Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 14: Mysterium Coniunctionis by Jung C. G. Hull R. F.C. Adler Gerhard

Author:Jung, C. G., Hull, R. F.C., Adler, Gerhard
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1963-02-24T05:00:00+00:00

5. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE PROCEDURE

[694] The answer to this question concerns us very closely, because here we come upon something that is of particular interest to modern psychology: the adept produces a system of fantasies that has a special meaning for him. Although he keeps within the general framework of alchemical ideas, he does not repeat a prescribed pattern, but, following his own fancy, devises an individual series of ideas and corresponding actions which it is evident have a symbolic character. He starts with the production of the medicine that will unite the unio mentalis, his spiritual position, with the body. The ambiguity already begins here: is the “corpus” his human body or the chemical substance? Apparently it is, to start off with, his living body, which as everyone knows has different desires from the spirit. But hardly has the chemical process got under way than the “body” is what remains behind in the retort from the distillation of the wine, and this “phlegm” is then treated like the subtle body of the soul in the purgatorial fire. Like it, the residue from the wine must pass through many subliming fires until it is so purified that the “air-coloured” quintessence can be extracted from it.

[695] This singular identity, simply postulated and never taken as a problem, is an example of that “participation mystique” which Lévy-Bruhl very rightly stressed as being characteristic of the primitive mentality.106 The same is true of the unquestionably psychic unio mentalis, which is at the same time a substance-like “truth” hidden in the body, which in turn coincides with the quintessence sublimed from the “phlegm.” It never occurred to the mind of the alchemists to cast any doubt whatsoever on this intellectual monstrosity. We naturally think that such a thing could happen only in the “dark” Middle Ages. As against this I must emphasize that we too have not quite got out of the woods in this respect, for a philosopher once assured me in all seriousness that “thought could not err,” and a very famous professor, whose assertions I had ventured to criticize, came out with the magisterial dictum: “It must be right because I have thought it.”

[696] All projections are unconscious identifications with the object. Every projection is simply there as an uncriticized datum of experience, and is recognized for what it is only very much later, if ever. Everything that we today would call “mind” and “insight” was, in earlier centuries, projected into things, and even today individual idiosyncrasies are presupposed by many people to be generally valid. The original, half-animal state of unconsciousness was known to the adept as the nigredo, the chaos, the massa confusa, an inextricable interweaving of the soul with the body, which together formed a dark unity (the unio naturalis). From this enchainment he had to free the soul by means of the separatio, and establish a spiritual-psychic counter-position—conscious and rational insight—which would prove immune to the influences of the body. But such insight, as we

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