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Kenneth Newman is to be congratulated upon his paper, which is as informative as it is a stimulus. It is informative in its presentation of the alchemical symbolism both of the vas bene clausum as the central of three such containing vessels, and of the panoramic vision of the alchemist's workroom with its twofold division. On the left it is an oratory or library for reflection and thought. On the right it is a laboratory where, among the retorts, crucibles and alembics, a workman, stripped to the waist, tends the fire that heats a retort, central in the picture, and containing the celestial-terrestial symbol of the winged dragon. No less enlightening is his description of the mutual interconnection between the smith and the shaman and his nicely turned phantasy around the image of the alchemical workman tempering his iron in the fire.
The stimulus the paper provides is to amplify and elaborate thoughts around the links between alchemical symbolism and both the motherinfant relationship and clinical practice. These two themes are linked, of course, by the fact that most analyses involve not only a re-experiencing and re-assessment within the transference-countertransference of the patient's infancy and early childhood experiences, but also the development of new adult beginnings often expressed in the imagery of infancy, but also in themselves, distorted by events in the patient's past.
Jung's insistence on the significance of the self, considered in terms of its ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ and seen to be expressed historically in alchemical imagery such as that of the three vessels, links with the investigations into the emergence and nurture of the self in infancy carried out by Winnicott, Fordham and, in a way, by Kohut and Kernberg. When, from the beginning of life, it is the emergence of the true self that is to be facilitated rather than the production either of good little citizens by authoritarian pattern imposition or of confused and lost ‘waifs’ through the neglect