Applying the Theory of Process from Arthur Young
Excerpts from Homeopathy in Reflexive Perspective
by Frans Maan MD

Frans Maan, M.D. is a homeopathic physician in the Netherlands. When he first discovered the work of Arthur Young in his wide-ranging study of unconventional ideas, he began to teach his fellow practitioners the connections between the theory of process and homeopathy to enhance their understanding of homeopathic remedies. His book on the subject was published in 2000.

When I was about twenty-one, I had the privilege of spending an evening with the late Arij Vrijlandt and his nephew, a friend of mine. Arij Vrijlandt was called the “Nestor of homoeopathy” in the Netherlands. I was still a medical student, and hardly knew anything about homoeopathy. Nevertheless, homoeopathic remedies were familiar to me, because of my Protestant upbringing. (In the Netherlands, one of the Protestant political leaders before WW II, Abraham Kuyper, was an advocate of homoeopathy. He induced many Reformed ministers to advocate it also. The result was that many Reformed families had a homoeopathic do-it-yourself book next to the Bible in their bookshelves. And so it was in our family.)

Arij Vrijlandt had constructed a periodic table out of metal, in the form of a pyramid. He connected the elements with a spiral. He was searching for similarities in the homoeopathic remedy pictures derived from the elements, and he tried to link them to the Ayurveda and the classic elements. He made mistakes, but something stuck. In the years to follow, slowly but surely becoming familiar with several unorthodox viewpoints and therapies (astrology, Alice Bailey, bioenergetics, Reich, Maslow, Bach flower remedies, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, healing, homoeopathy, and others), I did not resist the urge to buy books with unorthodox treatments of the periodic table, or chemical elements. Among them were Ouspensky, Blavatsky, Buckminster Fuller, and Arthur Young. At the time, I could not do anything with them in connection with homoeopathy.

Then came Jan Scholten, and suddenly it all made sense! (Jan Scholten is a homoeopathic doctor who has done groundbreaking work in classifying homoeopathic remedies according to the scheme of the periodic table.) I retrieved Arthur Young’s The Reflexive Universe from an unopened storage box, and bought The Geometry of Meaning later on. A framework isomorphic to Jan Scholten’s was there already, with the possibility of extending the same patterns to all kingdoms in nature and to make formal links with the zodiac, Jung, and personality psychology in general! The only thing lacking was that it had yet not been connected to homoeopathy.

Since then I have been busy familiarizing myself with Arthur Young’s thought, with Jungian thought, with other psychologists, and with the taxonomy of flowering plants, and using them all in practice. Homoeopathy became exciting again. Without Jan Scholten, Arthur Young, C.G. Jung, and astrology I could not have perceived the ideas presented here.

Among the many models and theories that line up with Jan Scholten’s, first and foremost is the model of Arthur Young. It makes possible not only the refinement and extension of Scholten’s work, but also the reduction into four functions with different orientations of awareness. Arthur Young’s work made me reconsider the patterns described by Scholten—to be able to detect “seven” in the columns of the periodic table, to my own surprise. “Seven” in the rows is obvious, since there are seven rows only.

In this book I propose that there is a pattern in homoeopathic materia medica that comes down to the pattern fire-water-air-earth-air-water-fire (quintessence)—on several hierarchical levels, with different time scales. This pattern can be detected horizontally and vertically in the periodic table, and also horizontally and vertically in Arthur Young’s kingdom grid, of which the periodic table is a part. Phrased differently, the pattern descends from spirit to matter and ascends back to spirit again; or, learning cycles followed by feedback loops.

The implications of detecting this pattern are manyfold:

• It allows for making many links with valuable systems outside homoeopathy, which implies that we may use armamentarium that is developed elsewhere.
• It makes our language less elusive to others, and the language of others less elusive to us.
• It enables us to formally link descriptions of imbalances with specific homoeopathic remedies, which may give a boost to our understanding of both well-known and unknown remedies.
• It allows for some additional questions in practice, whose answers point at distinct, newly arranged groups of possibly indicated remedies in specific cases.
• Correspondences between the sevens can serve as a scaffolding to facilitate the study of homoeopathy, offering the possibility of working from a general overview towards detail.
• The fixed structure of the periodic table allows for an integration of static “horizontal” approaches, with dynamic ones. For example, static “Big Five trait psychology” can be integrated with development theories, with our materia medica as the empirical data to confirm the patterns.

This book is intended as a teaching tool for homoeopathic practitioners. While it may be interesting in itself to point at connections and similarities between ideas in apparently unconnected areas, the object here is to create an enlarged framework in which all our remedy pictures can be embedded, and using these connections—to gain new insights into homoeopathy by drawing upon concepts that were developed elsewhere, and to create another interface to be used as a tool in analyzing our cases. Both “seven” and “four” allow for new arrangements of groups of remedies and new diagnostic questions, whose answers point directly to groups of remedies in a way that I have not seen used by others. At the same time, the framework may have extensive predictive value, if the observed patterns prove valuable.