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Alchemy as Projection

Alchemy as Projection

The epistemic hinge of Psychology and Alchemy is Jung’s claim that “the alchemist encounters in matter, as apparently belonging to it, certain qualities and potential meanings of whose psychic nature he is entirely unconscious” (Jung, CW 12, 1944). The alchemical text is not a primitive chemistry but the phenomenology of the unconscious speaking through the medium of matter. When the alchemist describes the prima materia as chaos, as massa confusa, as the dragon that devours itself, he is describing — without knowing he is describing — the state of the unconscious encountered at the beginning of the individuation process.

Jung locates the historical moment at which the projection fails: “The process of fission which separated the φυσικά from the μυστικά set in at the end of the sixteenth century” (ibid.). With the rise of scientific chemistry, the matter becomes merely matter, and the psychic substance of the work is orphaned. The alchemical corpus is thereafter misread as a failed precursor to chemistry until Jung — three centuries later — recovers it as a successful precursor to depth psychology. This is why CW 12 reads the corpus backward: the fission reveals what was fused.

The doctrine has a necessary limit. A concept that explains all alchemical texts as projection onto any matter would explain nothing. Jung’s reading preserves the historical specificity of the alchemical image — the reason the alchemists described the opus this way and not otherwise is that this configuration of images is what the unconscious throws up when the psyche turns toward its own transformation. james-hillman will later dispute the projection frame itself (cf. substantive-alchemy-hillman), arguing that the alchemical text is not a projection onto matter but a speaking of matter — imaginal, not representational. The disagreement remains a live one in the graph.

The thesis runs from Jung’s earliest alchemical work to his last. In Mysterium Coniunctionis he sharpens it: “The projections of the alchemists were nothing other than unconscious contents appearing in matter, the same contents that modern psychotherapy makes conscious by the method of active imagination before they unconsciously change into projections” (Jung 1955). And in Alchemical Studies: “the alchemical projections represent collective contents that stand in painful contrast — or rather, in compensatory relation — to our highest rational convictions and values” (Jung 1967). von Franz extends the thread historically, locating the alchemists “in those religious undercurrents in a particular cultural setting which were of an introverted cast and which were in search of direct experience” (von Franz 1975). They were mystics in chemical dress.

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