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. As part of our ongoing series on alchemy, today we are going to discuss the process of separatio, which is already intuitive, is about separation.

And this is a very human psychological process of differentiating, discriminating,

naming things, putting things in their proper place, of separating things into their distinctive, separate elements,

and having a way to order them as part of our ego functioning. It is an intermediate process in some of the alchemical operations.

It certainly is inherent in psychotherapy and certainly psychoanalysis.

And so with that as a prelude, let's start separating into our inherent parts, which is the three of us, and we will,

to use another term, circumambulate, separation. So let's just start with just the chemical

realities. So the alchemists are these precursors to our modern chemists. They have a natural

instinctive feeling that the objects around them, the stuff in the world, is more than it seems to be.

And if one could figure it out, one might discover either secret properties or this ability to extract or

transform things. So it's not uncommon for the alchemist to take one thing, let's say like a

pulverized ore of some kind or a mineral, and then to be able to add mercury and heat and this and that,

and then discover that there are more than one element,

for instance, if you mix mercury into pulverized ore,

it will temporarily liquefy gold and put it into a suspension. The heavier or other

elements rather will drop to the bottom. And then as it's heated and the mercury is vaporized off,

...