Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance

Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance PDF Author: Alan Bleakley
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111159906
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
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.

Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance

Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance PDF Author: Alan Bleakley
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3111159906
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
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.

Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry

Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry PDF Author: Alan Bleakley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040019757
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 493

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Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry draws on an international selection of authors to ask what the cultures of poetry and medicine may gain from reciprocal critical engagement. The volume celebrates interdisciplinary inquiry, critique, and creative expansion with an emphasis upon amplifying provocative and marginalized voices. This carefully curated collection offers both historical context and future thinking from clinicians, poets, artists, humanities scholars, social scientists, and bio-scientists who collectively inquire into the nature of relationships between medicine and poetry. Importantly, these can be both productive and unproductive. How, for example, do poet-doctors reconcile the outwardly antithetical approaches of bio-scientific medicine and poetry in their daily work, where typically the former draws on technical language and associated thinking and the latter on metaphors? How does non-narrative lyrical poetry engage with narrative-based medicine? How do poets writing about medicine identify as patients? Central to the volume is the critical investigation of the consequences of varieties of medical pedagogy for clinical practice. Presenting a vision of how poetic thinking might form a medical ontology this thought-provoking book affords an essential resource for scholars and practitioners from across medicine, health and social care, medical education, the medical and health humanities, and literary studies.

C. G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination

C. G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination PDF Author: Stanton Marlan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000317749
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Winner of the 2021 American Board & Academy of Psychoanalysis Annual Book Prize for Best Theoretical Book in Psychoanalysis! Stanton Marlan brings together writings which span the course of his career, examining Jungian psychology and the alchemical imagination as an opening to the mysteries of psyche and soul. Several chapters describe a telos that aims at the mysterious goal of the Philosophers’ Stone, a move replete with classical and postmodern ideas catalysed by prompts from the unconscious: dreams, images, fantasies, and paradoxical conundrums. Psyche and matter are seen with regards to soul, light and darkness in terms of illumination, and order and chaos as linked in the image of chaosmos. Marlan explores the richness of the alchemical ideas of Carl Jung, James Hillman, and others and their value for a revisioning of psychology. In doing so, this volume challenges any tendency to literalism and essentialism, and contributes to an integration between Jung’s classical vision of a psychology of alchemy and Hillman’s Alchemical Psychology. C.G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination will be a valuable resource for academics, scholars, and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, Jungian analysis, and psychotherapy. It will also be of great interest to Jungian psychologists and Jungian analysts in practice and in training.

Alchemical Active Imagination

Alchemical Active Imagination PDF Author: Marie-Louise von Franz
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834840790
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Although alchemy is popularly regarded as the science that sought to transmute base physical matter, many of the medieval alchemists were more interested in developing a discipline that would lead to the psychological and spiritual transformation of the individual. C. G. Jung discovered in his study of alchemical texts a symbolic and imaginal language that expressed many of his own insights into psychological processes. In this book, Marie-Louise von Franz examines a text by the sixteenth-century alchemist and physician Gerhard Dorn in order to show the relationship of alchemy to the concepts and techniques of analytical psychology. In particular, she shows that the alchemists practiced a kind of meditation similar to Jung's technique of active imagination, which enables one to dialogue with the unconscious archetypal elements in the psyche. Originally delivered as a series of lectures at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, the book opens therapeutic insights into the relations among spirit, soul, and body in the practice of active imagination.

Jung's Alchemical Philosophy

Jung's Alchemical Philosophy PDF Author: Stanton Marlan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781003215905
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
"Traditionally, alchemy has been understood as a precursor to the science of chemistry but from the vantage point of the human spirit, it is also a discipline that illuminates the human soul. This book explores the goal of alchemy from Jungian, psychological and philosophical perspectives. Jung's Alchemical Philosophy: Psyche and the Mercurial Play of Image and Idea is a reflection on Jung's alchemical work and the importance of philosophy as a way of understanding alchemy and its contributions to Jung's psychology. By engaging these disciplines, Marlan opens new vistas on alchemy and the circular and ouroboric play of images and ideas, shedding light on the alchemical opus and the transformative processes of Jungian psychology. Divides in the history of alchemy and in the alchemical imagination are addressed as Marlan deepens the process by turning to a number of interpretations that illuminate both the enigma of the Philosophers' Stone and the ferment in the Jungian tradition. This book will be of interest to Jungian analysts and those who wish to explore the intersection of philosophy and psychology as it relates to alchemy"--

