Anatomy of the Psyche

Anatomy of the Psyche is Edinger‘s systematic rendering of medieval alchemical symbolism as a working psychotherapeutic language. Published in 1985 by Open Court in the Reality of the Psyche series, the book organizes the field around seven alchemical operations: calcinatio, solutio, coagulatio, sublimatio, mortificatio, separatio, and coniunctio.

Edinger’s methodological premise is that alchemy’s wildness can be ordered without being reduced. “It is very difficult to understand alchemy as we find it in the original writings. We encounter a wild, luxuriant, tangled mass of overlapping images that is maddening to the order-seeking conscious mind. My method of ordering the chaos of alchemy is to focus on the major alchemical operations” (Edinger 1985). Each operation is the center of a symbol system that gathers to itself the cognate material of myth, religion, and folklore, because “they all come from the same source — the archetypal psyche” (Edinger 1985).

The distinguishing feature of the work is its clinical register. The operations are presented with charts that diagram the imagistic field around each core symbol, and the reader is taught to recognize calcinatio in the heat of a patient’s desire, solutio in a regressive dissolution, mortificatio in the nigredo of depression. The book’s position in the Edinger corpus is as the hinge between the early Ego and Archetype, which maps the axis, and the later Mysterium Lectures, which reads Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis verse by verse.

Concepts introduced or developed

Cited by

edward-edinger (throughout the later corpus)
Post-Jungian alchemical literature generally