by Lorrie Kazan
Notes from Ann Ulanov’s talk: Jung on the Hudson, July 2013
It’s hard to find an entry into alchemy. Feeling lost and confused? You’re on the right track. Bafflement and fear come up. Massa Confusa is always the experience of the prima materia.
Theme: Totality/chaos of all elements. Alchemical task begins here…the need to make some order.
Key: How to find yourself in the crowd. How to find your path? Alchemical discovery is one way to think about it. How to proceed?
One has to have chaos and order. Alchemy speaks in symbols. In the 17th century, the best minds used alchemy.
Jung made a list of most used alchemical words in order to begin decoding the language.
Most used words: Dissolve & coagulate.
Find the 1 vase that holds this process, out of it you’re creating yourself as the philosopher’s stone.
Without history there can be no psychology of the unconscious. Find an emerging center bigger than the ego.
What is the process of transformation?
Jung uses alchemy to hold his own ideas, to find his own ideas, an intermingling
Key: Find your own secret path in the prima materia as you experience it.
Alive within Jung was a living substance. His one goal: penetrate into the secret of the personality.Recognition of an alien other in oneself. Alchemy calls this barely understandable thing mercurias. (http://jungcurrents.com/jung-speaks-about-mercurius-and-alchemy/)
Secret within a secret but we do know when we have found it.
Imaginatio is the true key that opens all doors.
Arcane substance – thing he wanted most.
Prima materia is like being dropped in a sewer. No right answer, even the question is important.
Scary: Anything that had helped me in the past is useless now.
Prima materia and fish eyes. As a therapist or a psychic reader, we help people find fish eyes. (“A spark of the divine come into the human eye, a tiny fish eye in the vast dark of the cosmos, that yields glimpses of unending light…”
Your problems lead to bigger collective issues and you’re working for everyone.
(Ulanov: The goal of analysis, as I understand it, is to establish an ongoing, vital conversation between that person and the unconscious, and that the analyst’s role is to act as translator and maybe even mediator. When a person establishes that conversation, he or she can be done with the analyst.http://www.junginstitute.org/pdf_files/JungV1Fa99p5-26.pdf)
Nigredo: dark muck
Albedo: Washing and whitening, like being in the wash forever, insights.
Rubido: Reddening – bring insights we’ve gained into red-blooded living in the world.
Edinger – The Anatomy of the Psyche: Click to View on Amazon
Elements. Mortificatio – feeling you’re dying, necessity of going through symbolic death
Connuctio: conjoining what’s been separated into coherence
Non-linear process in the long run
You can’t think your way through the confused stuff. Notice symbols, images
Attitudes: 2 vectors Ann thinks about when listening to someone’s images:
What’s the objective history hiding in this symbol?
Active encounter with the image – not intellectual experience – integrity for one’s self (active imagination)
Inner dialogue – the other called the collapse
The other called the right thing to focus on
Symbol points beyond itself to third – doesn’t exist in logic but in reality is the truth (tertiary)
Ann believes dialogue begins with scraps – fugitive thought that arrests our attention – they’re weird but they’re yours.
Scraps are objective – they happen – a dream or something from outside
Connunctio: Entry point – process scraps
Process – emergence of conflict.
Separate things that are opposed. Rivaling decisions, warring dogs, dog and lion. Old ways don’t help and urgency to have a point of view. It’s a living experience, not a concept.
You get into issues of good and evil – not opposite paradoxically now touches on the secret of god.
You change – you have to work on it in yourself, eventually reaches symbols that connect to everyone – not working just for yourself. Ultimate purpose to dissolve dissociation between the ego and whatever you’re confronting.
Feeling is preparation to integration of the other within ourselves.
Transcendent function and connuctio always through living experience. Finding peace with the opposite. The scrap is arresting, personal particular is essential. In the audience, Rosvita mentions the Australian walkabout.
Pattern is there but we don’t know it.
Separate elements distinct. Conflict in dissolving, must have a living experience
Scrap of personal detail looms large (one’s own) learn to live with sudden unpredictable attacks, to hear and feel these signs and let fragile body lead brilliant brain.
Referring to her client, Ann says, “She must sacrifice her ruling principle – being kind or rational.”
We all have a ruling principle. Jung’s was “rational.” Jung’s sub-ruling principle was freedom at all costs.
“I must attune to what the other wants” her patient with (vomiting and diarrhea) said. And then “ask what you want.” Stress on her body, now her body is first.
Conflicting parts stay conflicting and distinct but we must find a way to live with them in our space.
Read: “The Embodied & Unembodied Self” in Spiritual
Third Process – Devotion involved in all processes. Brings danger. Taking one’s self as the most serious task and you may have to begin again and again – it’s snakelike and not lacking in terrors, demands effort and wholeness. What sustains our efforts, “Not knowing replaced planning” for her other client. He finds mother earth in place of his of his actual mother, alchemical symbols show patterns that go in psyche, regardless.
Psyche’s pattern – goes on with its pattern on a deep level, even when our mortal plans crash. Alchemy continues and offers renewal.
Being tossed between opposites means being contained in opposites.
You need another who recognizes and validates what you want to say – can also find it in music.
“It’s a form of social action to work on yourself.” Ann Ulanov
Diana Rubin says we’re all looking for magical enlightenment; maybe what we need to look for are the scraps.
