Welcome to this Jungian life.

Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marchiano, Deborah Stewart, and Joseph Lee,

invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.

I'm Lisa Marchiano, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Philadelphia.

I'm Joseph Lee, and I'm a Jungian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

I'm Deborah Stewart, a Jungian analyst, on Cape Cod.

Thank you. Jung was introduced to alchemy in the 1920s, after he was running into symbolic imagery in his patients' dreams like mandolos and transformative images and mystical unions that bore a very strange and uncanny similarity to the illustrations in a Renaissance alchemical text.

And the turning point came when his friend Richard Wilhelm, who is a German

sonologist and translator of the I Ching, gave him a copy of the 16th century Rosarium Philosophorum,

and what he focused on were these woodblock prints that provided a sequence of images of transformation.

And Jung came to realize that the alchemists who believed that they were transforming matter

were actually projecting their own inner psychological processes onto their work,

which was unconsciously mapping an inner transformative process.

So when Jung discovered alchemy, he saw that it was a system that was much older than

modern psychology that mirrored the stages of individuation.

And these stages are often summarized as the Negredo, Albido, Citranatus, and Rubedo,

with various other transformative descriptions in between.

And this illuminated the archetypal nature of the unconscious, and this became central

to his later theories of the self, archetypes, and the integration of opposites.

And this reinforced his connection of psychology with myth, mysticism, and this deep symbolic language of the soul. And since there

are many stages in alchemy, we've decided to do a series of episodes breaking each one down,

explaining it and also providing some very practical examples of it.

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