I recently had the pleasure of connecting with Lorie Dechar, who joined me for a rich conversation spanning acupuncture, alchemy, and psychoanalysis.
I first encountered Lorie’s work in her book, Five Spirits: Alchemical Acupuncture for Psychological and Spiritual Healing. This text became the source of a synchronicity: only two days before my meeting with Lorie, a friend came over and mentioned that she was reading Five Spirits.
The spirit of this synchronicity is a dynamics of resonance—as Lorie and I already share roots in Worsley five-element acupuncture, depth psychology, and alchemy. If the unconscious is the Other’s discourse, then in this conversation I heard my own pathways coming back to me in new points of connection.
In this conversation, Lorie shares her experience and inspiration with listeners, as we move across fields in an exciting exchange of ideas. From five-element acupuncture to the spirit of human potential. From field dynamics to rapport, transference, and the alchemical third. From Jung to Lacan, archetypes to signifiers, and the structures of the unconscious.
We conclude by re-framing human potential and individuation into rhizomatic networks of becoming, where desire realizes destiny.
Chapter Annotations
0:00 — Synchronous Currents
Opening with a synchronicity
03:28 — Five-Element Acupuncture
Studying with J.R. Worsley
06:48 — Acupuncture and Human Potential
Esalen; the mystery of acupuncture intervention
10:18 — Source Points
Teaching five-element treatment; less is more
13:27 — Field Dynamics
Subtle energetics; the joy of treatment; rapport and transference
20:35 — Knowledge and Collaboration
Breaking the epistemological divide; treatment as collaboration
24:32 — From Jung to Lacan
Tracing the move from Jung to Lacan; depth psychology and psychoanalysis
34:00 — Structures of the Unconscious
Preverbal experience and the a priori unconscious
40:23 — Spirit of the Points
Points as archetypes and signifiers
50:35 — Co-Individuation and Rhizomatic Becoming
Beyond the heroism of human potential and individuation
53:49 — Desire, Destiny, and the Real
Desire as the force of destiny; the Real to be continued
About Lorie Dechar
I’m an acupuncturist, psychotherapist, teacher, and author whose passionate focus is on the intersection of traditional Chinese medicine, depth psychology, spirituality, and Taoist and European alchemy. I touch the bodies, souls, and spirits of human beings with needles, moxa, plant medicines, poetry, stories, images, tears, laughter, and dreams.
I have studied with human teachers in this dimension – European Five Element Acupuncturist Professor J.R. Worsley, Zen Peacemaker Priest Claude AnShin Thomas, Focusing Founder Eugene Gendlin, Jungian Analyst Nathan Schwartz-Salant, and trans-public intellectual and post-activist Bayo Akomolafe. I have studied with more than human teachers – the quarry ponds, ocean tides, songbirds, fir trees, lady slippers, puffball mushrooms, sphagnum mosses, burdock weeds, and ice age stones – of the cove in Downeast Maine where I live. These, as well as teachers from other dimensions – the sages of ancient China, the revolutionary European mystics of Kabbalah and consciousness, wise wimmin whose names have disappeared like white feathers in the clouds – have guided me in the development of the work I call Alchemical Healing.
