a comprehensive col ection of Latin treatises among which are a
number of the "classics" of alchemy.
I let this book lie almost untouched for nearly two years.
Occasional y I would look at the pictures, and each time I would
think, "Good Lord, what nonsense! This stuff is impossible to
understand." But it persistently intrigued me, and I made up my
mind to go into it more thoroughly. The next winter I began, and
soon found it provocative and exciting. To be sure, the texts stil
seemed to me blatant nonsense, but here and there would be
passages that seemed significant to me, and occasional y I even
found a few sentences which I thought I could understand. Final y I
realized that the alchemists were talking in symbols those old
acquaintances of mine. "Why, this is fantastic," I thought. "I simply
must learn to decipher al this." By now I was
4 Problems of Mysticism and Its Symbolism (New York, 1917; Gennan
edn., Vienna, 1914).
5 Silberer committed suicide,
completely fascinated, and buried myself in the texts as often as I
had the time. One night, while I was studying them, I suddenly
recal ed the dream that I was caught in the seventeenth century. At
last I grasped its meaning. "So that's it! Now I am condemned to
study alchemy from the very beginning."
It was a long while before I found my way about in the labyrinth of
alchemical thought processes, for no Ariadne had put a thread into
my hand. Reading the sixteenth-century text, "Rosarium
Philosophorum" I noticed that certain strange expressions and turns
of phrase were frequently repeated. For example, "solve et
coagula" "unum vas" "lapis," "prima materia" "Mercurius" etc. I saw that these expressions were used again and again in a particular
sense, but I could not make out what that sense was. I therefore
decided to start a lexicon of key phrases with cross references. In
the course of time I assembled several thousand such key phrases
and words, and had volumes fil ed with excerpts. I worked along
philological lines, as if I were trying to solve the riddle of an unknown
language. In this way the alchemical mode of expression gradual y
yielded up its meaning. It was a task that kept me absorbed for
more than a decade.
I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most
curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists were,
in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world. This
was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the
historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The
possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted
intel ectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my
psychology. When I pored over these old texts everything fel into
place: the fantasy-images, the empirical material I had gathered in
my practice, and the conclusions I had drawn from it. I now began to
understand what these psychic contents meant when seen in
historical perspective. My understanding of their typical character,
which had already begun with my investigation of myths, was
deepened. The primordial images and the nature of the archetype
took a central place in my researches, and it became clear to me
that without history there can be no psychology, and certainly no
psychology of the unconscious. A psychology of consciousness
can, to be sure, content itself with material drawn from personal life,
but as soon as we wish to explain a neurosis we require an
anamnesis which reaches deeper than the knowledge of
consciousness. And when in the course of treatment unusual
decisions are cal ed for, dreams occur that need more than
personal memories for their interpretation.
I regard my work on alchemy as a sign of my inner relationship to
Goethe. Goethe's secret was that he was in the grip of that process
of archetypal transformation which has gone on through the
centuries. He regarded his Faust as an opus magnum or divinum.
He cal ed it his "main business," and his whole life was enacted
within the framework of this drama. Thus, what was alive and active
within him was a living substance, a suprapersonal process, the
great dream of the mundus archetypus (archetypal world).
I myself am haunted by the same dream, and from my eleventh year
I have been launched upon a single enterprise which is my "main
business." My life has been permeated and held together by one
idea and one goal: namely, to penetrate into the secret of the
personality. Everything can be explained from this central point, and
al my works relate to this one theme.
My real scientific work began with the association experiment in
1903. I regard it as my first scientific work in the sense of an
undertaking in the field of natural science. Studies in Word
Association was fol owed by two psychiatric papers whose origin I
have already discussed: "The Psychology of Dementia Praecox"
and "The Content of the Psychoses." In 1912 my book Wandlungen
und Symbole der Libido was published, and my friendship with
Freud came to an end. From then on, I had to make my way alone,
I had a starting point in my intense preoccupation with the images
of my own unconscious. This period lasted from 1913 to 1917; then
the stream of fantasies ebbed away. Not until it had subsided and I
was no longer held captive inside the magic mountain was I able to
take an objective view of that whole experience and begin to reflect
upon it. The first question I asked myself was, "What does one do
with the unconscious?" "The Relations between the Ego and the
Unconscious"[6] was my answer. In Paris I had delivered a lecture
on this subject in 1916;[7] it was, however, not published in German
until twelve years later, in greatly expanded form. In it I described
some of the typical contents of the unconscious, and showed that it
is by no means a matter of indifference what attitude the conscious
mind takes toward them.
