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,

and Cape Cod.

Thank you. In today's episode, as part of our sequence on alchemical stages, we're going to talk about the saluteo, which is one of the primary operations in alchemical symbolism.

It's associated rather explicitly with the element of water. And from a purely chemical standpoint, it has to do with the operations that turn a solid into a liquid. When we think

about that as a psychological metaphor, we're talking about

dissolving something that is fixed, taking a very differentiated attitude, experience, feeling,

and taking it back to a kind of primal, undifferentiated state,

back to what the alchemist called its prima materia.

And this return to one's origins

is a kind of psychological return to the womb

and a possibility for rebirth, ideally on a higher arc.

So we're going to delve into this, but before we jump into the specific, we should probably

just talk a little bit about alchemy in general, particularly for

those of you that may be new to the topic. So alchemy was the medieval study of materials

with the hope of learning the secret to transmuting lead into gold. It was about the search for

the philosopher's stone, which was also seen to have magical properties such as granting everlasting

life. It was the precursor to modern day chemistry because the alchemists actually did

experiments in their laboratory, trying to understand the chemical changes again in search for

...