C. G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination: Passages into the Mysteries of Psyche and Soul

Description

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. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures Foreword Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Jung’s Discovery of Alchemy and its Development in the Jungian Tradition 2 Jung and Alchemy: A Daimonic Reading 3 Fire in the Stone: An Inquiry into the Alchemy of Soul-Making 4 Salt and the Alchemical Soul: Freudian, Jungian, and Archetypal Perspectives 5 The Metaphor of Light and Renewal in Taoist Alchemy and Jungian Analysis 6 The Metaphor of Light and its Deconstruction in Jung’s Alchemical Vision 7 Facing the Shadow: Turning Toward the Darkness of the Nigredo 8 The Black Sun Part A. Archetypal Image of the Non-Self Part B. Epilogue to the Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness 9 From the Black Sun to the Philosophers’ Stone 10 A Critique of Wolfgang Giegerich’s Move from Imagination to the Logical Life of the Soul Part A. The Psychologist who is not a Psychologist: A Deconstructive Reading of Wolfgang Giegerich’s Idea of Psychology Proper Part B. The Absolute that is not Absolute: An Alchemical Reflection on the Caput Mortuum , The Dark other of Logical Light 11 What’s the Matter—with Alchemical Recipes? Philosophy and Filth in the Forging of Jung’s Alchemical Psychology 12 The Philosophers’ Stone as Chaosmos: The Self and the Dilemma of Diversity 13 The Azure Vault: Alchemy and the Cosmological Imagination 14 Divine Darkness and Divine Light: Alchemical Illumination and the Mystical Play Between Knowing and Unknowing Index