Why Did Jung Study Alchemy?
by Dyane Sherwood, Ph.D.

Friday, February 13, 2009, 7:30 p.m.,  Lecture.
The Unitarian Universalist Church,
3975 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota
$10 Members   $15 Non-Members   $5 Students

    What relevance does the Philospher’s Stone have to the modern field of Depth Psychology? What did Jung learn from his study of the obscure, symbolic texts of Chinese Taoist hermits, Alexandrian mystics, and medieval Arabic and European alchemists? Jung hypothesized that alchemy might be a window into the nature of the human mind and its innate tendencies to imagine and structure experience when faced with the unknown. In this illustrated lecture, Dr. Sherwood will discuss Jung’s discovery of similarities between the imagery of the alchemists and the dream imagery of contemporary people in analysis. You will be introduced to the basic history and symbolism of alchemy and learn how the alchemists’ attempts to transform base matter into gold became a practice of inner transformation.

Embodied Spirit:
The Symbolic Alchemy of the Splendor Solis
Workshop
Saturday, February 14, 2009 10 a.m.- 4 p.m.
The Unitarian Universalist Church, South Wing
3975 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota
$25 Members   $30 Non-Members   $15 Students
Early Registration Discount:  Register with payment by February 11, 2009:
$20 Members $25 Non-Members

    The alchemists’ pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone was not intellectual only but deeply involved in an experiential interaction with matter. For them, spiritual transformation was an embodied process of discovery: that spirit comes from matter and that inner gold, or the Stone, lies in potentia within the recesses of inner darkness. Their evocative imagery often induces a physical and intuitive reaction in the viewer, as we will see by focusing on the beautiful symbolic paintings contained in an early Renaissance alchemical manuscript, the Splendor Solis.

Dyane N. Sherwood, Ph.D. is an analyst member and on the teaching faculty of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She is the Editor of Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche, an international quarterly. Dr. Sherwood is the author of publications focusing upon the human need to make meaning out of suffering. She co-authored, with the late Joseph L. Henderson, M.D., Transformation of the Psyche: The Symbolic Alchemy of the Splendor Solis. Dr. Sherwood, who received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, is in private practice is in Woodside, California.

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