Callan, G.(2002).

Temenos: The primordial vessel and the mysteries of "9/11"

Temenos is the sacred container known by the alchemist as the retort or vas hermeticum, by the freemason as the cathedral or rotundus, by the analyst as the consulting room and the transferential relationship itself. Carl Jung viewed the individuation process as an alchemical endeavor in which the analysand, the analyst, and the vessel of their relationship are transformed in the furnace of analysis. In this light, the vessel is both the agent and the object of transmutation.

This dissertation employs a blend of artistic and hermeneutic methodologies. In the tradition of phenomenology, the researcher opens to a hermetic mode of consciousness as a vehicle for bearing witness to the world. She employs psychological, anthropological, philosophical, mythological, religious, literary, architectural, and cosmological theory to probe the question: What makes a container transformational, and how might we partake of its medicine? With the massive breakdown of containment in our world, a strong tincture of imagination must be brought to this psychological enterprise. The researcher dwells inside the inquiry until it yields an empirical response in image, poetry, reverie, memoir, and visual art.

In the individuation of a person, a culture, or a global community, a process of deconstruction, dissociation, and annihilation takes place. The old vessel gives way and familiar notions of containment must be abandoned. This dissertation seeks to encounter "9/11" as an exemplary retort, or vas mirabile . In the national and global psyche, our pathologies have arisen to inseminate the future. At the heart of this study is the contention that the macrocosm of our plight and our possibility is encoded in the microcosm of every gesture, artifact, and dream left in the wake of the World Trade Center explosion—and in the individual and collective psyche.