Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘alchemical’ functions as far more than a period adjective designating a pre-modern chemical tradition. It names a symbolic and psychological register — a mode of apprehending the transformation of matter and psyche simultaneously — that Jung, Hillman, and Edinger each deploy, contest, and extend in markedly different ways. Jung’s foundational argument, elaborated across Psychology and Alchemy, Alchemical Studies, and Mysterium Coniunctionis, is that alchemical operations are projections of unconscious individuation processes onto matter; the laboratory vessel becomes a theatre of the psyche. Edinger translates this framework into clinical utility, mapping the seven major alchemical operations onto concrete psychotherapeutic phenomena. Hillman, characteristically, resists the reductive move: he employs alchemical language as a therapeutic aesthetic in its own right, valuing its obscurity, metaphoricity, and imaginal density rather than decoding it into psychological prose. Giegerich, occupying a critical pole, charges that Jung’s reading of alchemy as implicit personal psychology mistakes a naive form of consciousness for depth-psychological self-reflection. Abraham’s lexicographic work situates alchemical imagery across six centuries of literary and intellectual culture, providing the iconographic ground from which depth psychologists draw their amplifications. Romanyshyn’s ‘alchemical hermeneutics’ constitutes a further methodological appropriation, treating the research process itself as an opus of transformation, mourning, and soul-making. The term thus marks a site of genuine theoretical tension: between projection and phenomenology, between metaphor and method, between historical scholarship and living practice.