---
slug: jung-alchemy-00ff8860
title: "Jung on Alchemy"
author: "C.G. Jung"
work: "Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy"
section: ""
year: "1954"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - alchemy
fragment: |
  Thus the underlying idea of the psyche proves it to be a half bodily, half spiritual substance, an anima media natura,12 as the alchemists call it, 13 an hermaphroditic being 14 capable of uniting the opposites, but who is never complete in the indi-vidual unless related to another individual. The unrelated hu-man being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a "You." Wholeness is a combi-
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Jung borrows from the alchemists here, and the borrowing matters: *anima media natura*, the middle nature, names a substance that belongs fully to neither spirit nor body and therefore cannot be reached by ascending toward one at the expense of the other. What the passage refuses is the private inward journey as sufficient — the self alone in its interiority, cultivating depth, becoming whole. That project, however earnestly undertaken, mistakes the half for the whole. The soul is relational by constitution, not by preference or therapeutic recommendation.
  
  The harder implication sits in the phrase "always found in a 'You.'" Not sometimes, not ideally — always. Which means every strategy for achieving wholeness that moves away from genuine encounter with another person is working against the grain of what the psyche actually is. The longing to be complete through spirit, through inner development, through transcendence of the relational mess — each of these is a real movement, and each is not wrong exactly, but it is incomplete in the precise sense Jung means: structurally, constitutionally, unable to deliver what it promises. The soul requires the friction, the opacity, the genuine otherness of another. The *You* is not an obstacle to inner work; it is the condition under which the *anima media natura* becomes whole at all.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The word "unrelated" is doing the heaviest work in this passage — not "isolated," not "lonely," but unrelated, which is a structural claim, not a psychological mood. Jung is saying something ontological: the soul is not a closed vessel that occasionally reaches outward for comfort, but a substance that is constitutively incomplete, the way a magnet is incomplete without a field. The alchemists' phrase *anima media natura* — a middle nature, neither purely body nor purely spirit — names exactly this: the soul as the zone where two things meet rather than the property of one thing alone. Hillman would later press this further, insisting the soul-making never happens in the interior at all but always in the *between*. Whether or not you follow him that far, the practical implication is already here in Jung: the question is not only who you are, but who you are *to someone*.
parent_id: Jung_1954_Collected_Works_Volume_16__par0077
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Jung writes:

> Thus the underlying idea of the psyche proves it to be a half bodily, half spiritual substance, an anima media natura,12 as the alchemists call it, 13 an hermaphroditic being 14 capable of uniting the opposites, but who is never complete in the indi-vidual unless related to another individual. The unrelated hu-man being lacks wholeness, for he can achieve wholeness only through the soul, and the soul cannot exist without its other side, which is always found in a "You." Wholeness is a combi-

— C.G. Jung

Jung borrows from the alchemists here, and the borrowing matters: *anima media natura*, the middle nature, names a substance that belongs fully to neither spirit nor body and therefore cannot be reached by ascending toward one at the expense of the other. What the passage refuses is the private inward journey as sufficient — the self alone in its interiority, cultivating depth, becoming whole. That project, however earnestly undertaken, mistakes the half for the whole. The soul is relational by constitution, not by preference or therapeutic recommendation.

The harder implication sits in the phrase "always found in a 'You.'" Not sometimes, not ideally — always. Which means every strategy for achieving wholeness that moves away from genuine encounter with another person is working against the grain of what the psyche actually is. The longing to be complete through spirit, through inner development, through transcendence of the relational mess — each of these is a real movement, and each is not wrong exactly, but it is incomplete in the precise sense Jung means: structurally, constitutionally, unable to deliver what it promises. The soul requires the friction, the opacity, the genuine otherness of another. The *You* is not an obstacle to inner work; it is the condition under which the *anima media natura* becomes whole at all.

---

C.G. Jung · *Collected Works Volume 16: The Practice of Psychotherapy* · 1954