Writings of Members and Friends of the NYAAP Community.
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Article by NYAAP Analyst Sarah Jackson and Students on Alchemy To Be Published
An “Introduction to Alchemy” class took place during the 2020 fall semester at the C.G. Jung Institute of New York,
in which we undertook the study of that obscure art in the midst of the pandemic, while this country, and most of the
rest of the world, were submerged in what the alchemists might have identified as a protracted nigredo: a dark and
difficult operation that can occur either at the beginning or further along in the opus.
What we discovered in the class, and what some of us further explored in this collaborative paper, is that alchemy continues to be relevant to the clinical practice of depth psychology; its strange images and metaphors speak to us in new ways that
resonate on both individual and collective levels. The co-authors consider the personal and clinical implications
of various aspects of alchemy, including the importance of containment in both vessels and crucibles,
the ouroboros, and the utterly ambiguous and gender-fluid figure of Alchemy’s presiding deity, Mercurius.
The article will appear in the next edition of Quadrant, the Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation in New York.
in which we undertook the study of that obscure art in the midst of the pandemic, while this country, and most of the
rest of the world, were submerged in what the alchemists might have identified as a protracted nigredo: a dark anddifficult operation that can occur either at the beginning or further along in the opus.What we discovered in the class, and what some of us further explored in this collaborative paper, is that alchemy continues to be relevant to the clinical practice of depth psychology; its strange images and metaphors speak to us in new ways thatresonate on both individual and collective levels. The co-authors consider the personal and clinical implicationsof various aspects of alchemy, including the importance of containment in both vessels and crucibles,the ouroboros, and the utterly ambiguous and gender-fluid figure of Alchemy’s presiding deity, Mercurius.The article will appear in the next edition of Quadrant, the Journal of the C.G. Jung Foundation in New York.