Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bleakley, Alan.

Series:

Medical and Health Humanities Series

Medical and Health Humanities Series ; v.1

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (262 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berlin/Boston : Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2023.

Summary:

Alchemy is popularly viewed as a secret way of turning worthless base metal into gold, and then a precursor to modern chemistry. This is often taken as a metaphor for psychological development. 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 metaphor-driven "best practices" for indwelling complex and contradictory earthly matters 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 echoes post-Freudian developments in psychoanalysis that avoid the mysticism of symbol systems to work rather with everyday signs and linguistic registers such as embodied metaphors, keeping the focus on known and sensed phenomena rather than abstractions.

Contents:

Intro

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.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9783111157368

3111157369

OCLC:

1385452595