Alchemical Projection and its Withdrawal

The alchemical tradition’s central psychological fact — the fact Jung spent his last decades documenting — is that the alchemist projected unconscious contents into the substances of the retort and, by working with those substances, worked upon those contents. The prima-materia is the unconscious as it first appears: foreign, opaque, outside. The opus is the long process by which the projection is recognized, the content returned to its source, and the psyche made more transparent to itself.

Von Franz, in Alchemy: An Introduction, states the principle without hedging: “Basically, however, alchemy is still an open problem to us, which is why when Dr. Jung touched it he felt that he was touching something which led still further” (von Franz 1980, p. 38). The modern reader who says the alchemist “just projected” and we have outgrown the gesture has missed the phenomenon. Projection is not error — it is the mode by which the unconscious first comes into view. “The psychological analogy is obviously to the first hard part of an analysis where Venus, the love problem, must be washed, as well as Mars, the problem of aggression… . If the projection is on the outside it would mean that Mars has fallen into matter” (von Franz 1980, pp. 220–221).

In [[von-franz-psyche-and-matter|Psyche and Matter]], von Franz names the classical antecedent: late-antique alchemy was “a sort of active imagination, which is performed not by writing or painting, but by mixing chemical substances: substances which were at the same time gods or demons. Lead, for instance, is Saturn, a demon who creates depression and madness. Quicksilver is Hermes, an aspect of the Anthropos, or god-man” (von Franz 2014). The substance is the god is the complex. The opus is the path by which the three are again distinguished.

Jung’s own summary is that the spiritus released from the heated prima materia is “a projected image of what happens psychologically in the conscious assimilation of activated unconscious contents” (von Franz 1980, caption to illustration 5). Withdrawal is the analytic hour: the slow restitution of what has been placed in matter to the psyche that placed it there.

Relationships

Primary sources

von-franz-alchemy (von Franz 1980)
jung-mysterium-coniunctionis (Jung 1955)
von-franz-psyche-and-matter (von Franz 2014)