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Why Alchemy?
In order for teachers to reflect deeply upon themselves, they need powerful models and images to guide their introspection. In teacher reflectivity, as in the therapeutic processes, psychic energy must ultimately be "contained" by models and modalities that enable one to make sense out of one's inner and outer experiences. This enables those experiences to form the basis for the transformation of self, setting, and other. In this article, I would like to introduce and employ a model that I believe can enrich teacher reflectivity at biographical, political and spiritual levels. I am speaking of alchemy-and specifically, Jung's psychotherapeutic interpretation of it.
An Alchemical Primer
In the last major phase of his career, Carl Jung, the father of archetypal psychology, turned to the lost art and arcane texts of alchemy in his researches, claiming that alchemical processes subtly embodied and richly symbolized the psycho-spiritual transformations that occur in the course of deep therapy. He asserted that "the world of alchemical symbols definitely does not belong to the rubbish heap of the past, but stands in a very real and living relationship to our most recent discoveries concerning the psychology of the unconscious" (1963, p. xiii). In this article, I want to show how alchemy in its psychotherapeutic contexts offers especially rich symbols for exploring oneself as a teacher.
A Few Historical Notes on Alchemy
The son of a Protestant minister, Jung asserted that the sacramentally minimalist world of Protestantism had stripped Christianity of its sacred archetypal flesh by tearing away many of its rites and symbols. Contrary to the popular contemporary image of the alchemist as a quick-change artist trying to coax a sub rosa fortune in gold out of coal shards, the religious alchemists were engaged in a labor of high spiritual import. The gold that they aimed to produce-the Philosopher's Stone-represented nothing less than the spiritualization of matter, just as the wine of the mass became the true blood of Christ. Thus, the religious alchemist insisted that the transformations of matter that he sought in both himself and his material were tam moralis quam physica-moral as well as physical. Little wonder, then, that the religious alchemist believed that he could bring his work to completion only if he achieved a unio...
