---
title: "Jung and the Alchemical Imagination"
author: "Jeffrey Raff"
year: 2000
shelf: "the-psyche"
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Raff+Jung+Alchemical+Imagination"
in_stock: false
related: ["jung-mysterium-coniunctionis", "jung-alchemical-studies", "jung-psychology-and-alchemy", "marlan-black-sun-alchemy", "abraham-dictionary-alchemical-imagery", "von-franz-aurora-consurgens", "von-franz-alchemy", "edinger-mysterium-lectures"]
collections: []
content_type: "book-commentary"
key_takeaways:
  - "Raff carries Jung’s alchemical reading forward by foregrounding the technical practice the alchemists themselves named *imaginatio vera* — true imagination — and demonstrating that this is the operative faculty of alchemical work, neither fantasy in the modern sense nor mental representation, but the disciplined imaginative engagement by which the practitioner enters into reciprocal relation with the figures of the unconscious in the imaginal field."
  - "By developing the concept of the *psychoidal* — the layer of psyche that borders on the non-psychic, where psyche and matter are not yet distinguished — Raff supplies a working clinical-contemplative concept that Jung’s late writings introduced (in *Mysterium Coniunctionis* and the Eranos lectures on *Aion* and synchronicity) but did not develop with operational specificity, and supplies the framework within which encounters with autonomous imaginal figures can be understood as relations to a real psychoidal other rather than as projections of intrapsychic content."
  - "Raff’s clinical-meditative practice — the *ally* relationship — names the disciplined cultivation of an ongoing imaginal partnership with a specific autonomous figure across long periods of work, distinct from active imagination as Jung described it (occasional, episodic) and from the casual imagining of pop spirituality, supplying the field with a contemplative practice the depth tradition had implied but rarely articulated as a procedure."
references:
  - "Raff, J. (2000). *Jung and the Alchemical Imagination*. Nicolas-Hays."
  - "Jung, C. G. (1955–56). *Mysterium Coniunctionis*. Princeton University Press."
  - "Jung, C. G. (1953). *Psychology and Alchemy*. Princeton University Press."
  - "von Franz, M.-L. (1980). *Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology*. Inner City Books."
  - "Marlan, S. (2005). *The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness*. Texas A&M University Press."
glossary_terms:
  - "alchemy"
  - "imaginal"
  - "active-imagination"
  - "coniunctio"
  - "individuation"
scholar_prompts:
  - "Raff develops the concept of the *psychoidal* from Jung’s scattered references in the late writings; how does Raff’s operational deployment of the term bear on Jung’s own use, and where does Wolfgang Giegerich’s contesting reading of the psychoidal in *The Soul’s Logical Life* constrain or refute Raff’s clinical-contemplative appropriation?"
  - "The *ally* relationship that Raff describes — a sustained imaginal partnership with a specific autonomous figure — extends active imagination as Jung practised it; how does this practice relate to Henry Corbin’s account of the imaginal partner in Sufi mysticism (the *ta’wīl* practice with the *imago templi*) and to the Hindu-Tantric *ishtadevatā* practice, and what are the conditions under which the depth-psychological version of the practice can be conducted ethically and clinically?"
  - "Raff is in dialogue throughout with Marie-Louise von Franz’s alchemical scholarship, particularly the volumes on the *Mutus Liber* and *Aurora Consurgens*; where does Raff extend von Franz’s scholarship toward a contemporary contemplative practice, and where does von Franz’s philological caution constrain or check the practice-oriented reading?"
seo_title: "Jung and the Alchemical Imagination by Jeffrey Raff — Imaginatio Vera and the Psychoidal | Seba.Health"
seo_description: "Raff develops alchemical imagination as a contemplative practice — imaginatio vera, the psychoidal, and the ally relationship as imaginal partnership."
---

**Carrying Jung’s Alchemy Forward: From Scholarship into Practice**

Jeffrey Raff’s *Jung and the Alchemical Imagination* (2000) addresses a question that the Jungian alchemical literature, despite its size, had not yet answered with operational clarity: what is the working faculty by which the alchemists themselves conducted their work, and what does the inheritance of that faculty look like in contemporary practice? Jung’s alchemical writings — *Psychology and Alchemy* (1944), *Mysterium Coniunctionis* (1955–56), *Alchemical Studies* (1968 collected) — had treated the alchemical operations as a symbolic-psychological projection of the individuation process, and the subsequent generation of Jungian alchemical scholars (Marie-Louise von Franz, Edward Edinger, James Hillman in *Alchemical Psychology*) had elaborated the symbolic apparatus with increasing refinement. What had remained underdeveloped was the practitioner-side question. The alchemists, Raff insists, were not psychologically projecting onto their *opus*; they were doing a particular kind of contemplative-imaginative work whose technical name in their own writings was *imaginatio vera* — true imagination — and the contemporary inheritor of that work needs the contemplative-imaginative practice, not merely the symbolic apparatus. Raff, a Jungian analyst trained at the C. G. Jung Institute of Zurich and practising in Denver, writes from inside that practice, and the book reads as a teaching of the practice as well as a scholarly account of it.

