Alchemy as Voluntary Psychosis

A thread the alchemical tradition carries without naming it directly: the opus is dangerous because it works. The alchemist who brings the prima-materia to speech enters a state in which the ego’s boundary with the complex can thin to the point of dissolution. Von Franz, in Alchemy: An Introduction, names the hazard with analytic precision: “the alchemist has become literally identical with the mystical object he is cooking in his vessel. This borders on, or gets very close to, a psychotic state where it is typical for ego consciousness to be swallowed up, having become identical with certain complexes of the unconscious, generally of an archetypal nature. It also happens in what Dr. Jung calls a voluntary psychosis, namely in active imagination” (von Franz 1980, p. 241).

The distinction between voluntary and involuntary psychosis is load-bearing. The involuntary form is the clinical one — the patient swept under by the same archetypal contents. The voluntary form is the practitioner’s — deliberate descent into material the ego could otherwise not meet, undertaken for the sake of individuation, and held by the vessel of the method. The difference is the vessel: the theoria, the symbolic frame, the analyst’s ear, the alchemist’s written commentary. Without the vessel, the same content drowns.

Edinger, in [[edinger-mysterium-lectures|The Mysterium Lectures]], ties the thread back to the nigredo and the “encounter with the chthonic spirit” (Edinger 1995). The encounter must be survived; it must also be risked. The tradition’s witness is that only the risked encounter yields the albedo, and only the albedo can bear the rubedo.

Sources

• marie-louise-von-franz: “the alchemist has become literally identical with the mystical object he is cooking” (1980, p. 241)
• carl-jung: the opus as circulatory process, the ego meeting the collective unconscious through the vessel (1955, 1951)
• edward-edinger: the nigredo as the encounter with the dragon, survived by the vessel (1985, 1995)