Customer Reviews

The Alchemy of Healing: Psyche and Soma

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This is probably the best work on healing I have read so far; I am now on my third reading and it will not be the last as there is so much in this book to chew on. Whitmont, who was born in the early part of the century, is (if he's still alive) an M.D. and psychotherapist, and also well versed in homeopathy, alchemy, chaos theory, the theories of Rupert Sheldrake and David Bohm, and many other topics such as art, literature, and drama. He has a truly broad intellect as well as a highly developed intuitive sense. I would say his ideas are firmly within the humanist tradition, without any New Age leanings. Indeed, he shows that in healing, darkness is just as important as "the Light"--for the darkness is where one goes to mine the gold of the deepest human experiences. He does not approach the causes of illness from the standpoint so prevalent today of "we cause our illnesses by not dealing with our emotional or soul issues."

Rather, he points out that illness, as well as all phenomena, proceeds from a deeper level of reality whose patterns are not readily discernible or understandable when viewed from the three dimensional reality we inhabit. Although I cannot summarize the book well because it contains so much, I would say that his basic stance is that everything of the visible world is rooted in an invisible reality, an "implicate order," (to quote physicist David Bohm) and that in healing we must take that implicate order into consideration just as much as we do the physical reality of the illness. His way of doing this takes up a good part of the second portion of the book. (The first portion explains his way of looking at man, reality, and the universe, with an interesting first chapter on homeopathy.)

I highly recommend this book to any healer, whether you are a nurse, physician, psychotherapist, energy healer, somatics practitioner, whatever.........it's not necessarily an easy read but it will open up many dimensions of the healing process to you.