We all arrive in this world as one hundred percent vulnerable infants. Without coordinated muscles or words, we're one of Nature's most helpless experiments. Without people to teach us, we wouldn't know what to eat, how to stay dry and warm, what to do with ourselves, or how to ask a simple question.
We enter the psychotherapist's office when our stories fail us. We hope that this therapist will show genuine interest in us, understand our story, and say something helpful. Chances are, we will walk anxiously into the room with as much fear as hope.
The psychoanalyst's office is the place, perhaps above all others, where people tell their private stories. When analysis works at its best, each session begins with three radical assumptions: Each person has a story, their story makes sense, and it's worth listening to.
Despite its apparent lack of success the 'sacred art' of alchemy persisted for more than seventeen hundred years. The essential duality which characterised alchemy from the very beginning, by which the work was divided into the practica and the theoria, reflects the confluence in Hellenistic times of a new spirit with a very old tradition.
