Psychological Perspectives, 62: 139–142, 2019

Copyright # C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles

ISSN: 0033-2925 print / 1556-3030 online
DOI: 10.1080/00332925.2019.1624431

The Alchemy of What Moves Us

Robin Robertson

hile we hope that each issue of Psychological Perspectives moves and excites
W our readers, occasionally we have such a bounty of riches that the issue bursts at
the seams. This is one such issue. Accordingly, I can only discuss at length some of the
riches contained inside, providing briefer overviews of the remaining articles.
Fanny Brewster begins her moving article on how she slowly came to be aware of
racial prejudice in her life with these words:
My first world of color consisted of brown pecans with streaks of black that
had fallen into my gardener-grandfather’s yard. … My first identification as a
brown child grew seamlessly into my consciousness. My friends at school and
my Catholic nuns, my first teachers where I began kindergarten and remained
for eight years—were all chocolate-colored. My world of colors did not mean I
was color-blinded. It only meant that I was born into a small Southern town
where segregation was a way of life.
As she says, “The disruption that came to my idyllic world of sweetness happened
because I grew up.” She then carefully develops, step-by-step, a model of racial com-
plexes that can help us better understand how prejudice begins at an unconscious
level, and how best to use that knowledge to better deal with the effect of those com-
plexes in our lives. She is fully aware that this won’t be easy. In Jung’s words:
“Complexes are something so unpleasant that nobody in his right senses can be per-
suaded that the motive forces which maintain them could betoken anything good.” Her
final words are: “Can there be any wonder we have avoided within our area of American
Jungian psychology a depthful discussion of racial complexes, racial prejudice, and cul-
tural trauma?”
In a tour-de-force dream amplification, “When Snake Comes,” Barbara Platek
allows the reader to follow her fifteen-year path toward deeper insight that began with a
terrifying dream of a huge snake. Soon afterwards, she experienced a debilitating illness
that lasted three months, then led her to set aside her plans to become an analyst. Like
so many of us, she came to find that the unconscious was instead calling her to go deeper
into the unconscious and live there for a long time. In her words: “Fifteen years ago a
giant snake interrupted the path I was on and moved me in a new direction. Since that
time my interest in a more feminine, embodied approach to healing has grown. … As
the years have passed, I have become less terrified of the serpent and more aware of its
role as guide and protector. To follow the wisdom of the snake is to trust the unknown
and allow myself to be moved and transformed by energies beyond my consciousness.”
140 PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 䉬 VOLUME 62, ISSUES 2-3 / 2019

Reading of her inner journey that started with a dream, I’m reminded of the
words of anthropologist, writer, and founder of North Atlantic Press, Richard
Grossinger: “In a certain sense, dreams are realer than life. That is, they are closer to
the roots of our being than daily waking events. If we exist in some ultimate terms, it is
beyond the senses and beyond consciousness.”
Providing further proof of this centrality of the dream, in “Six Hundred Years”
frequent contributor Meredith Sabini brings together two brief but powerful dreams,
one of her own and one of the late Max Zeller (“The Task of the Analyst,” also included
in this issue). Together their dreams speak to not only the end of Christianity but also
to the early beginnings of a new religion. Sabini’s dream occurred more than three dec-
ades ago: “I go around the four directions of a building. A man comes to the front desk
holding pieces of an ark. He asks me what it symbolizes. I say, ‘That the container of
Christianity has broken.’” In her own life, she found herself leaving a Christianity that
was so confining that it often forced her to leave church services with acute stomach
pains. She moved on to sample many other less restrictive religious traditions, finally
becoming a Jungian-oriented psychologist.
Max Zeller’s dream from 1949, which he shared with Jung, showed an incredible
number of people, including Zeller, who were in the process of building an enormous
temple. Though it was still early days, the foundation was already in place. Jung told
him that this was the new religion that people were working on all over the world,
which would, according to Jung’s own dreams, take six hundred years to complete.
During our present era of upheaval and chaos, it can be reassuring to remember that a
new universal container is slowly emerging. I can remember that when my own path of
individuation took me through the dark night of the soul, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero
with a Thousand Faces reassured me that this was just one stage in a long journey.
Jeffrey Raff’s “The Alchemy of Imagination” draws on “the Esoteric tradition that
includes Hermeticism, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Sufism, and, of course, alchemy. We may,
I think, safely place Jungian psychology and spirituality in this tradition, for certainly
Jung’s great respect for the imagination, which he preferred to call the unconscious, is
seen throughout his work and of course in his development of the technique of active
imagination.” But Raff disagrees with Jung’s position that the alchemists were projec-
ting their inner psychological issues onto their experiments. Raff felt that the best of
the alchemists were experiencing a deeper form of imagination. He presents a level of
imagination that goes beyond psychological projection to an encounter with an actual
psychoid level of reality. He argues that “in the psychoidal imagination one actually
experiences the world of subtle bodies and divine energies and that this, in fact, is not a
projection at all. … When we enter the realm of subtle bodies, we have entered the
rich imaginal world that has its own reality over and beyond my psyche.”

