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Have you ever met someone and felt an instant sense of attraction or repulsion even though you do not know the person? In Depth Psychology this is an unconscious as well as alchemical reaction that is understood as part of psychic projective phenomena of affinity, where a constellated chemistry between two individuals is ignited. This phenomenon was understood by Jung mythically as the unio Mystica, or the union of opposites.This presentation will share how Jung illustrated this psychological understanding of the transference phenomena in alchemical symbolism and illustrations taken from the 16th-century alchemical text, Rosarium Philosophorum. He utilized these illustrations to show the connections that exist between the transformative process shared by alchemy and an analogous transformative process that he discovered in the psychic growth of an individual.
About the author
Madeleine Spencer is a critical community psychologist, trained for 10 years at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California. Her work is in the field of depth psychology where her studies have involved analytical, archetypal, imaginal, community, eco-indigenous and liberation psychology. Her current focus in community psychology is on the relationship between race, and place and the ways that our relationships to each other, as well as the built environment, architecture, and city planning, have protracted social impacts on the mental health of communities.
