Aniela Jaffe, From the Life and Work of C.G. Jung, Alchemy
Jung’s method of research was pre-eminently historical. It consisted essentially in comparing his ideas and intuitions, and the insights he had gained from the empirical material provided by his patients, with the historical evidence.
This method enabled him to view his own psychic experiences and psychological discoveries objectively and to establish their general validity.
The obscure, confused, and often grotesque statements of the alchemists played the most important, indeed the decisive, role in this respect.
It was largely the correspondence between the alchemical statements and images and the results of his researches into the unconscious that helped Jung to put his psychology into historical perspective and hammer it into an objective science.
During the period of friendship and collaboration with Freud, from 1907 to 1912, Jung had a number of significant dreams which could not be satisfactorily interpreted on the basis of Freud’s conception of the unconscious as a reservoir of repressed psychic contents.
It was then that the idea of a much more comprehensive unconscious – a collective unconscious which was the source of impersonal, autonomous contents – came to him for the first time.
After the separation from Freud, Jung followed up this trail and began to experiment with the unconscious himself.
He immersed himself in it, using for this purpose a method of “active imagination” which he himself had developed.
He would let the contents rise up from the unknown psychic depths, not
only carefully observing them but treating them as realities to be lived with, felt, and experienced through active participation.
These “imaginings” or fantasies brought up a whole world of strange images, often of a religious or a mythological nature, and he himself became the protagonist in a series of enigmatic but intensely exciting psychic dramas. For the time being, however, the meaning of the images and of what was happening remained for him a complete mystery.
This experimental phase began at the end of 1912 and lasted till about 1919.
It was a period of pioneer work in the jungle of the unconscious, which not unnaturally isolated Jung from the scientific world of his time.
He nevertheless called those years the most important in his life, for
during them there burst forth – if only as a torrent of emotionally charged fantasies and images –everything that was later formulated conceptually in his scientific writings.
“It was the prima materia for a lifetime’s work.”
The scientific processing of this “fiery magma” was indeed a long-drawn-out affair, and it was only after some twenty years that Jung was able to understand, in some measure, the products of his active imagination.
In his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he wrote, First I had to find evidence for the historical prefiguration of my inner experiences.
That is to say, I had to ask myself, “Where have my particular premises already occurred in history?”
If I had not succeeded in finding such evidence, I would never have been able to substantiate my ideas.
Therefore, my encounter with alchemy was decisive for me, as it
provided me with the historical basis which I had hitherto lacked.
All the same, a good while had still to pass before Jung became seriously interested in alchemy. Before a lucky chance first brought him face to face with an alchemical text, he had made a thorough study of the Gnostics during the years 1916-26.
What attracted him to them was the fact that they had been confronted with “the primal world of the unconscious.”
Just as he and, as he was to discover, the alchemists had been.
The study of Gnostic traditions nevertheless left him unsatisfied. For one thing, they were not less than seventeen or eighteen hundred years
old and too remote historically for him to establish a living link with them.
For another, the tradition that might have connected the Gnostics with the present seemed to him to have been broken.
Later Jung realized that alchemy should in fact be considered the connecting link between Gnosticism and the modern psychology of the unconscious.
This crucial discovery revealed the unbroken historical continuity of a cultural current that for much of its course flowed underground.
There was a continuous chain of great wise men, known in alchemy as the
“Golden” or “Homeric Chain,” who from antiquity had undertaken the “unpopular, ambiguous, and dangerous voyage of discovery to the other pole of the world,” or, in psychological terms, who had sought to explore the mystery of the psychic hinterland and to bridge the gulf between
the conscious and the unconscious.
In 1928 Jung began to study alchemy. Concurrently with his practice, his scientific researches, and the major works he had written in the meantime,the work on his own unconscious had quietly been going ahead.
His most important discovery during these years of experimentation
was the fact that a process of development was going on in the unconscious which had as its goal the wholeness of the personality.
This process (Jung later called it the “individuation” process)
frequently depicts itself in the form of images from the unconscious representing the circumambulation of a center.
Also the goal of the process, man’s psychic totality or the “self,”
embracing both conscious and unconscious, often appears as a circle, a static mandala.
Although he recognized the significance of these figures, for many years Jung kept quiet about the insights he had gained from the practice of active imagination, as well as from the material presented by patients, concerning the meaning of the mandala in relation to the individuation process.
The results of his investigations seemed questionable to him in more than one respect.
“My results, based on fifteen years of effort, seemed inconclusive, because no possibility of comparison offered itself. I knew of no realm of human experience with which I might have backed up my findings with some degree of assurance.”
The turning point came when the Sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent him the manuscript of his translation of a Chinese alchemical treatise of Taoist origin entitled The Secret of the Golden Flower[8] with the request that he write a commentary on the text.
It was a rare work quite unknown in Europe at that time, its content deriving from an ancient Chinese esoteric doctrine.
The oral transmission of the text goes back to the Tang Dynasty (eighth century) and to the esoteric religion of the Golden Elixir of Life, whose founder is said to have been the famous Taoist adept, Lü Yen, according to folklore one of the “eight immortals.”
Later the text was circulated in manuscript.
The first printing dates from the eighteenth century. In 1920 a thousand
copies were reprinted in Peking, together with another treatise, the Hui Ming Ching (Book of Consciousness and Life), and distributed to a small circle of readers, among them Richard Wilhelm, who was then a missionary in China.
Jung wrote in his memoirs, I devoured the manuscript at once, for the text gave me undreamed-of confirmation of my ideas about the mandala and the circumambulation of the centre.
That was the first event which broke through my isolation.
I became aware of an affinity; I could establish ties with something and someone. ~Aniela Jaffe, From the Life and Work of C.G. Jung, Page 33-36
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