, 71 f., 76 f., 81, 90, 200, 211 Child (archetype) 44, 71, 88, 94, 141 – 146, 152 f., 155, 167, 179, 190, 193, 203, 209, 212, 219, 231 Chronos (Saturn) 15, 17, 71, 212, 227 Cibatio (feeding) 64, 217, 228 – 231 Cioran, EM 173 Classification schemes 75 Climate crisis 4, 9, 11, 20, 25, 30, 44, 124, 142, 148, 208 Coagula et solve (coagulate and dissolve) 45 Cognitive unconscious 47 Coincidence of opposites 218 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 54, 64, 68, 171 Cole, Thomas 4 f. Collective unconscious 10, 23, 30, 34, 47, 215 Colour changes (in alchemical operations) 42 – black 7, 53, 57, 65, 117, 127, 130 f., 142, 150, 154, 169, 186, 221 f. – blue 45, 53, 127, 130, 135, 137, 150 f., 169, 219, 223

241

– red

34, 46, 63, 70, 78, 83, 98, 106, 111 – 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 127 – 129, 131 f., 134 – 137, 141, 144 f., 150 f., 154, 186 – silver 45, 53, 64, 115, 130, 149, 169 – white 53, 63, 92, 98, 102, 126 f., 141, 156 f., 161, 193, 205, 231 Compulsion 11, 107, 110, 117, 119, 128 – 133, 139 – 141, 145, 154, 166, 171, 180, 220 Coniunctio (conjunction) 64, 81, 175 – 177, 180, 188, 195, 200, 204 – 206, 209, 213, 217, 219 Cooked, the 33, 82, 92, 95, 105, 177, 219 Cooper, David 138 Copper 153 – verdigris 151, 153 Coppola Francis Ford – Apocalypse Now 109 Corpus mundum 209 Crawford, Paul 3 f. Creation myth 26 Cyclothymia (mood swings) 45, 129, 134, 170 Davy, Humphry 32 Deaton, Angus 134 f. Defence mechanisms of the ego 61, 64, 128 Deleuze, Gilles 188 Demeter 85 Democratic habits 11, 118, 121 Depression 8, 15, 17, 21, 34, 53 f., 57, 59 f., 65 – 68, 70 f., 73, 79, 84, 87, 89, 107, 111, 117, 149 f., 158, 160, 165 f., 168, 170, 178, 212, 214 – depressive position 43, 150 De Rola, Stanislas Klossowski 50, 78, 81 Derrida, Jacques 43, 151, 176 – différance 107 – horizon project – ‘invention of the other’ 43 – iterability 43 Desire 10, 17, 20, 23, 30 f., 39, 50 f., 79, 85 f., 89, 91, 95, 97 – 99, 101 f., 107 f., 113 f., 123, 126 – 129, 131 f., 134 – 136, 139 f., 142 – 145, 151, 154 – 157, 163, 165 f., 171, 174, 177 f., 181, 183, 185 – 187, 189, 193 – 195, 203 f., 208, 212 f., 217, 228 Deuteronomy 161 Developmental fantasy 152

