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.

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.

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.

A leading Jungian psychologist reveals the relationship between alchemy and analytical psychology, delving into the visionary work of a sixteenth-century alchemist 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.

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

The psychological and religious implications of alchemy were Jung's major preoccupation during the last thirty years of his life. This collection of shorter Alchemial Studies has special value as an introduction to Jung's work on alchemy.

From Robert A. Johnson, the bestselling author of Transformation, Owning Your Own Shadow, and the groundbreaking works He, She, and We, comes a practical four-step approach to using dreams and the imagination for a journey of inner transformation. In Inner Work, the renowned Jungian analyst offers a powerful and direct way to approach the inner world of the unconscious, often resulting in a central transformative experience. A repackaged classic by a major name in the field, Robert Johnson’s Inner Work enables us to find extraordinary strengths and resources in the hidden depths of our own subconscious.

Tackling some of the world’s most profound questions through the intimate lens of fatherhood, Bayo Akomolafe embarks on a journey of discovery as he maps the contours of the spaces between himself and his three-year-old daughter, Alethea. In a narrative that manages to be both intricate and unguarded, he discovers that something as commonplace as becoming a father is a cosmic event of unprecedented proportions. Using this realization as a touchstone, he is led to consider the strangeness of his own soul, contemplate the myths and rituals of modernity, ask questions about food and justice, ponder what it means to be human, evaluate what we can do about climate change, and wonder what our collective yearnings for a better world tell us about ourselves. These Wilds Beyond Our Fences is a passionate attempt to make sense of our disconnection in a world where it is easy to feel untethered and lost. It is a father’s search for meaning, for a place of belonging, and for reassurance that the world will embrace and support our children once we are gone.

Alchemy, the Noble Art, conjures up scenes of mysterious, dimly lit laboratories populated with bearded old men stirring cauldrons. Though the history of alchemy is intricately linked to the history of chemistry, alchemy has nonetheless often been dismissed as the realm of myth and magic, or fraud and pseudoscience. And while its themes and ideas persist in some expected and unexpected places, from the Philosopher's (or Sorcerer's) Stone of Harry Potter to the self-help mantra of transformation, there has not been a serious, accessible, and up-to-date look at the complete history and influence of alchemy until now.

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.