Simultaneously, I was busy with preparatory work for Psychological
Types, first published in 1921. This work sprang original y from my
need to define the ways in which my outlook differed from Freud's
and Adler's. In attempting to answer this question, I came across
the problem of types; for it is one's psychological type which from
the outset determines and limits a person's judgment. My book,
therefore, was an effort to deal with the relationship of the individual
to the world, to people and things. It discussed the various aspects
of consciousness, the various attitudes the conscious mind might
take toward the world, and thus constitutes a psychology of
consciousness regarded from what might be cal ed a clinical angle.
I worked a great deal of literature into this book. The writings of
Spitteler occupied a special place, in particular his Prometheus
and Epimetheus;[8] but I also discussed Schil er, Nietzsche, and the
intel ectual history of the classical era and the Middle Ages. I was
presumptuous enough to send a copy of my book to Spitteler. He
did not answer me, but shortly afterward delivered a lecture in which
he declared positively that his Prometheus and Epimetheus
"meant" nothing, that he might just as wel have sung, "Spring is
come, tra-la-la-la-la."
The book on types yielded the insight that every judgment made by
an individual is conditioned by his personality type and that every
point of view is necessarily relative. This raised
6 In Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW 7) .
7 "La Structure de I'inconscient," Archives de psychologie, XVI (Geneva,
1916), 62, 152-79. See CW 7, Appendix 2, "The Structure of the
Unconscious."
8 Carl Spitteler (1845-1924) was a Swiss writer whose best-known works,
besides Prometheus and Epimetheus, include the epic Der Olympische
Fruhling and the novel Imago. In 1919 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
literature.
the question of the unity which must compensate this diversity, and
it led me directly to the Chinese concept of Tao. I have already
spoken of the interplay between my inner development and Richard
Wilhelm's sending me a Taoist text. In 1929 he and I col aborated
on The Secret of the Golden Flower. It was only after I had reached
the central point in my thinking and in my researches, namely, the
concept of the self, that I once more found my way back to the
world. I began delivering lectures and taking a number of journeys.
The various essays and lectures formed a kind of counterpoise to
the years of interior searching. They also contained answers to the
questions that were put to me by my readers and patients.[9]
A subject with which I had been deeply concerned ever since my
book Wandlungen und Symbole was the theory of the libido. I
conceived the libido as a psychic analogue of physical energy,
hence as a more or less quantitative concept, which therefore
should not be defined in qualitative terms. My idea was to escape
from the then prevailing concretism of the libido theory in other
words, I wished no longer to speak of the instincts of hunger,
aggression, and sex, but to regard al these phenomena as
expressions of psychic energy.
In physics, too, we speak of energy and its various manifestations,
such as electricity, light, heat, etc. The situation in psychology is
precisely the same. Here, too, we are dealing primarily with energy,
that is to say, with measures of intensity, with greater or lesser
quantities. It can appear in various guises. If we conceive of libido
as energy, we can take a comprehensive and unified view.
Qualitative questions as to the nature of the libido whether it be
sexuality, power, hunger, or something else recede into the
background. What I wished to do for psychology was to arrive at
some logical and thorough view such as is provided in the physical
sciences by the theory of energetics. This is what I was after in my
paper "On Psychic Energy" (1928). I see man's drives, for example,
as various manifestations of energic processes and thus as forces
analogous to heat, light, etc. Just as it would not occur to the
modern physicist to derive al forces from, shal We say, heat alone,
so the psychologist should beware of lumping al instincts under the
concept of sexuality. This was Freud's initial error which he later
corrected by his assumption of "ego-instincts." Stil later he brought
in the superego, and conferred virtual supremacy upon it.
9 These works are distributed mainly among volumes 4, 8, 10, and 16 of the
Collected Works.
In "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious" I had
discussed only my preoccupation with the unconscious, and
something of the nature of that preoccupation, but had not yet said
anything much about the unconscious itself. As I worked with my
fantasies, I became aware that the unconscious undergoes or
produces change. Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy
did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche
is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the
contents of the unconscious. In individual cases that transformation
can be read from dreams and fantasies. In col ective life it has left
its deposit principal y in the various religious systems and their
changing symbols. Through the study of these col ective
transformation processes and through understanding of alchemical
symbolism I arrived at the central concept of my psychology: the
process of individuation.