242

Index

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 58, 69, 74, 165 Dialectic 11, 37, 43, 174, 176, 180, 212 f., 217 Dialectical Behavior Therapy 230 Dib, Roula-Maria 29 – 31, 77 Dickinson, Emily 1 f. Dionysus 201 Dis 22, 98, 116, 130 – 132, 154, 184 Dis mal 133 Displacement 42, 51, 64, 89, 111, 174, 197 Dissociation 39 f. Dissolution 179, 195, 203, 213, 220 – 222, 224 – 228 – styles of liquidity 226 Distillation 42, 55 f., 77, 179, 181, 187 Donne, John 63, 77, 193 – 195, 202, 205 Double pelican 90 f., 191 f., 195, 204, 210, 230 Dreams 10, 23, 42, 61, 80, 150, 203 f., 213 f., 221 f., 225 f. Early modern period 14, 108 Eating disorders 9, 15, 44, 57, 59, 75, 89, 154, 168, 184 – 186, 229 f. Echo 11, 30, 38, 114, 146, 148, 183 Eco-logical (vs ego-logical) 9, 11, 89 Ego 20, 42 – 44, 47, 50 f., 61, 64, 87, 94, 116, 123, 128, 132, 162 f., 178, 184, 202 – 204, 207, 217 – ego-logical 9, 11, 89 Ekphrasis 7, 12 Electra complex 215 Eliade, Mircea 26, 66 Eliot, TS 2, 24 – information 2, 24, 67, 93, 159 f., 164, 180, 228 f. – knowledge 2, 24, 43, 52 f., 56, 61, 74 f., 79, 93, 99, 101, 107, 114, 123, 143, 160, 177, 179, 204, 210 – wisdom 2, 17, 24, 54, 66, 93, 101, 142, 149, 160, 172 f., 176, 204, 216, 225 Enantiodromia 19, 108, 217 Engestrõm, Yrjö 104 – Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) 176, 180 Enlightenment 20, 32 f., 46, 74, 76, 78 – 80, 147, 198

Entanglement 8, 35, 37 f., 156, 168, 183, 201, 203 Enthusiasm 50, 66, 83 f., 88 f., 94 – 96, 98 f., 101, 104, 107, 111, 129, 132, 134, 145, 153, 181, 201 Entropy 138, 153 Envy 151 Erickson, Milton 230 Eros (Cupid) 81, 89 – 91, 95, 107 f., 143, 145, 163, 171 f., 181, 193, 199 f., 203, 216, 220, 227 Erotic desire 82, 131, 133, 163 Eternal Return 21, 26, 43, 171 Ezekiel 170 Fat earth 32, 60, 118, 135, 137, 157 Faulkner, William 72, 116 Fecundity 129, 140 f. Fermentatio (fermentation) 55, 93, 191 Fever 17, 97 f., 116 Finlay, Karen 186 Fire 11, 18, 27 f., 31 – 33, 36, 50, 52 f., 63, 68 – 70, 72, 78 f., 81 – 105, 110, 112, 114, 116 f., 119, 121 – 123, 126, 128 – 131, 135, 143, 146, 156 – 158, 170, 173, 176, 179 f., 188, 193 f., 196 f., 206, 212, 220 f., 223, 225, 227 – 230 – flame 33, 50, 81 – 83, 86 – 88, 91 – 98, 100, 102 – 105, 110 f., 115, 123 f., 126 – 131, 138, 140, 143, 145, 147, 150, 154, 156, 173, 178, 180 f., 196, 227 – ice and fire 97 f. – kinds of fire (‘wet’, ‘heavy’, etc) 92 – secret fire 89, 91, 93, 172, 220 Fitch, Alanah 71 Fitzgerald, Des 37 Flamel, Nicholas 70, 200 Food 33, 75, 85, 112, 134, 138, 140, 168, 170, 184 f., 197, 228 f. – food disorders 9, 44, 89, 137, 154, 168, 184, 229 Force 10, 36, 44 f., 47, 50, 55, 62, 66 f., 70, 75, 91, 98, 107 f., 110 f., 119, 122, 127 f., 131, 136 f., 140, 142, 145 f., 148 f., 170, 184, 199, 203, 215, 218, 226 Forel, August 202 Forrester, John 201 – 203

