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Psychology and Alchemy
Psychology and Alchemy
Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12) is Jung’s opening of the alchemical corpus as a psychological document. Published in 1944 after two decades of study, it contains the foundational claim that the alchemical texts are records of projection: “The alchemist encounters in matter, as apparently belonging to it, certain qualities and potential meanings of whose psychic nature he is entirely unconscious. […] The process of fission which separated the φυσικά from the μυστικά set in at the end of the sixteenth century.” What remained indistinguishably chemical-and-mystical in earlier alchemy is, read back through the discovery of the unconscious, a phenomenology of individuation.
The work’s second half is a continuous commentary on the “Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy” — a study of a modern analysand’s dreams (Pauli’s, as has since been established) in which alchemical motifs recur spontaneously, without training. The convergence is the book’s empirical argument: the alchemical imagery is archetypal, and the archetypal is live.
The book establishes the four-color schema from Heraclitus (melanosis, leukosis, xanthosis, iosis), grounds the prima materia in its pre-Socratic origins (“The original idea is to be found in Anaxagoras, where the nous gives rise to a whirlpool in chaos”), and sets up the coniunctio theme that will occupy Jung for the rest of his writing life. It is the entry point to CW 13 (Alchemical Studies) and CW 14 (Mysterium Coniunctionis).