An essential aspect of my work is that it soon began to touch on the
question of one's view of the world, and on the relations between
psychology and religion. I went into these matters in detail first in
"Psychology and Religion" (1938) and then, as a direct offshoot of
this, in Paracelsica (1942). The second essay in this book,
"Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon," is of particular
importance from this point of view. The writings of Paracelsus
contain a wealth of original ideas, including clear formulations of the
questions posed by the alchemists, though these are set forth in
late and baroque dress. Through Paracelsus I was final y led to
discuss the nature of alchemy in relation to religion and psychology
or, to put it another way, of alchemy as a form of religious
philosophy. This I did in Psychology and Alchemy ( 1944). Thus I
had at last reached the ground which underlay my own experiences
of the years 1913 to 1917; for the process through which I had
passed at that time corresponded to the process of alchemical
transformation discussed in that book.
It is only natural that I should constantly have revolved in my mind the
question of the relationship of the symbolism of the unconscious to
Christianity as wel as to other religions. Not only do I leave the door
open for the Christian message, but I consider it of central
importance for Western man. It needs, however, to be seen in a
new light, in accordance with the changes wrought by the
contemporary spirit. Otherwise, it stands apart from the times, and
has no effect on man's wholeness. I have endeavored to show this
in my writings. I have given a psychological interpretation of the
dogma of the Trinity and of the text of the Mass which, moreover, I
compared with the visions described by Zosimos of Panopolis, a
third-century alchemist and Gnostic.[10] My attempt to bring
analytical psychology into relation with Christianity ultimately led to
the question of Christ as a psychological figure. As early as 1944,
in Psychology and Alchemy, I had been able to demonstrate the
paral elism between the Christ figure and the central concept of the
alchemists, the lapis, or stone.
In 1939 I gave a seminar on the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius
Loyola. At the same time I was occupied on the studies for
Psychology and Alchemy. One night I awoke and saw, bathed in
bright light at the foot of my bed, the figure of Christ on the Cross. It
was not quite life-size, but extremely distinct; and I saw that his body
was made of greenish gold. The vision was marvelously beautiful,
and yet I was profoundly shaken by it. A vision as such is nothing
unusual for me, for I frequently see extremely vivid hypnagogic
images.
I had been thinking a great deal about the Anima Christi, one of the
meditations from the Spiritual Exercises. The vision came to me as
if to point out that I had overlooked something in iny reflections: the
analogy of Christ with the aurum non vulgi and the viriditas of the
alchemists.[11] When I realized that the vision pointed to this central
alchemical symbol, and that
10 Both studies are included in Psychology and Religion: West and East (
CW 11 )
11 The more serious alchemists realized that the purpose of their work was
not the transmutation of base metals into gold, but the production of an
aurum non vulgi ("not the common gold") or aurum philosophicum
("philosophical gold"). In other words, they were concerned with spiritual
values and the problem of psychic transformation. A. J.
I had had an essential y alchemical vision of Christ, I felt comforted.
The green gold is the living quality which the alchemists saw not
only in man but also in inorganic nature. It is an expression of the
life-spirit, the anima mundi or films macrocosmi, the Anthropos who
animates the whole cosmos. This spirit has poured himself out into
everything, even into inorganic matter; he is present in metal and
stone. My vision was thus a union of the Christ-image with his
analogue in matter, the filius macrocosmi. If I had not been so struck
by the greenish-gold, I would have been tempted to assume that
something essential was missing from my "Christian" view in other
words, that my traditional Christ-image was somehow inadequate
and that I stil had to catch up with part of the Christian development.
The emphasis on the metal, however, showed me the undisguised
alchemical conception of Christ as a union of spiritual y alive and
physical y dead matter.
I took up the problem of Christ again in Aion.[12] Here I was
concerned not with the various historical paral els but with the
relation of the Christ figure to psychology. Nor did I see Christ as a
figure stripped of al externalities. Rather, I wished to show the
development, extending over the centuries, of the religious content
which he represented. It was also important to me to show how
Christ could have been astrological y predicted, and how he was
understood both in terms of the spirit of his age and in the course of
two thousand years of Christian civilization. This was what I wanted
to portray, together with al the curious marginal glosses which have
accumulated around him in the course of the centuries.
As I delved into al these matters the question of the historical
person, of Jesus the man, also came up. It is of importance
because the col ective mentality of his time one might also say: the
archetype which was already constel ated, the primordial image of
the Anthropos was condensed in him, an almost unknown Jewish
prophet. The ancient idea of the Anthropos, whose roots lie in
Jewish tradition on the one hand
12 English trans., under same title, in 1959 (CW 9, **)
and in the Egyptian Horus myth on the other, had taken possession
of the people at the beginning of the Christian era, for it was part of
the Zeitgeist. It was essential y concerned with the Son of Man,
God's own son, who stood opposed to the deified Augustus, the
ruler of this world. This idea fastened upon the original y Jewish
problem of the Messiah and made it a world problem.
