What do Julia Child, the analytical psychologist, and the alchemist Morienus have in common? In their various kitchens, the chef, the analyst, and the alchemist take raw ingredients and, through their labors and various transformative processes, create something sublime. As Morenius has said, “This thing for which you have sought so long is not to be acquired or accomplished by force or passion. It is to be won only by patience and humility and by a determined and most perfect love.”
The psyche’s hunger for manifestation in the world is equal to our hunger for spiritual nourishment. Susan Negley’s training in the culinary arts of classical French cooking and mastery of its processes enhanced her understanding of alchemical transformation, making it more palatable. After decades of dreaming about food, its environment, preparation, and presentation, she came to realize that this was the language her unconscious was using to speak to her, connecting the mundane and the spiritual. The feast of metaphor and analogy in dreams led her to a bittersweet understanding of one of life’s greatest mysteries — life and death.
The ritual of the harvest and the Thanksgiving celebration is the right time to take a deeper look at how dreams of food and sacrifice connect us to our mythic underpinnings and can lead each of us to the questions: Which myth do you live by? What is the lingua franca of your soul? Susan’s thesis for her certification as Jungian analyst is “The Coniunctio Gastronomique: A Study of the Process of Individuation in Culinary Terms.”
