Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘material’ operates across at least four distinct registers that are simultaneously in tension and in dialogue. In its most concrete alchemical deployment — dominant in Jung, von Franz, Edinger, and Abraham — material denotes the prima materia: the undifferentiated, chaotic, hermaphroditic substrate from which transformation proceeds, carrying within itself both the darkness of nigredo and the seed of the philosopher’s stone. Here matter is not inert but animated, the site of projected unconscious content and the locus of a sleeping divinity awaiting liberation. A second register emerges in clinical and methodological usage — in Jung, Freud, Romanyshyn, and the IFS tradition — where ‘material’ signifies the raw psychic data furnished by dreams, fantasies, active imagination, and somatic life: the empirical substrate the analyst must not violate with preconceptions. A third register, prominent in Sardello, von Franz, and Aristotle, concerns the philosophical relationship between matter and form, and the question whether the material world itself carries soul. A fourth, visible in quantum-psychological discourse (Ponte and Schäfer), asks whether psychic and physical matter share a single reality viewed from different angles. Across all these registers, the term marks the irreducible ground — that which must be encountered before transformation, interpretation, or transcendence can occur.
the one primarily in need of redemption is not man, but the deity who is lost and sleeping in matter. Only as a secondary consideration does he hope that some benefit may accrue to himself from the transformed substance
Jung articulates the alchemical theology in which matter is not passive substrate but the prison of a divine spirit whose liberation is the opus’s ultimate aim, reversing the Christian schema of human redemption.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944thesis
What he sees in matter, or thinks he can see, is chiefly the data of his own unconscious which he is projecting into it. In other words, he encounters in matter, as apparently belonging to it, certain qualities and potential meanings of whose psychic nature he is entirely unconscious.
Jung establishes that the alchemist’s engagement with material substance is fundamentally a psychological encounter — matter as the screen onto which unconscious content is projected.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944thesis
Neither earth, nor air, nor fire, nor water, nor those things which are made of these things nor those things of which these are made, should be called the prima materia, which must be the receptacle and the mother of that which is made
Drawing on Steeb’s alchemical theology, Jung locates prima materia as formless, pre-elemental receptacle — a philosophical category beyond any physical substance.
, Psychology and Religion: West and East, 1958thesis
that unknown, living factor which the alchemists thought to be the animating power in matter and which for want of a better name we now call the unconscious
Von Franz proposes a structural homology between the alchemical animating power in matter and the Jungian unconscious, leaving open whether they are the same reality viewed from within and without.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014thesis
The child is the prima materia of the adult. This patient’s urge for transformation is causing his return to the original condition. In Aristotle’s terms, the form that actualizes the present personality is being dissolved and returned to the first matter
Edinger applies the alchemical concept of prima materia clinically, interpreting regression and suicidal dissolution as the psyche’s return to formless potentiality prior to new individuation.
, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy, 1985thesis
the prima materia as Unum, Unica Res, and Monad and to the statement in the ‘Liber Platonis quartorum’ that man is well qualified to complete the work because he possesses that which is simple, i.e., the soul
Jung surveys alchemical names for prima materia, demonstrating its identification with unity, the monad, and the human soul — making material transformation inseparable from psychic work.
, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944thesis
work on one’s own individual psychic condition is of essential importance to the Opus, and this throws a new light on the previously referred to quotation concerning the separation of body and soul
Von Franz reads Zosimos to argue that alchemical material transformation is simultaneously an inner psychic event — the microcosmic mortification and spiritualisation of the practitioner.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
In the context of the opus alchymicum Adam is a synonym for the prima materia, the substance from which it was believed the universe and all the things in it were created.
Abraham’s dictionary entry identifies Adam with prima materia, anchoring the mythological and linguistic dimensions of material substance in alchemical thought.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998supporting
these mother goddesses are also connected with the concept of matter, for not only is the word itself connected wi
Von Franz traces the etymological and mythological connection between mother goddesses, the maternal feminine, and the concept of material substance in alchemical tradition.
, Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, 1980supporting
the material world may in fact be the culmination of the creating force of the soul of the world, its most highly developed form, the jewel of the world soul. This jewel is rough, uncut, unpolished, without radiance and glow, in need of work.
Sardello advances an archetypal ecological thesis in which material reality is not soul’s opposite but its highest expression — the anima mundi’s most developed form requiring imaginative engagement rather than flight.
, Facing the World with Soul: The Reimagination of Modern Life, 1992supporting
the latter would define e.g. anger as the appetite for returning pain for pain, or something like that, while the former would define it as a boiling of the blood or warm substance surround the heart. The latter assigns the material conditions, the former the form or formulable essence
Aristotle’s hylomorphic framework — distinguishing the material conditions of an affection from its formal essence — provides depth psychology’s philosophical foundation for the matter-spirit and body-soul dialectic.
, On the Soul (De Anima), -350supporting
Since by active imagination all the material is produced in a conscious state of mind, the material is far more rounded out than the dreams with their precarious language. And it contains much more than dreams do; for instance, the feeling-values are in it
Jung distinguishes active imagination material from dream material on grounds of conscious participation and affective fullness, treating psychic material as possessing differentiable qualities rather than uniform substance.
, Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life, 1976supporting
the first mistake they generally made in their psychoanalytic work was to do violence to the material by their own preconceived opinions. That is, they now vented their previous attitude to psychoanalysis on their material, which they could not assess objectively
Jung articulates a methodological imperative: clinical material must be met on its own terms, not forced into theoretical preconceptions — an empirical ethics of the analytic encounter.
, Collected Works Volume 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis, 1961supporting
does the material illustrate how the work was transformed by the researcher after he or she made his or her complex relation to the work more conscious?
Romanyshyn applies the concept of transference material to research methodology, insisting that the researcher’s unconscious relation to the material is itself a datum of the inquiry.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting
both of these disciplines have led at the same time to revolutionary changes in the Western understanding of the cosmic order, discovering a non-emp
Ponte and Schäfer propose that Jung’s psychology and quantum physics converge on a non-empiricist account of reality in which psyche and matter may share a common ontological ground.
, Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and the Spiritual Mind: A Mystical Vision of the Twenty-First Century, 2013supporting
integration of the unconscious material into consciousness, therefore facilitating the evolution of the personality towards wholeness or the individuation process
Dennett employs ‘material’ in the standard clinical Jungian sense of unconscious content requiring conscious integration as the vehicle of individuation.
, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025aside
I must mention another circle of ideas which often serves sexual material both in dreams and in neuroses: namely ideas connected with changing house.
Freud uses ‘material’ in the clinical-empirical sense of symbolic content that serves as the raw substance of dream-work and neurotic formation.
, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900aside