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.