Index

Foucault, Michel 31, 46, 74 f., 79 Foulkes, Lucy 71 f. Fowles, John 153 Free association 23, 26, 61, 216 Free-floating anxiety 66, 153 Freud, Sigmund 2, 8 – 10, 16 f., 23, 26, 38 f., 42, 47, 61, 64, 66 f., 80, 97, 108, 121, 127, 131 f., 140, 143 – 145, 153, 162 f., 165, 177 f., 181, 185, 189, 196, 201, 203, 214 – 217, 219 f. – Freud’s couch 38 Friedman, Lester 5 Galen 62 Gallo, Rubén 215 Gender fluidity 27, 42, 200 Giegerich, Wolfgang 28, 128, 133, 207 f. Global warming 82, 88, 94, 111, 113, 118, 154, 208, 229 – climate change 111, 113, 221 – greenhouse effect 113 Glü ck, Louise – ‘Alverno’ 111 Godin, Leona 55 Goffman, Erving 14, 149 Gold 10, 14, 22 f., 26, 31, 45, 50, 52 f., 63 f., 72, 131, 149, 207 f. Green 45, 66, 70, 127, 131, 135 – 137, 142 f., 145 f., 148 – 154, 161, 225 – green goddess 150 Grinnell, Robert 117, 131, 137, 148 Gross, Otto 66, 104, 170, 201 f., 221 f. Guattari, Félix 188 Haematemesis (vomiting blood) 7 Hatoum, Mona 187 Health humanities 1 – 5, 8, 11 Health (WHO definition) 3 – 5, 29, 41, 51, 57, 62, 76, 87, 108, 137 f., 168 f., 184 Heavy earths 60 f. Hegel, GWF 37, 176, 197, 206 Heidegger, Martin 30, 66 Heraclitus 100, 115 Hercules 224, 227 Hermes 28, 77, 116, 207 – Trickster 22, 116 Heron, John 24, 165, 178 Hestia 82, 94

243

Highsmith, Patricia 155 – 158 Hill, Adrian 3 Hillman, James 2, 27, 32, 34 f., 42 – 44, 52 – 54, 62, 76, 79 – 81, 89, 106, 108 f., 111, 128 f., 133, 137, 139, 143, 147 f., 153, 158, 160, 168, 170, 179, 183, 187 f., 208 Hindu Tantra 199 Hippocrates 62 Holy Fool 197 Homeopathy 170 Homer 106 f., 109, 111 – 113, 115, 125, 164 – Iliad 106, 108 f., 125, 164 – Odyssey 106, 111, 125, 164 Humours 62 f., 152, 158 Hypnosis 9, 40 Hysteria 39 f., 66, 121, 217 Id 51, 61, 64, 131 Identity 15, 20, 42, 59, 70, 75, 110, 116, 119, 123, 132, 149, 169, 172, 179, 185 – 187, 200, 203, 210, 212, 215 – identification 22, 27, 39, 41 f., 71, 89, 106 f., 119, 149, 178, 209, 221 – subjectivity 207, 212 Illich, Ivan 221, 224 Imagination 2, 8, 10 – 14, 20 – 22, 25 f., 30, 32 – 35, 41 f., 45 – 49, 53, 55 f., 61 – 63, 66 f., 69 – 72, 76 – 80, 82, 87 f., 90 – 92, 95, 102 f., 106, 108, 115, 118, 125, 129, 134 f., 137 f., 141 f., 147, 149 f., 152, 154, 158, 163 f., 167, 169, 177, 179 f., 184 f., 188 f., 193, 195, 203, 205, 208, 211, 213 f., 218 f., 224, 226, 228 f., 231 – image 19, 21, 24, 28 – 30, 34 f., 37, 44, 49, 53, 55, 62 f., 68 f., 73, 79, 91, 97, 100, 110, 113, 116 – 119, 123 – 125, 127 – 129, 132, 146, 156 f., 164, 166, 178, 188, 191, 193, 197, 202 – 206, 219, 221, 225, 229, 231 Impulse (impulsion) 9, 11, 17 f., 36, 42, 45, 91, 93, 95 f., 106, 108 – 110, 112 – 115, 117, 119 – 121, 123 – 132, 134 f., 139 f., 145 f., 148, 150, 154 f., 163, 166, 170, 179 f., 193, 196, 201, 210, 212, 217, 220, 227, 231 Individuation 29, 31, 52, 191, 206 f., 210 Indwelling 10, 30 Inequality 88, 169, 206 Instrumentalism 47, 177, 213

244

Index

Irigaray, Luce 176 Iteratio (iteration, repetition)

