CW 12 as the Charter of Jungian Alchemical Psychology

Psychology and Alchemy (1944) is the document on which the entire Jungian alchemical inheritance rests. Everything the first-generation Jungians produced in the alchemical register — Edinger’s edinger-anatomy-of-the-psyche (1985), von Franz’s von-franz-aurora-consurgens and her commentary in jung-mysterium-coniunctionis, Jung’s own CW 13 (jung-alchemical-studies) and CW 14 (jung-mysterium-coniunctionis) — elaborates, corrects, or extends claims first made in CW 12. To read the first-generation Jungian literature without CW 12 is to read footnotes without the text.

Three claims in CW 12 are generative:

1. Alchemy is projection. The alchemical corpus is a phenomenology of the unconscious read through the medium of matter (cf. alchemy-as-projection). This is the epistemic warrant for everything that follows.
2. The lapis is the Self. The stone and Christ are parallel figures of the archetype of totality (cf. lapis-christ-parallel, self-as-god-image). This is the religious-psychological load CW 12 carries into Aion and Answer to Job.
3. The dream series demonstrates the archetype is live. The modern dreamer produces alchemical imagery without training (cf. dream-series-pauli). This is the empirical argument that made the reading academically defensible in 1944 and institutionally important thereafter.

The later volumes are elaborations on these three claims. CW 13 gathers the individual alchemical essays (Mercurius, the visions of Zosimos, the philosophical tree). CW 14 systematizes the coniunctio in the terms of Dorn’s three stages. Edinger’s Anatomy of the Psyche formalizes the seven operations. Von Franz completes the unfinished commentaries. But the charter is CW 12 — without which none of the later work has a foundation to stand on.

Sources

• carl-jung: establishes projection, lapis-Self parallel, and dream-series method in one volume (CW 12, 1944)
• edward-edinger: formalizes the alchemical operations as stages of analysis (Anatomy of the Psyche, 1985)
• marie-louise-von-franz: completes Jung’s Aurora commentary, extends the method to fairy tales (Aurora Consurgens, Alchemy)
• james-hillman: receives and then disputes the substantive reading, proposing imaginal alchemy in its place