Jungian interpreters are often seized by the magical world of the alchemical lore. They use its terminology to talk about psychology without knowing the reason Jung used them in the first place. James Hillman is one of them and he has influenced a generation of Jungian analysts.
In the book Alchemical Psychology, Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman. Volume 5, we find one of the source of the lamentable state of Jungian psychology. Although, Hillman has certainly studied alchemy in order to write his talks, he missed the essential goal of alchemy and the reason Jung used it so much.
In chapter 8, Hillman wrote
Our theme – the ideas and images of the alchemical goal – cannot be better introduced than by this statement from C. G. Jung: “The goal is important only as an idea; the essential thing is the opus which leads to the goal: that is the goal of a Iifetime.” “The goal is important only as an idea” de-literalizes goals right at the beginning. We may not take alchemy’s images of the hermaphrodite, the gold, or the red stone as actualized events. Nor may we even consider these images, and the many others, to be symbolic representations of psychological accomplishments. Not the goal; the idea of goal; goal as idea. (p. 139)
This quote shows Hillman's and his followers' (Stanton Marlan, among others) incapacity to find a simple logical explanation for alchemy. They seem unable to decipher the reason of Jung's interest in alchemy. To Hillman, the hermaphrodite, the gold and the stone are not actualized events nor psychological accomplishments. If so, one is authorized to ask: why did alchemists write so much about them? Were they really writing about the making of gold from lead? Hillman answers no. This seems to be an important contradiction unless you believe alchemy is just an imaginary outcome.
There is an easy way to find out if a Jungian interpreter is right about alchemy: the logical verification of their understanding of the goal of alchemy.
Let's see Hillman's understanding of the goal of alchemy. About the pearl of great price, he wrote:
The pearl as goal expresses the idea that the materia prima, the worthless gritty bit we call a symptom or problem, when worked on constantly, slowly becomes coated. An organic process turns the bit of grit into a coagulated jewel. The work goes on in the depths of the sea, where light does not reach, inside the hermetically closed oyster. (P. 140)
To Hillman, the goal of alchemy is the process of taking a problem or a symptom and transforming it in something of great value. But there is a important problem with this interpretation that Hillman did not take into account. In alchemy, the prima materia is the origin and the end-product of the alchemical process. An information that Hillman ignored. In Hillman' s view, that would means that alchemy is about taking a problem and creating a bigger problem! He added:
And since these goals – diamond and pearl, rubedo and lapis, elixir of immortality – are imaginal and mythical, they are beyond time, dissolving the literalism of the laboratory and its measures of time into images, rather than temporal steps, images of drying and moistening, distilling and condensing, therewith moving the method of alchemy itself into myth. (P. 145)
We have here Hillman's core interpretation of alchemy as an imaginary construct composed of mythical works about solving problems and symptoms. Now, if that were to be true, we should ask ourselves important logical questions. Why would the finest intellectuals of their time invest time, money and efforts in writing books about such a stupid goal. Why did they not write directly and simply about their methods to solve problems? Why would they hide the meaning of their recipes to solve problems under multiple layers of symbols thus rendering their books almost undecipherable? It seems to Hillman and his followers that the alchemical authors were deficient intellectuals that needed to write mythical books about solving problems. This is not logical.
There is a logical explanation to alchemy and it is not about the psychological process of solving problems or symptoms, nor about the therapeutic process. The alchemists wrote about something that needed to be hidden from the Church and the Inquisition. That information was something so important to them that they would write only to those who knew what they were talking about. That means that only those who knew what alchemy was all about were able to understand the grimoires. Those intellectuals, the finest of their time as we have already said, share their personal methods to reach mystical experiences, a subject that would have triggered a terrible anger and fury from the Church. To those intellectuals, mystical experiences were not divine interventions but psychological occurences that could be consciously induced.
That is exactly what Carl Jung found in alchemy. He knew that conjunctions of opposites are the symbols appearing in mystical experiences. He knew that the pearl, the rebis, the hermaphrodite, the union of the king and the queen, the magnet, the homonculus, the philosopher's stone were symbols of a mystical experience, an extremely numinous symbol of conjunction of opposites entering consciousness for a short moment. Jung's lifelong study was about mystical experiences that, he thought, were signposts of a consciously performed individuation process. He began with the study of Gnosticism and their mentions of the magnet (conjunction of opposites poles) and eventually found out that alchemy was also about those phenomena. The main goal of his investigations, from 1944 until the end of his life, was about the psychological processes leading to those experiences and how they were linked to the individuation process.
Hillman has produced an almost irreparable wrong to Jungian psychology by misleading a generation of analysts. We should recognize that Jung always sticked to the scientific analysis of psychological processes and events, even if some are extremely rare such as mystical experiences. In his talks about alchemy, Hillman has shown his incapacity to find the core meaning of Jung's analytical psychology.
To an outsider, Jungian psychology seems to have been hacked by the New Agers from the beginning. It is almost certain that Jung would not have approved that orientation. When the Jungian interpreters leave the psychotherapeutic process to enter into Jung's analysis of the goal of human life, they always show their incapacity to read Jung correctly. Then, they write about tarot, astrology, yi king, visions, alchemy, the occult, archetypes, the Magical Other, and all the sujects of the magical world of Jungian mystique. They invent meanings to Jung's writings that do not stand the test of logic. And unfortunately, those are the same people who peer-review articles and books on Analytical psychology, thus maintaining Jung's psychology in a laughable condition.
We could only hope that one day, a few Jungians will have the courage to lead the way into a logical interpretation of Jung'a writing.
For more