146, 171, 220

Johnson, Mark 47, 63, 150, 179 Joining (styles of) 7, 166, 217 Jones, Ernest 9 Jones, Saeed 130 Jones, Tess 5 Jonson, Ben 22 Jouissance 107, 213 Joyce, James 21, 24, 30, 61 Jung, Carl Gustav 2, 10 f., 23 f., 26 – 32, 34, 37, 42 – 44, 47, 52, 100, 108, 125, 130 f., 143, 145, 158, 171, 190 f., 194, 197, 200 – 210, 215 – 217, 222 Kant, Immanuel 20, 24, 78, 80, 198 f. Kekulé, August 35 Kerr, John 200 – 202 Kirmayer, Laurence J 86, 121 Klein, Melanie 120 Kristeva, Julia 6, 106 – 108, 111, 117, 121, 150 Laboratory 22 f., 26, 33, 52, 63, 76, 90, 99, 183, 206, 219 Lacan, Jacques 11, 22, 39, 50, 80, 108, 118, 123 f., 138, 147, 151, 154, 176 – 178, 202, 212 f., 226 – knots 27, 118, 177, 229 f. – the Imaginary 50, 80, 125, 147, 178, 202 – the Real 37, 47, 50, 71, 118, 124 f., 147, 151, 154, 178, 184 f., 196 f., 202, 204 – 206, 209 – the Symbolic 47, 50, 63, 80, 124, 151, 177 f., 202 Lady Alchymya 18 Laing, Ronald 138, 168, 229 Lakoff, George 47, 63, 150, 179 – embodied metaphors 2, 8, 11, 13, 22, 25, 42, 45, 52, 63, 67, 81, 92, 113, 118, 120, 133, 137, 150, 156, 179, 193, 195, 205, 214 Lambspring, The Book of 15, 18 Language 2, 7 – 9, 19, 22 – 25, 27, 30 f., 35, 41 f., 46, 50, 54, 61 – 63, 65 f., 73, 77, 79 f., 85, 94, 97, 107, 118, 124, 138, 140, 147, 149, 151 f., 157 f., 171 f., 177, 181, 193, 198, 202, 205, 209, 212 f., 215 f., 226

Latour, Bruno 104, 176 – Actor-Network Theory (ANT) 176, 180 Lavoisier, Antoine-Laurent de 32, 54 Lawrence, David Herbert 96, 101, 106, 129 f., 132, 156 f., 160, 178 – 180, 221 f. Lead 8, 14, 17 f., 21, 24, 32, 34, 43, 45, 51 – 53, 60 f., 64, 66 f., 70 – 72, 79 f., 87, 91, 94, 96 f., 102 f., 111 f., 117, 119 f., 125, 127, 129, 131, 134, 141 f., 144, 147, 149, 158, 160, 163, 166 f., 170, 172, 180 – 182, 197 – 200, 207, 219 Leade, Jane 194, 200 Left-hand path (in Tantra) 199, 204 – 206 Lethe 224 Libido 84, 140, 163, 181, 205 Library 22, 99, 183, 206, 219 Lingis, Alphonso 187, 197, 199 f. Lion 45, 91, 112, 119 f., 125, 129, 135 f., 140, 147 – Golden lion 154 – green lion 44 f., 136, 145, 148, 153 f., 178, 180 – taming of the lion 125 Literalising (literalism) 22, 80, 108, 158, 163, 195 Longinus 196, 198 Lorca, Federico Garcia 150 Lucretius 49 Lynch, David 126 – 128, 131, 141, 144 Lyotard, François 38, 197 – 199 Lyric 7 f., 11 f., 25, 34 – lyrical medicine 7 Mad studies 41, 138 Maier, Michael 65, 129 f. Mania 21, 28, 43, 45, 61, 66 – 71, 89, 107, 110, 119, 124, 128 f., 131 f., 134, 145, 150, 154, 158, 167, 170 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia 14 Marx, Karl 37, 169, 176, 197, 206 Material imagination 33, 54, 63, 118, 179 Materialism 37, 147, 176, 197 – material fallacy 25 Mathers, Dale 28 Meaning 3, 7, 9 – 11, 15, 21 – 24, 28 f., 33 – 35, 37, 47, 49, 51, 55, 57 f., 61, 66 f., 73, 79, 83, 89, 92, 100, 104, 107 f., 128 f., 152, 159, 162, 165, 167, 175 – 177, 180, 184, 187 f., 194, 196,

