The word *iteratio* stops the progressive logic cold. Everything in contemporary therapeutic culture wants the dark periods to be transitional — to mean something in retrospect, to justify themselves by leading somewhere else. You endure the dissolution so that you can arrive. Hillman refuses this. Black repeats. Not because the work was done poorly the first time, but because deconstruction is not an event that concludes. It is a mode the psyche returns to whenever another layer of fixed form requires undoing.

What this means practically is harder to bear than any single bout of suffering: the mortification you thought was behind you has not graduated you out of mortification. The shame that seemed to end, the putrefaction of a friendship that seemed finally composted — these are not past. They are available again. *Iteratio* is the alchemical word for what ordinary language calls relapse and insists on calling failure.

Hillman is reading the alchemical process against its own popular misuse as a spiritual curriculum — the one where you complete the nigredo and ascend. The image is not progressive. It does not have a gate you pass through once. The bitter and dry periods are not tuition paid toward something better. They are the recurring condition of a psyche that is still capable of coming apart.