ABSTRACT
Medieval alchemists tried making gold in their crucibles and failed unless they'd put gold in at the beginning. Alchemical language can work as a particle decelerator. Symbols of transformation, of holding and containing, speak about changes resulting from work and by prayer. Alchemy, like analysis, depends on work and prayer: to reflect, to be with as well as to do; to not know as well as to know; to allow the natural chaos and uncertainty of any creative process. Developmental psychology and neuroscience are useful, if not essential, attempts to describe things as they really are, but they capture what it is to be human as successfully as reading a cookery book captures the taste of real food. Developmental psychology and neuroscience are determinedly modern; materialist-based discourses about doing. They seem to accept logic of cause and effect, of determinism.