Index

198 f., 205 f., 208 – 210, 212 – 214, 220, 222, 224, 226, 228, 231 Medical education 2 – 8, 87 Medical humanities 3 – 8, 87 – critical 2 – 5, 38, 74, 76, 93, 119, 124, 138, 142, 165, 200 – first wave 5 – second wave 5 – translational 6, 53, 135 Melancholia 16 f., 43, 45, 53, 75, 96, 149 f. Memory 21, 34, 42, 67 f., 80, 101, 120, 123, 157, 159, 162, 164 f., 172, 183, 224 – screen memories 9 Menstruation 185, 194 Mental health 41, 49 f., 57 – 60, 62, 65, 71, 73 – 75, 79, 81, 162, 169, 181 f. Mercury 8, 21, 34, 43, 51 f., 63 f., 78, 113, 125, 158, 160 f., 167 f., 171, 221 Metals (see lead, mercury) 10, 23, 32 f., 45 f., 48 f., 53 f., 64, 71, 93, 153, 179 Metaphor 1 f., 6 – 8, 10 – 12, 17 – 19, 21 f., 24, 27 – 31, 33 – 35, 37 f., 40 f., 44 – 47, 49, 51 – 64, 66, 69, 72 f., 78 – 83, 85 f., 89, 91 – 94, 96 – 100, 103, 105 f., 109 – 111, 113, 115, 118 f., 121 – 123, 131 f., 135, 138, 140, 143, 145 – 152, 154, 158, 162, 170, 173 – 175, 177 – 184, 188, 192 – 194, 196, 203, 212 – 216, 218, 220 – 222, 224 – 226, 229 – 231 – affective metaphor 180 – embodied metaphor 10, 12, 20, 22, 24, 32, 46, 49, 53, 87, 119, 137, 140, 151, 158, 178, 181 f., 188, 206, 216, 219, 231 – enacted metaphor 53, 80 – literacy 213 f. – metaphor multiplication 61, 79 – metaphor of substance 2, 26, 40 f. – re-usable metaphor 21 Metonym 24, 31 Metzner, Ralph 27 f. Miasma 224 Mindfulness 41, 219 Mnemosyne 224 Moltzer, Maria 201, 203 Monstrum 219 Moon 35 f., 45, 156 f., 178, 190, 231 – Harvest moon 129 – lunar 35 – 37, 120, 123, 129, 157, 190, 231

245

– trees 70, 127, 140, 178 Moral courage 113, 120, 123, 133 Multiplicatio 35, 64, 79, 137, 149, 217 Musil, Robert 61 Nancy, Jean-Luc 188 Narcissus 146, 226 – narcissism 43 f., 65, 98, 152 Narrative 3, 11 – 13, 24, 26, 37 f., 41, 64, 72, 104, 137, 180, 208 Nature 8, 18, 29 f., 33, 36, 44 – 47, 49 – 51, 53 f., 71, 76, 79 f., 82, 86 – 88, 95, 98 f., 106, 110, 114, 117 – 119, 124 f., 128, 131, 133, 135 – 139, 141, 144 – 148, 150 – 154, 161, 170, 179, 188, 197 – 199, 202 – 204, 208 f., 214, 219 – naturalism, naturalistic fallacy 147 Neilson, Shane 1, 11, 25, 34, 41, 61, 72, 86, 118, 215 New Age 27, 29, 31, 43, 47, 78 f., 125, 139, 141 Newton, Isaac 24, 50, 54, 63 Nicholl, Charles 54, 77, 193 f. Nietzsche, Friedrich 208 Nightingale, Florence 2 f. Nobile, Marianna 4 Norton, Thomas 92 – 96 – menu of fires 92 Object Relations 122 Objects, ontological status of 2, 6 f., 25, 30, 53, 81, 131, 154, 164, 180, 185, 216 Obsession 66, 75, 86, 98, 100, 107, 110, 141 f., 157 f., 160 – 163, 165 – 167, 169 – 172 – obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) 166 Odysseus 107, 111 – 113, 115, 120, 125 f., 139, 164 Oedipus 215 Old Testament 26, 194 Olson, Charles 107 Orlan 183, 185 Orlovitz, Gil 24 Ouroborous 36, 74 Ovid 146 Oxygen 32 f., 54 Paine, Thomas 197 Pan 102, 144, 146 – 148, 153, 218

