Evaporation

Evaporation lets off the steam, boils away the moisture that has kept you stuck. Old glue dries to dust; you no longer adhere to former allegiances. Once the emotion is extracted from a memory, it can pass in review as an interesting curiosity.

Hillman argues that evaporation as alchemical operation performs the psychological work of detaching affect from memory, producing the dry salt of wisdom that characterizes aged, disillusioned insight.

Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

evaporation in a flat pan lets the steam dissipate; distillation achieves from a messy mass a few drops of clarity; sublimation brings a material upward from the sedimentation at the bottom of the vessel

Hillman situates evaporation as one of a series of distinct alchemical cooking operations, each corresponding to a different psychic movement, distinguishing its drying function from distillation, sublimation, and fermentation.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Since there are many salts, there are many operations to produce it, evaporation being but one. Others are calcination, putrefaction, distillation (salt as a byproduct), coagulation.

Hillman positions evaporation within a taxonomy of salt-producing operations, asserting that it is not the sole or privileged path to the saline residue but one among several alchemical routes.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

the evaporation of Christianity under the assaults of rationalism, intellectualism, materialism, and ‘realism.’

Jung deploys evaporation as a metaphor for the historical dissolution of religious substance, suggesting that an entire symbolic worldview can be volatilized by the progressive dominance of secular rationalism.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, 1951thesis

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

A silver band rotated about the equator and, according to the frequency of its vibrations, formed alternate zones of condensation and evaporation.

In a numinous dream-vision recounted by Jung, evaporation and condensation appear as paired cosmic rhythms structuring a vision of the globe, linking the operation to archetypal processes of manifestation and dissolution.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

it expedites the ‘drying’, the evaporation of the liquid of life—and with it, we can explain Homer’s name for the funeral process

Onians grounds evaporation in archaic Greek thanatology, arguing that cremation was understood as accelerating the natural evaporation of the soul’s moisture, enabling the spirit’s release from the body.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

Everyone, not only artists, recognizes that evaporation of ideas. A mother may enjoy raising her children for months or years, every day thinking up new ideas for them. Then one day the inspiration leaves and emptiness takes over.

Moore applies evaporation phenomenologically to the sudden loss of creative inspiration, treating this drying-up not as failure but as a shadow phase belonging to the soul’s cyclical creative rhythm.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

0un6s is the boiling of the blood around the heart through a desire to retaliate’ and lies behind the Platonic explanation, ’0u|j6s from the seething (Quaecos) and boiling of the vyuxr)’

Onians traces the ancient Greek concept of thumos to the vaporous evaporation of heated blood around the heart, providing pre-Socratic precedent for the psychophysical imagery of evaporation as soul-substance in motion.

Onians, R B, The origins of European thought about the body, the mind,, 1988aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →

a silver band rotated about the equator and, according to the frequency of its vibrations, formed alternate zones of condensation and evaporation

Chodorow reproduces the same cosmic vision cited by Jung, confirming the paired rhythm of condensation and evaporation as a structuring image within the individuation process as rendered in active imagination.

Chodorow, Joan, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997aside

Dig deeper with Sebastian →