***Imaginatio Vera*: The Operative Faculty of Alchemical Work**

The book’s central technical contribution is the development of *imaginatio vera* as a working concept. The alchemists used the term in distinction to *imaginatio fantastica* — fantasy in the pejorative sense, mere mental construction — and Jung had picked up the distinction in a footnote to *Mysterium Coniunctionis* but had not developed it. Raff develops it. *Imaginatio vera* is neither fantasy nor mental representation. It is the disciplined imaginative engagement by which the practitioner enters into reciprocal relation with the figures of the unconscious as encountered in the imaginal field. The relation is reciprocal: the practitioner addresses the figure, but the figure also addresses the practitioner, with content that the practitioner did not consciously produce and could not have produced. The reciprocity is the operative criterion. Where the imagination is one-directional — the practitioner imagining onto a passive receiver — the activity is fantasy. Where the imagination is reciprocal — the practitioner attending to figures who speak back, with their own characters, their own concerns, their own resistances — the activity is *imaginatio vera*. The clinical and contemplative implication is that the cultivation of this reciprocal imaginative capacity is a developable skill rather than a spontaneous gift, and the alchemical literature is, among other things, a centuries-long pedagogical record of how to cultivate it.

**The Psychoidal: Where Psyche and Matter Are Not Yet Separated**

Raff’s second technical contribution is the operational development of the *psychoidal* — the layer of psyche that borders on the non-psychic, where psyche and matter are not yet distinguished. Jung had introduced the term in his late writings, particularly in the *Aion* essay on synchronicity and in scattered passages of *Mysterium Coniunctionis* and the *Letters*, to name the layer at which psychological content shades into something more than psychological — the layer at which the synchronistic event, the somatic-imaginal correspondence, the autonomous figure with its own intelligence becomes intelligible. Jung had been characteristically tentative about the metaphysical implications. Raff is more direct: the psychoidal is the working ontological field in which the figures encountered in *imaginatio vera* have their being. The figures are not internal contents projected outward; they are encountered as real participants in an imaginal-psychoidal field whose ontological status is neither subjective nor objective in the standard Cartesian dichotomy. The position carries Raff close to Henry Corbin’s *mundus imaginalis* and Roberts Avens’s argument in *Imagination Is Reality*, but Raff develops it as a clinical-contemplative concept rather than a primarily philosophical one. The implication for practice is that the cultivation of *imaginatio vera* is the cultivation of a working relation to the psychoidal field, with all the disciplines of attention, ethical care, and discriminative judgment that such a relation requires.

**The Ally Relationship: A Sustained Imaginal Partnership**

The book’s third and most clinically practical contribution is Raff’s description of the *ally* relationship: a sustained imaginal partnership with a specific autonomous figure across long periods of work. Raff distinguishes the ally relationship from active imagination as Jung described it. Active imagination, in Jung’s usage, is typically episodic — a particular dialogue with a particular figure over a particular session of inner work. The ally relationship is sustained: the practitioner cultivates a working relation with one specific figure (the ally) across months or years, attends to the figure in regular contemplative practice, learns the figure’s character and concerns, and develops with the figure the kind of reciprocal partnership that alchemical practice describes as the work of the *adept* with the *Mercurius* of the operation. Raff is careful that the practice is not a casual technique. The practitioner takes on the figure as a serious commitment, and the practice has the qualities — discipline, ethical care, willingness to be addressed — that contemplative traditions ascribe to spiritual direction. The contemporary depth tradition has long implied something like this practice in its references to the “inner companion,” the “anima/animus dialogue,” the “transcendent function,” the “Self’s emissaries.” Raff supplies the operational name and the procedural description that the field had not previously possessed.

For any reader of Jung’s alchemical writings who has wanted the practitioner-side complement to the symbolic-scholarly apparatus, *Jung and the Alchemical Imagination* is the book that completes the inheritance. To read it is to acquire a working vocabulary — *imaginatio vera*, the psychoidal, the ally — by which the imaginative practice the alchemists conducted can be conducted again, and to recognise that depth psychology, fully pursued, is a contemplative discipline whose object is the development of the reciprocal imagination by which the soul addresses, and is addressed by, what is more than the soul.