Metaphorical Use of Alchemy’s Retort, Prima Materia, and the Philosopher’s Stone in Psychotherapy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay shares my experience of the usefulness of alchemical understandings of the retort, the prima materia (first matter), and the philosopher’s stone in the practice of therapy. I discovered that these suppositions offer practical insights into how to be an effective clinician. The retort correlates with the therapist, the process of therapy, and eventually the client as container; the prima materia correlates with the unconscious material that the client brings to therapy; and the philosopher’s stone correlates with the healing function of the psyche. The quality of the therapist’s presence is likened to the qualities the alchemists aspired to live up to in themselves. I also found parallels between psychological transformation and the alchemical understandings of the structure of the retort as exemplified in the axiom “like cures like.” * Author
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".