Elizabeth Eowyn Nelson, in “‘Hatred Is Tremendous Cement’: Complexity
Science and Political Consciousness in Chaotic Times,” examines hatred in light of the
2016 election of Donald Trump by discussing Andrew Samuel’s “action ethos,” Jung’s
thoughts on conflict and consciousness as they pertain to individuation, Singer and
Kimbles’ notion of the cultural complex, and complexity science to help us to think dif-
ferently about the eros of hatred in this urgent time.
William K. Grevatt’s “The Alchemy of Tyranny: A Journey through Central
Europe” takes us on an eye-opening trip from Prague to Budapest, during which he
distills the current political storms in Europe as well as America. In both geographical
arenas, he shows us the very same putrid ingredients of anger, hatred, lies, racism, mis-
ogyny, and anti-Semitism that lead away from democracy and into tyranny.
 ROBIN ROBERTSON 䉬 THE ALCHEMY OF WHAT MOVES US 141

“Kali: In Praise of the Goddess,” by Michael A. Marsman, contrasts the Western

view of this goddess as associated with death, sexuality, and violence with the Eastern
Indian perspective of her as a manifestation of the divine feminine as savior and pro-
tector. The article provides historical and philosophical background and a symbolic
understanding of the story of Kali that embraces an expanded comprehension.
Evin Eldridge Phoenix’s “Goddess Consciousness: The Power of Inanna as
Revolutionary Ecofeminist Archetype” explores the shift in consciousness that is neces-
sary to resolve the wounded anima/animus in our collective unconscious to mitigate
climate catastrophe, ecocide, and associated human costs of unfettered capitalism. To
alleviate environmental destruction and the human cost of patriarchal capitalism, a glo-
bal shift in consciousness that places life over material wealth, instead of the culturally
dominant inverse value system of profit over life, is desperately needed.
“The Muse of Women’s Rage,” by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, reminds us first of the
Kavanaugh hearings in September 2018, during which Christine Blasey Ford gave care-
ful and heart-wrenching testimony about being sexually assaulted by the man who
aspired to become a Supreme Court Justice. This brave act was met with hectoring,
furious (mostly old) white men, and the vote to confirm Kavanaugh. These events
ignited collective fury among women, inspiring the author to consider the importance
and validity of women’s rage, in prose and in poetry.
Joseph A. Talamo’s “Archetypal Storm: Jung and the Music of DragonForce” con-
siders a selection of resonant lyrics spread throughout the total oeuvre of the UK-based
metal band DragonForce through a Jungian lens that opens windows into the psyche
and the nature of the universe.
“Romantic Love: A Treatment Approach,” by S. Robert Moradi, discusses his
understanding of the phenomenon of romantic love as it appears in the consulting room
and the usefulness of taking a phenomenological approach to romantic love in the treat-
ment process. Approached alchemically, the hidden essence of the individual can begin
to be unveiled by the work on the phenomenon of romantic love. Ultimately, this
“unveiling” may serve the process of transforming romantic love into universal love.
Claire Tiampo Savage illuminates two ways of finding our way home in “Tantric
Chakras and the Descent of Inanna: Bridging the Archetypes and the Human Soul”: the
Tantric chakra system as discussed by C. G. Jung in The Psychology of Kundalini
Yoga, and the Sumerian myth of the descent of Inanna. These ancient perspectives
delve into the core of our being, revealing soul and meeting the urge to realize our
true nature.
Carl Trepagnier’s “An Enlightening Experience” demonstrates the direct influ-
ence of unconscious material in the form of dreams throughout the process of individu-
ation. Influenced by Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” and Jung’s theory of the shadow
archetype, the author was guided to transcendent information garnered through a ser-
ies of dreams.
In “Comment on ‘Outbreak: On Transgender Teens and Psychic Epidemics,’”
Clara Schaertl Short discusses Lisa Marchiano’s previous article (Vol. 60[3], 2017) on
what Marchiano termed a social contagion of “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” Schaertl
Short, herself a trans woman, contends that gender dysphoria has been established as a
legitimate medical condition, not a “psychic epidemic,” as Marchiano contends. This
article is then followed by Marchiano’s rebuttal.
And, as always, there is poetry that speaks meaningfully to Jungians, including
three major poems by our poetry editor, Naomi Ruth Lowinsky; Michael Gellert’s book
142 PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES 䉬 VOLUME 62, ISSUES 2-3 / 2019

review of Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others; and an insightful film
review of The Shape of Water by Thuy Bui.

AN INVITATION TO OUR READERS

Since the debut of Psychological Perspectives in 1970, its contents have
reflected the belief that Jungian psychology is not restricted to typical academic topics.
In addition to articles exploring myriad themes and subjects through a Jungian lens, we
also publish a wide variety of short fiction, poetry, art, and book and film reviews. All in
some way connect, whether straightforwardly or more complexly, with Jungian ideas.
Joseph A. Talamo’s article in this issue (“Archetypal Storm: Jung and the Music of
DragonForce”) is an initial experiment to see if articles and reviews dealing with the
relationship between Jungian thought and music can also find a home in our journal.
We would welcome other contributions that find a commonality of thought and feeling,
through music, with Jungian ideas. These could include reviews of particular groups or
individual artists. Perhaps one specific album or even a single song speaks in a particu-
larly Jungian way. Remember Sting’s “Synchronicity”? Or the commonality of purpose
might not manifest through the lyrics, but the music itself. Or best of all: both. We wel-
come your thoughts and contributions in this area.

Robin Robertson, Ph.D. is a Jungian-oriented clinical psychologist, now

retired. Robin has published many books and articles on Jungian psychology
and related areas, such as his hobby as an amateur magician. He lives in
Alhambra, California with his wife Katherine.
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