Jung's Technique of Active Imagination and Desoille's Directed Waking Dream Method

Jung's Technique of Active Imagination and Desoille's Directed Waking Dream Method PDF Author: Laner Cassar
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042984557X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
Jung's Technique of Active Imagination and Desoille's Directed Waking Dream Method brings together Carl Jung’s active imagination and Robert Desoille’s "rêve éveillé dirigé/directed waking dream" method (RED). It studies the historical development of these approaches in Central Europe in the first half of the 20th century and explores their theoretical similarities and differences, proposing an integrated framework of clinical practice. The book aims to study the wider European context of the 1900s which influenced the development of both Jung’s and Desoille’s methods. This work compares the spatial metaphors of interiority used by both Jung and Desoille to describe the traditional concept of inner psychic space in the waking dreams of Jung’s active imagination and Desoille’s RED. It also attempts a broader theoretical comparison between the procedural aspects of both RED and active imagination by identifying commonalities and divergences between the two approaches. This book is a unique contribution to analytical psychology and will be of great interest for academics, researchers and post-graduate students interested in the use of imagination and mental imagery in analysis, psychotherapy and counselling. The book’s historical focus will be of particular relevance to Jungian and Desoillian scholars since it is the first of its kind to trace the connections between the two schools and it gives a detailed account of Desoille’s early life and his first written works. This book was a Gradiva Award nominee for 2021.

The Alchemical Actor

The Alchemical Actor PDF Author: Jane Gilmer
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004449426
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
The Alchemical Actor – Performing the Great Work: Imagining Alchemical Theatre offers an imagination for an alchemical theatre inspired by the directives of Antonin Artaud.

Theater as Metaphor

Theater as Metaphor PDF Author: Elena Penskaya
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110622033
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The papers of the present volume investigate the potential of the metaphor of life as theater for literary, philosophical, juridical and epistemological discourses from the Middle Ages through modernity, and focusing on traditions as manifold as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and Latin-American.

The Power of Human Imagination

The Power of Human Imagination PDF Author: Jerome L. Singer
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461339413
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
For at least half of the twentieth century, psychology and the other mental health professions all but ignored the significant adaptive pos sibilities of the human gift of imagery. Our capacity seemingly to duplicate sights, sounds, and other sensory experiences through some form of central brain process continues to remain a mysterious, alma st miraculous skill. Because imagery is so much a private experience, experimental psychologists found it hard to measure and turned their attentian to observable behaviors that could easily be studied in ani maIs as well as in humans. Psychoanalysts and others working with the emotionally disturbed continued to take imagery informatian se riously in the form of dream reports, transferenee fantasies, and as indications of hallucinations or delusions. On the whole, however, they emphasized the maladaptive aspects of the phenomena, the dis tortions and defensiveness or the "regressive" qualities of daydreams and sequences of images. The present volume grows out of a long series of investigations by the senior author that have suggested that daydreaming and the stream of consciousness are not simply manifestations in adult life of persist ing phenomena of childhood. Rather, the data suggest that imagery sequences represent a major system of encoding and transforming information, a basic human capacity that is inevitably part of the brain's storage process and one that has enormous potential for adap tive utility. A companian volume, The Stream of Consciousness, edited by Kenneth S. Pope and Jerome L.

Psychoanalysis of Technoscience

Psychoanalysis of Technoscience PDF Author: Hub Zwart
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643910509
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This book presents a psychoanalysis of technoscience. Basic concepts and methods developed by Freud, Jung, Bachelard and Lacan are applied to case histories (palaeoanthropology, classical conditioning, virology). Rather than by disinterested curiosity, technoscience is driven by desire, resistance and the will to control. Moreover, psychoanalysis focusses on primal scenes (Dubois' quest for the missing link, Pavlov's discovery of the conditioned reflex) and opts for triangulation: comparing technoscience to "different scenes" provided by novels, so that Dubois's work is compared to missing link novels by Verne and London and Pavlov's experiments with Skinner's Walden Two, while virology is studied through the lens of viral fiction.