In this free 60-minute talk, Robert Bosnak introduces alchemical psychology and its surprising relevance to modern daily life. The word gibberish, he reveals, has alchemical roots and that connection turns out to be a doorway into a completely different way of relating to difficulty. Where contemporary culture tends to solve or eliminate problems, alchemy invites us to stay with them, to work within the unknown until something shifts. Bosnak shows how this older approach to stuckness and transformation can open new possibilities in your own life. This is a free introduction to his full course Gibberish: Alchemy for Everyday Life.

Robert Bosnak has spent fifty years returning to alchemy because it is the last Western intellectual tradition that placed human experience, rather than abstract law, at the centre of its inquiry. Where modern science asks how things work independently of our perception, alchemy asks how matter appears to us, treating that lived encounter with the world as the primary source of knowledge. In this blog, Bosnak draws on the sixteenth-century alchemical text Rosarium Philosophorum to explore how the alchemists' techniques for extracting life from encrusted matter offer a practical framework for anyone trying to move from contraction and stagnation back into a living, flowing engagement with the world. Read more 

Robert Bosnak draws a fundamental distinction between rational intelligence, measured by IQ, and what he calls Embodied Intelligence or MQ, the slower, less controllable knowing that lives in the body's sensations, symptoms, and physical responses. Through a clinical example of a dreamer whose left wrist reveals a pattern of holding back that his conscious mind is entirely unaware of, Bosnak shows how attending closely to specific bodily experiences can surface intelligence that rational thought cannot reach. Developing MQ means learning to treat the body's signals not as obstacles or illnesses to be overcome but as genuine sources of information about how we are actually engaging with our lives. Read more

Writing from Laos, Robert Bosnak asks a question that has genuinely troubled him: does happiness make creative work harder? He agrees with Freud that love and work are what matter most in life, and reflects that some of his most creative periods have followed heartbreak, while misery does seem to make the muses more prolific. His conclusion is not that we must choose between love and creativity, but that inspiration cannot be waited for, what matters is showing up to work daily with the discipline of the monks he watched that morning, whether the muse arrives or not. Read more

Robert Bosnak has been part of Jung Platform since its earliest days, one of the first teachers to bring his work to the platform when it launched in 2012. Over more than a decade he has taught more courses here than almost any other faculty member, building one of the most distinctive and extensive bodies of online teaching available in the field of depth psychology.