Separatio psychological process

Separatio — from the Latin separare, to set apart, to sever — is one of the seven central operations of the alchemical opus, and in Jungian psychology it names the act of consciousness that divides what was fused, rendering opposites visible as opposites. Edinger gives the canonical formulation:

The prima materia "was thought of as a composite, a confused mixture of undifferentiated and contrary components requiring a process of separation."

The operation recapitulates cosmogony. Paracelsus held that "the first separation began with the four elements, when the first matter of the world was one chaos" — and what is true of the world's creation is true of every increment of psychic creation. Each newly encountered area of the unconscious calls forth a cosmogonic act of separatio: the undifferentiated material must be broken into distinguishable parts before it can be known, related to, or integrated.

Psychologically, the operation addresses the problem of fusion — what Jung called participation mystique, the condition in which subject and object, inner and outer, concrete and symbolic, remain indistinguishably merged. Edinger identifies several registers in which this fusion shows up clinically: the confusion of subjective feeling with objective fact, the inability to distinguish the literal meaning of an action from its symbolic meaning, the entanglement of one person's identity with another's. The alchemical instruction "separate the earth from the fire, the subtle from the dense" translates, in practice, into the painstaking work of discriminating what belongs to the self from what belongs to the projection, what is concrete reality from what is psychic image.

Thomas Moore's clinical account of a woman who repeatedly used the word "separation" about her marriage illustrates how the soul speaks in this operation's language before the mind has caught up. Her insistence on the word was not, Moore suggests, a demand for literal divorce but the soul's announcement that a separatio was required — a differentiation of identities that had become too tightly fused, a release of her own individuality from the imprisoning identifications she had carried since childhood. The concrete and the symbolic are two different levels of reality that need to be distinguished and considered separately; when this is done, the objective decision often becomes clear.

Hillman, approaching separatio through the nigredo, names its specific therapeutic form as decapitation — the alchemical image of severing the head from the body. In the nigredo, the mind is identified with suffering, trapped in the literalism of its own darkness. Decapitation "emancipates the cogitatio": the mind may begin to recognize what the body only senses. The distinction between head and body creates a two, while suffering imprisons in singleness. This is separatio as the basic therapeutic move of making distinctions — analysis in the etymological sense, a cutting up into pieces small enough to be assimilated.

The goal of separatio, Edinger observes, is to reach the indivisible — that is, the individual. The word "individual" is cognate with "widow," one of the separated ones who is on the way to the indivisible. Anaxagoras' Nous — infinite, self-ruled, mixed with nothing — is the psychological analogue of the Self in its dynamic aspect: both the source and the goal of the operation. The soul that has been sufficiently separated from its fusions becomes capable of genuine relation, because only separated things can unite. This is why separatio is the necessary precondition of coniunctio: the alchemical opus cannot move toward the union of opposites until the opposites have first been made visible as opposites.

What the pneumatic tradition tends to skip is precisely this labor. The ascent to unity — whether Platonic, Neoplatonic, or its modern descendants in mindfulness and the higher self — bypasses the discriminating work by leaping over the mess of fused, undifferentiated material. Separatio refuses that leap. It insists that the soul's contents be held in their distinctness long enough to be known. The suffering this involves is not incidental; it is the disclosure. What the soul says in the failure of its fusions — in the moment when the merged identities can no longer hold — is the only thing that actually lands.

  • separatio — glossary entry on the alchemical operation and its psychological meaning
  • coniunctio — the union of opposites that separatio makes possible
  • Edward Edinger — portrait of the analyst who mapped the alchemical operations onto individuation
  • James Hillman — portrait of the archetypal psychologist who read separatio through the nigredo and decapitation

Sources Cited

  • Edinger, Edward F., 1985, Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy
  • Hillman, James, 2010, Alchemical Psychology
  • Moore, Thomas, 1992, Care of the Soul