Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance / / Alan Bleakley.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter DG Plus DeG Package 2023 Part 1
• VerfasserIn: Bleakley, Alan,
• Place / Publishing House: Berlin ;, Boston : : De Gruyter, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Medical & Health Humanities : Aesthetics, Analyses, Approaches , 1
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (XIV, 248 p.)

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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- 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