#4 An alchemical perspective on clinical psychology training.

”Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.” -Anna Freud

The Grand Hermetic Androgyne trampling underfoot the Four Elements of the Prima Materia - Codex Germanicus Monacensis 598, 1417. Source: Wikimedia.

Dear friends,

I quietly decided at the start of 2023 that my word for the year would be alchemy.

I thought about it all year while I did pretty much nothing about it, wondering what was going on and how to find a hook into an action that would make that mean something. I didn’t know why it mattered. I didn’t know what ‘it’ even was. Except for tinkering with Kim Krans’ Wild Unknown Alchemy Deck in a state of bafflement, and acquiring Carl Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy so it could gather dust on my bookshelf, I felt blank.

Weird alchemy stuff
Turns out, this kind of speechless confusion is the embodiment of the first stage of alchemy.  (Phew. 😅) In mid-December (sliding to the finish line), via

Michelle at SPACIES

, I finally found the work of

Emmalea Russo

, a poet, writer, astrologer, and alchemist who I could both understand and take seriously. Prior to finding her work, everyone I could understand when they talked about alchemy seemed like a bit of a New Age floozy, and everyone I could take seriously (my friendly spirit guide Dr. Jung, for example) was basically incomprehensible. I signed up for her course, The Alchemy of the Word. The next day, a flock of ravens, which I would come to learn are also harbingers of the first stage of alchemy, took up residence in the trees outside the front door of my home for several weeks.

I also started noticing this mural on my commute (via Brisbane artist @mikeshankster.) Sidebar: did you know the correct collective noun for a group of ravens is an unkindness?)

Many more synchronicities followed. With the activation of her teaching, I have also been able to begin this writing, and to see many things anew that have felt stuck and heavy for a long time. This has included much relating to my work and training as a therapist.

Clinical psychology training as prima materia
To step through the stages of alchemy - to turn lead into gold, at least metaphorically speaking - we must understand something about the elemental nature of what we have to work with. Alchemy begins with what is called the prima materia, that is, the first material. In the first stage of the work, we have to ask, what do we have to work with? What is here? Where do we begin?

The prima materia is never easy to deal with - even the concept itself is slippery and hard to understand. Russo teaches that it is often linked with the metal lead, the oldest, heaviest, and most dense of the seven alchemical metals, and associated with the planet Saturn. The Roman god Saturn is a pretty brutal guy - the overseer of time and death, and famous devourer of his own children. A harsh teacher to say the least.

Brian Cox, Succession’s Logan Roy (the ultimate Saturnian dad), with Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, at the Prado Museum in Madrid, via Reddit. 🔥

When I reflect on my work as a therapist, I currently see the prima materia of my career as clinical psychology, and specifically my experience of clinical psychology training. The initiation of this training, which I began almost sixteen years ago, gave me something to work with, a place to begin, something to do, something to call myself. In that sense, it began my adult life. It was also, like lead, dense, heavy and black, a burden that has been hard to carry and even harder to transform into something I could use in therapeutic practice.

The elemental nature of clinical psychology
Today’s clinical psychology is a product of its time: a body of thought uprooted from its origins in the humanities and psychoanalysis, and transplanted through the collective trauma of the Second World War and the cognitive revolution of the 1960s and 1970s to its current home, fighting for legitimacy amongst the medical sciences. Despite its humanist and even religious or magical foundations as a healing art, it is now largely a framework of assessment, categorisation and scientific study, with cognitive therapies headlining as the psychotherapeutic products of this conversion.

The first act of the cognitive revolutionaries, as is always the first act of colonisers and overthrowers, was to erase this history, replacing it with their own. In the halls of the psychology school of my esteemed Australian undergraduate university, the psychoanalysts were nowhere to be found. There was no mention whatsoever of Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Freida Fromm-Reichmann or Heinz Kohut; no mention either of artists or poets, no history of contemporary culture, no history of humanity at all (save for one German professor’s labour of love, a single enchanting course on evolutionary psychology). Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis, but also unequivocally a founding father of psychology itself, was not so much erased as strung up by his neck in a clown costume, as an example to others of the pitfalls of acknowledging the darkness, eros and mystery of the human psyche.

“Scientist-practitioner” as “gold standard”
In the place of all the artistry, complexity, romanticism, eroticism and murderousness of humanity, I was offered the “scientist-practitioner model” of clinical practice. By its standards, everything true and helpful can be discovered with scientific rigour - ideally, randomised control trials, with each element of reality controlled for to reveal a neat, coherent truth. This seems reasonable enough, but had many implications, some explicitly stated and some communicated more atmospherically. These included:

• Anything that cannot be measured is ignored, often determined not to exist at all.

• Anything that is measured is automatically determined to be real, valid and important.

• Individuals can and do accurately describe themselves when self reporting, that is, they do not have unconscious or hidden motives or aspects of self.

• The use of instinct, intuition, personal experience or anecdotal evidence in clinical practice is irresponsible.

• Deference to protocols is a more ethical way of practicing than including or relying on one’s own particular style, nature, personality or experience.

• There is one right way (ironically called the “gold standard”) and other ways are incorrect or even harmful.

• The desires and comfort of the clinician are irrelevant.
  

Prior to the cognitive revolution, there were many traditions of what it meant to do therapy welcomed within the umbrella of psychology, many of which have continued at the margins of our community; however, in its wake, clinical psychology swiftly became what Dr Paul Rhodes (in this brilliant conversation) called an epistemological bubble, unable to see outside of itself and so only able to conduct research reinforcing its own paradigm. Cognitive therapy, with all its simple promises, functioned like an invasive introduced species, destroying the ecological diversity of the profession and eradicating much colour and beauty in its path. It was into this ravaged environment that I walked to begin my studies to become a therapist.

It is found in the filth
I have caught myself repeatedly attempting to skip ahead in this writing to make this a story of transformation - to move quickly to how I found the analysts and they found me, and to my work as I see it now, much more creative and less dense - less leaden - than these principles would allow. And in truth, I no longer believe any of the statements on that list. However, prima materia requires much consideration. The first stage of the alchemical process is the longest, and in many respects the hardest and most important. In the same way we must return to memories, images and rules from our childhood over and over again in therapy, our origins exist in everything that comes after them.

I have spoken with a great deal of scorn at times about my clinical psychology training (and may well continue to do so 😅). But in the most neutral and obvious sense, without our prima materia, we have nowhere to start. That black lead was my beginning, and if I were handed any other material, I would not have been transformed in the fire necessary to burn away its density. I was not graced with entry to an institution that was fluent in real ways to initiate its students into the role of a therapist, but I was initiated nonetheless, through that chaos, into the extraordinary realm of the human psyche. I have no wish to glorify the institution itself, but I have a new appreciation for its necessity.

Without the lead, we cannot begin.

In love, and the pursuit of a shared path to a greater truth,

Kate