Distillation occupies a privileged position in the depth-psychology corpus as the alchemical operation that most explicitly bridges physical procedure and psychic transformation. Across the major voices—Jung, von Franz, Edinger, Hillman, Moore, and Abraham—the term carries a double register: it names a concrete laboratory technique (the extraction of volatile spirit from gross matter through heat) and simultaneously serves as the pre-eminent metaphor for psychic refinement, the separation of essential from accidental, spirit from body, clarity from confusion. Jung establishes the foundational interpretive move in his Paracelsus commentaries, reading the ‘thousandfold distillation’ and the circulatory retort as figures for the psyche’s own ceaseless effort to purify itself toward the centre—what he calls the maior homo. Von Franz pursues the chemical idiom most rigorously, identifying the extractio animae with literal distillation: when a substance is evaporated its vaporous form is its soul, and precipitation returns it to embodied life. Edinger anchors distillation within the cluster of mortificatio operations, noting that the caput mortuum—the worthless residue left in the retort—paradoxically becomes the most precious material. Hillman, characteristically, pluralises the operation, listing distillation among many cooking procedures, each producing a distinct mode of psychic clarity from a ‘messy mass.’ Moore, in the most accessible register, transposes distillation into the language of melancholy: rumination over memory is itself a slow distillation through which ‘something essential emerges from the saturnine reduction—the gold in the sludge.’ The central tension in the corpus runs between distillation as purificatory ascent (the spirit rising free of the body) and distillation as circulatory return, the pelican vessel in which the distillate runs back into the belly—individuation as endless recycling rather than one-way transcendence.