Searching Again though Inquiry and Inheritance

Coppin and Nelson (2017) open their genealogy of depth psychological research with a claim that is also an inheritance: "One of the gifts of the tradition of depth psychology is to show the connection between myth, dream, and symptom" (p. 40). That connection is not an invention, but rather a recovery. Myth preceded psychology by millennia, and dreams preceded myth. What Jung and Hillman formalized, cultures already practiced: the treatment of psychic images as carriers of meaning irreducible to literal explanation.

Rowland (2026) punctuates this recovery as re-search: a return to searching. The ontological starting point of depth psychology is the reality of the generative, creative psyche, a psyche that produces images as its primary epistemic currency. This ontology descends from myths, religion, alchemy, herbal medicine, and the esoteric traditions that modernity expelled from its epistemological canon. Alchemy in particular held what the scientific method discarded: the insistence that the researcher is transformed by the research, that subject and object cannot be cleanly split, that the vessel matters as much as the substance. Depth psychology circles back to this insistence and gives it new methodological language.

What is genuinely new is the reflexivity. Premodern alchemists did not theorize their own subjectivity as a method; they enacted it. Depth psychology recognizes what alchemy performed. The fifteen "moves" Coppin and Nelson (2017) outline, welcoming the psyche, creating a container, engaging dialogue, etc., are alchemical operations translated into research practice, each one a recognition that inquiry transforms the inquirer.

Of these traditions, alchemy resonates most directly with the work I intend to pursue. My research examines how diagnostic culture and organizational systems pathologize decent, and alchemy offers the counter-image: transformation through containment, not through excision. The alchemical vas holds what the diagnostic manual or corporate workshop would label and remove.

References

Coppin, J., & Nelson, E. (2017). The art of inquiry: A depth psychological perspective (2nd ed.). Spring Journal Books.