It would be a serious misunderstanding to regard as "mere
chance'* the fact that Jesus, the carpenter's son, proclaimed the
gospel and became the savior of the world. He must have been a
person of singular gifts to have been able so completely to express
and to represent the general, though unconscious, expectations of
his age. No one else could have been the bearer of such a
message; it was possible only for this particular man Jesus.
In those times the omnipresent, crushing power of Rome,
embodied in the divine Caesar, had created a world where
countless individuals, indeed whole peoples, were robbed of their
cultural independence and of their spiritual autonomy. Today,
individuals and cultures are faced with a similar threat, namely of
being swal owed up in the mass. Hence in many places there is a
wave of hope in a reappearance of Christ, and a visionary rumor
has even arisen which expresses expectations of redemption. The
form it has taken, however, is comparable to nothing in the past, but
is a typical child of the "age of technology." This is the worldwide
distribution of the UFO phenomenon (unidentified flying
objects).[13]
Since my aim was to demonstrate the ful extent to which my
psychology corresponded to alchemy or vice versa I wanted to
discover, side by side with the religious questions, what special
problems of psychotherapy were treated in the work of the
alchemists. The main problem of medical psychotherapy is the
transference. In this matter Freud and I were in complete
agreement. I was able to demonstrate that alchemy, too, had
something that corresponded to the transference-
13 Cf. Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies (New
York and London, 1959); also in Civilization in Transition (CW 10).
namely, the concept of the coniunctio, whose pre-eminent
importance had been noted already by Silberer. Evidence for this
correspondence is contained in my book, Psychology and Alchemy.
Two years later, in 1946, I pursued the matter further in "Psychology
of the Transference,"[14] and final y my researches led to the
Mysterium Coniunetionis.
As with al problems that concerned me personal y or scientifical y,
that of the coniunctio was accompanied or heralded by dreams. In
one of these dreams both this and the Christ problem were
condensed in a remarkable image.
I dreamed once more that my house had a large wing which I had
never visited. I resolved to look at it, and final y entered. I came to a
big double door. When I opened it, I found myself in a room set up
as a laboratory. In front of the window stood a table covered with
many glass vessels and al the paraphernalia of a zoological
laboratory. This was my father's workroom. However, he was not
there. On shelves along the wal s stood hundreds of bottles
containing every imaginable sort of fish. I was astonished: so now
my father was going in for ichthyology!
As I stood there and looked around I noticed a curtain which bel ied
out from time to time, as though a strong wind were blowing.
Suddenly Hans, a young man from the country, appeared. I told him
to look and see whether a window were open in the room behind
the curtain. He went, and was gone for some time. When he
returned, I saw an expression of terror on his face. He said only,
"Yes, there is something. It's haunted in there!"
Then I myself went, and found a door which led to my mother's
room. There was no one in it. The atmosphere was uncanny. The
room was very large, and suspended from the ceiling were two
rows of five chests each, hanging about two feet above the floor.
They looked like smal garden pavilions, each about six feet in area,
and each containing two beds. I knew that this was the room where
my mother, who in reality had long been dead, was visited, and that
she had set up these
14 In The Practice of Psychotherapy ( CW 16 ).
15 CW 14.
beds for visiting spirits to sleep. They were spirits who came in
pairs, ghostly married couples, so to speak, who spent the night or
even the day there.
Opposite my mother's room was a door. I opened it and entered a
vast hal ; it reminded me of the lobby of a large hotel. It was fitted
out with easy chairs, smal tables, pil ars, sumptuous hangings, etc.
A brass band was playing loudly; I had heard music al along in the
background, but without knowing where it came from. There was no
one in the hal except the brass band blaring forth dance tunes and
marches.
The brass band in the hotel lobby suggested ostentatious jol ity and
worldliness. No one would have guessed that behind this loud
facade was the other world, also located in the same building. The
dream-image of the lobby was, as it were, a caricature of my
bonhomie or worldly joviality. But this was only the outside aspect;
behind it lay something quite different, which could not be
investigated in the blare of the band music: the fish laboratory and
the hanging pavilions for spirits. Both were awesome places in
which a mysterious silence prevailed. In them I had the feeling: Here
is the dwel ing of nig