246

Index

Paracelsus 23 f., 49 – 51, 62 f., 68 f., 72, 76 f., 158, 170 Parapraxes 61, 212, 214 Paterson, Don 24 f. Pathology 79 Peacock’s tail 53 f. Peronelle 200 Personalistic psychology 47 Perspective 11, 21, 23, 25, 28, 30 f., 63, 76, 79, 87, 100, 102, 106, 116, 137, 144, 147, 150, 161, 178, 183, 198 Peter Pan 141 f., 144 Pharmaceuticals 67, 73, 124, 165, 212 Pharmakon (healing poison) 19, 108 Philaletes (also Philalethes) 116 – Introitus Apertus 116 Phlegm 62 f., 153 Phlogiston 32 f., 54 Physis 147 Plato 7 Plot 12, 137, 157 Poetry 1, 4, 8, 11 f., 22, 25, 30 f., 34, 46, 52, 54 – 56, 63, 72, 77 – 79, 96, 98 f., 101, 103, 118, 147, 163 f., 171, 175, 193, 202, 205, 216 f., 228 – consonance 6, 31 – rhythm 6, 38, 45, 53, 55 f., 64, 107, 216 f., 226, 231 Polanyi, Michael 47, 123 Pordage, John 194, 200 Portmann, Adolf 147 Post-coital reverie 188, 191, 205, 208 Post-human 27, 29, 154, 207 Post-industrial 88, 113, 142, 154, 229 Postmodernism 37 Power 2, 5, 15, 30, 42, 45 f., 58, 61, 67, 75, 79, 91, 106, 108 – 110, 132, 134 – 139, 141, 144 f., 150, 156, 160 f., 176, 178 f., 193 f., 210, 223 – capillary 42 Premodern, the 23, 26, 29, 37, 42, 47, 108, 137, 176, 184, 216 Presence 6, 38, 43, 48, 73, 108, 110, 113, 116, 118, 123, 132, 136 f., 140 f., 145 – 147, 170, 196, 199, 223 Priestley, Joseph 32, 54 Projection 42, 51, 61, 64, 93, 128, 178, 217 Projectio (projection) 64, 217

Protestantism (and Capitalism) 31 Protoplasmic kisses (synapses) 7 Prurience 95, 97 Psyche 9, 22 f., 26, 34 f., 42 f., 47, 51, 55, 60 – 62, 64, 66, 73, 86, 93, 95 – 97, 104, 115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 126 f., 139, 141, 145, 147, 151, 162 f., 167, 179, 184, 212, 219, 221, 225 Psychoanalysis 8 f., 11, 21, 34, 41 f., 44, 51 f., 61, 64, 66, 89, 144, 157, 162, 188, 208 f., 213 – 216, 222 – psychodynamic psychotherapy 1 f., 8, 11 – 13, 18 f., 22, 26, 36, 41, 57, 87, 103, 124, 139 Psychologised 30, 42 Puffers 22, 103 Putrefactio (putrefaction, rotting) 64, 117, 139, 217, 219 Rank, Otto 9 f. Raw, the 55 f., 82 f., 92, 95, 100, 108, 110 f., 116, 125 f., 143, 145, 147, 152, 185, 215, 219 Rebis (‘two thing’) 219 Rectificando (rectify) 118, 137 Redgrove, Peter 21, 77 f., 194 Reflection 20, 71, 83, 91, 100, 102, 112 f., 115, 119 f., 123 – 126, 128 – 132, 139, 146, 148, 152, 158, 199, 204, 217, 226, 231 – critical reflexivity 113, 124 – reflection within the impulse 120, 124 Reformation 31 Reich, Wilhelm 10, 188, 220 Reinke, EE 3 Resistance 9 f., 28, 42, 87, 96, 99, 130, 169, 172, 177, 182, 228 Rhea 17 Romans 31, 110, 161, 224 Romanyshyn, Robert 27, 31 Rosarium Philosophorum 154, 190 Roscher, William 147 Rossi, Paolo 164 Sackler, Arthur 134 f. Salamander (‘fire lizard’) 83 f., 97 Salt 8, 11, 21, 42, 51, 55, 63 f., 66 f., 79, 81, 99, 110, 112 f., 125 f., 132, 155 – 163, 165 – 173, 178 – dosage 92, 160, 170 f. Sarton, George 3

