The first is that alchemy is still hanging around despite its status as a subjugated science. The second is that it is precisely its secondary citizenship that may recommend it as a foil to traditional psychology. Psychology is a therapy industry that tends to wrap itself in a mantle of hard science no matter how tangential the connection may be. We are persuaded to suppress these feelings by psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries that profit from psychosis. The capitalist priestcraft of modern psychiatry, working in tandem with the State bureaucracy, regulates and polices the new restriction and gelding of desire.
Damned desire equals unhappiness, and unhappiness creates a motivation for buying things.
Complicit with the therapy industry's project to undermine natural impulses is its attempt to eradicate the occult arts, whose relationships with objective science are deemed impure and misguided. However, these systems of knowledge have not been successfully erased and continue to offer valid and helpful perspectives to living. They hover beyond the confines of dogmatic psychology as patient, but persistent spirits. As a way of combating the dogma of disease and the service to capitalism perpetuated by the therapy industry, I offer the insights garnered from a historically rich alchemical tradition. First, a brief sketch of the contours of alchemy.