Psychotherapy, the Alchemical Imagination and Metaphors of Substance

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-11-115477-0
Verlag: De Gruyter

Buch, Englisch, Band 1, 248 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 230 mm, Gewicht: 491 g

Reihe: Medical & Health Humanities

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.

Zielgruppe

Psychotherapists, psychologists, healthcare workers, academics ac

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bleakley, Alan

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Europäische Literatur
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Psychologie / Allgemeines & Theorie Psychologische Theorie, Psychoanalyse
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen

Über Autor(innen)

Alan Bleakley, University of Plymouth, United Kingdom.