For him there was first of all an initial state in which opposite tendencies or forces were in conflict; secondly there was the great question of a procedure which would be capable of bringing the hostile elements and qualities, once they were separated, back to unity again. The initial state, named the chaos, was not given from the start but had to be sought for as the prima materia. And just as the beginning of the work was not self-evident, so to an even greater degree was its end. There are countless speculations on the nature of the end-state, all of them reflected in its designations. The commonest are the ideas of its permanence (prolongation of life, immortality, incorruptibility), its androgyny, its spirituality and corporeality, its human qualities and resemblance to man (homunculus), and its divinity. The obvious analogy, in the psychic sphere, to this problem of opposites is the dissociation of the personality brought about by the conflict of incompatible tendencies, resulting as a rule from an inharmonious disposition. The repression of one of the opposites leads only to a prolongation and extension of the conflict, in other words, to a neurosis. The therapist therefore confronts the opposites with one another and aims at uniting them permanently. The images of the goal which then appear in dreams often run parallel with the corresponding alchemical symbols. An instance of this is familiar to every analyst: the phenomenon of the transference, which corresponds to the motif of the "chymical wedding."
— Carl Gustav Jung
The alchemist did not begin with chaos — that is the passage's first sharpness. The chaos had to be found, extracted from what appeared ordered, dragged into visibility. Most of the work Jung describes here happens before the work properly begins: the recognition that something is already in conflict, that the disorder is real and not a failure of management. We spend enormous energy trying to skip this stage, arriving at the laboratory with a tidy problem rather than the actual prima materia — which is always messier, stranger, more compromised than we wanted to bring in the door.
What the alchemical literature accumulated around the end-state is worth holding: permanence, androgyny, divinity, corporeality. These are not values that cohere by logic — they are precisely what cannot cohere unless the conflict has been genuinely metabolized rather than suppressed. Repression extends the conflict; Jung is clinical about this. The neurosis is not the conflict itself but the attempt to resolve it by elimination, by insisting one pole is simply wrong. The transference becomes the living form of this problem because the therapeutic relationship is where the incompatible tendencies stop being theoretical and start pressing on actual flesh. The chymical wedding is not a consoling image — it requires two natures that have not dissolved each other.
Carl Gustav Jung·Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy·1955