Index

Scheele, Carl Wilhelm 32, 54 Schön, Donald 123 f. Science, Enlightenment 2 f., 6, 9, 12, 14, 24, 27, 32 – 35, 37, 46, 49 f., 52, 54, 60, 62 f., 71, 75 f., 80, 123, 141, 154, 175, 189 Searle, Adrian 183, 186 Self 4, 16, 18, 20, 24, 30 f., 33, 38, 40, 42 f., 46 f., 50 f., 69, 72, 78, 87, 98, 115 f., 122 – 124, 129, 131 f., 135, 139, 141, 146, 148, 152, 156, 172 f., 179, 183 f., 188, 191, 195, 197, 203, 206 f., 209 f., 212 f., 221, 230 Self-harming 68, 167, 183 Semele 88 Semiotic 27, 38, 61, 120, 126, 181 Sendigovius, Michael 135 f. Seneca 106 Separatio (separation) 14, 64, 178, 213, 217, 220 f., 224, 227 – styles of 179, 213, 217 f., 226 Sexuality 9 f., 39, 143 f., 186, 189, 194, 200, 202 f., 205, 215, 222 Shadow 18, 28, 42, 141, 184 f. Shakespeare, William 8, 53 f., 63, 71 f., 77, 138, 149 – 151, 153, 172, 193, 219 Shamanism 139 Shuttle, Penelope 194 Signs 11, 27, 30, 34 f., 37 f., 52, 120, 214 Single pelican 191 f., 230 Sloterdijk, Peter 66 f. Snow White 141 Song of Songs 194 Sontag, Susan 188 f. Soul (psyche) 9, 18, 22, 27 – 29, 47 f., 55, 66, 76, 79 f., 100, 102, 115, 119, 129, 139, 141 f., 153, 156 f., 163, 168, 171 f., 177, 179, 185, 193 – 195, 198 f., 208 – 210, 216, 219, 221 f., 227 f. Spielrein, Sabina 189, 201 – 204 Spirit 22, 32, 49, 54 f., 60, 66, 70 f., 78 f., 91, 109, 131 f., 138 f., 146, 148, 150, 165, 176 f., 180, 185, 187 f., 193 – 198, 202, 207, 209 f., 219 – 221, 224 Stereotypes 27, 183, 206 Stevens, Wallace 110, 136 Stones 101, 153, 179 – softening of stones 49 Styx 224

