Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance
Title | Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance PDF eBook |
Author | Alan Bleakley |
Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG |
Total Pages | 286 |
Release | 2023-07-04 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 3111159906 |
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
Title | Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance PDF eBook |
Author | Alan Bleakley |
Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG |
Total Pages | 262 |
Release | 2023-07-03 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 3111157369 |
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
Title | Routledge Handbook of Medicine and Poetry PDF eBook |
Author | Alan Bleakley |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Total Pages | 493 |
Release | 2024-05-02 |
Genre | Medical |
ISBN | 1040019757 |
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.
Alchemical Active Imagination
Title | Alchemical Active Imagination PDF eBook |
Author | Marie-Louise von Franz |
Publisher | Shambhala Publications |
Total Pages | 216 |
Release | 2017-06-13 |
Genre | Psychology |
ISBN | 0834840790 |
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
Title | The Alchemical Actor PDF eBook |
Author | Jane Gilmer |
Publisher | BRILL |
Total Pages | 262 |
Release | 2021-05-12 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 9004449426 |
The Alchemical Actor – Performing the Great Work: Imagining Alchemical Theatre offers an imagination for an alchemical theatre inspired by the directives of Antonin Artaud.
Jung's Technique of Active Imagination and Desoille's Directed Waking Dream Method
Title | Jung's Technique of Active Imagination and Desoille's Directed Waking Dream Method PDF eBook |
Author | Laner Cassar |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 231 |
Release | 2020-06-07 |
Genre | Psychology |
ISBN | 042984557X |
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.
Psychoanalysis of Technoscience
Title | Psychoanalysis of Technoscience PDF eBook |
Author | Hub Zwart |
Publisher | LIT Verlag Münster |
Total Pages | 200 |
Release | 2019-02-20 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 3643910509 |
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.