C. G. Jung and the Alchemical Imagination

Book excerpt: 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.