247

Sublimation 51, 61, 64, 93, 128 f., 138 f., 141, 178, 187 f., 196, 202 – 205, 209, 217, 221 Sublime, the 184 – 189, 191, 193 – 200, 203, 205, 208 – 210 – sublime body 188 Sulphur 8, 21, 28, 34, 51, 63 f., 66 – 71, 81, 91, 99, 109 – 113, 115 – 117, 119 f., 122, 124 – 128, 130 – 132, 135 – 137, 139 – 141, 146 – 150, 154, 158, 161, 168, 170, 172, 185, 201 – black sulphur (and ‘tar’) 116, 132 f., 140, 153 – green sulphur 11, 42, 44, 111, 133 – 141, 144 – 148, 152 – 154, 178 – red sulphur 11, 42, 44, 96, 106, 108, 110 f., 113 – 120, 125 f., 128 – 132, 134 – 141, 145 – 148, 152 – 154, 180, 212 – spiritus sulphur (‘red thief’) 116 f., 121 f., 126, 135, 212 f. Sun 35 f., 44 f., 69, 83, 108, 112, 117, 119, 128, 131, 135 f., 145, 147 f., 156, 180, 227 – red sun 45, 136 Superego 51, 61, 64 Surrealism 38 Sweating kings 16, 61, 178 Symbols 2, 8, 10, 22 – 24, 29 f., 34, 36 f., 52, 63, 76, 120, 180 f., 187, 218 Synthesis (as coagula) 11, 37 f., 43, 50, 53, 62, 64, 85, 87, 119, 175 f., 204, 206, 216 f., 219 f., 224, 230 Tachypnoea (panting for breath) 7 Tacit knowing 47, 123 Talking cure, the 20, 61, 214 Tantric sex 191 Tarantino, Quentin 114 f. Telemachus 107, 112 Tender-minded 182 Thanatos (death drive) 108, 203 Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum 32 Therapeutic alliance 94, 165, 176 Thinking ‘slantwise’ 1 Thirst 93, 101, 104 f., 160 f., 170, 221, 224 f., 227 Thomas, Dylan 66, 70, 92, 116, 131, 137, 142, 148 Thunberg, Greta 142 Törneke, Niklas 41 Torrey Canyon 114 Tough-minded 182

248

Index

Transference 9, 11, 39, 64, 81, 87, 91, 119, 142, 172, 174 f., 177 f., 180 – 183, 188, 190, 192 f., 195 f., 200 f., 204 – 209, 213, 217 f., 230 – countertransference 229 – negative transference 181 – positive transference 162, 181 – transference as catharsis 178 – transference as rationalisation 178 Translation 6, 104, 135, 138, 141, 175, 180 Transubstantiation fallacy 25 Trinick, John 27, 86, 116, 128, 141 Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine 100, 105 Unconscious 1, 8 – 10, 12, 23, 26, 30, 39, 41 – 43, 47, 51, 61, 64, 67, 80, 108, 118, 131, 149, 159, 164, 174, 178, 196, 202 – 204, 206, 212, 214 f., 217, 222, 229 – collective unconscious 10, 23, 30, 34, 47, 215 Underworld 110, 126, 131 f., 139, 148, 150, 153 f., 184, 224 Values 3, 7, 11, 19, 22, 41, 46 f., 107, 214 Ventura, Michael 44, 89, 111, 168 Verne, Jules 139 Vessels 78, 90, 114, 160, 230 Vigilant attention 56 Violence 58, 106, 108, 112, 114 – 116, 119, 124 – 126, 128, 144, 150, 188 Vitrification 102 Vitriol – green Vitriol 118 – oil of Vitriol 118 – V.I.T.R.I.O.L 118 Volcano 83, 110 f., 131, 140

Vollmann, William Tyler Von Franz, Marie-Louise

109 f. 26, 43, 149 f., 198

War, love of 3, 31, 34, 45, 58, 69, 83, 85, 87, 89 – 91, 93 f., 97 f., 103, 106 – 112, 131, 140, 153, 158, 173, 180, 198, 228 Wassersug, JD 6 Water 24, 33, 46, 60 f., 64, 70, 73, 78 f., 82 f., 92 – 94, 100 f., 104 f., 127 f., 158, 176, 186, 215, 221 – 228 – water closet 221, 224 f. Wear, Delese 5, 45, 128 Weaver, Richard 58 Wei Boyang 110 Wesley, John 224 Whan, Michael 28 f., 177, 207 f. Wheelis, Allen 182 Whitehead, Anne 5 Whitening 113, 115, 120, 124 – 126, 128, 138, 141 Windbag (follis) 197 Winnicott, Donald 120, 144, 152 Wolff, Toni 201 Woods, Angela 5 Wordsworth, William 171 Work Against Nature 146, 196 World Soul 28 – 30, 44 f., 47, 111, 113 f., 131, 137, 168, 176, 225 Yates, Frances 164 Yeats, William Butler Zeus

17, 27, 71, 88

30