Immersion in the Bath

Immersion in the bath is the alchemical operation in which the king and the queen — sol and luna, the masculine and feminine substances of the work — enter together into a vessel of water or aqua mercurialis, where they are dissolved and from which, after death and putrefaction, the filius arises. The image is among the most important in the alchemical corpus and appears as the second plate of the Rosarium Philosophorum series (1550), in which Jung read the ten plates as a schematic of the transference process in his [[psychology-of-the-transference|Psychology of the Transference]] (1946).

The bath is [[solutio|solutio]] — the dissolution of fixed form that is the condition of new coagulation. Psychologically the immersion names the moment in analysis or in individuation at which the ego’s established identifications must be dissolved in a liquefying medium (the analytic relationship, the dream-encounter, the affective crisis) before the new form can crystallize. The bath is intimate, erotic, dangerous: the king and the queen enter it together, and what emerges is neither of them but the filius. See solutio and rosarium-philosophorum.

Relationships

• solutio
• rosarium-philosophorum
• psychology-of-the-transference