In 2022, the Jung Journal published a paper by Daniela Boccassini titled At the Roots of Jung’s Alchemy. We will evaluate this essay because it focuses on a subject that I know very well. Here, the work of the peer-reviewer and the editor is particularly sloppy. Here are seven examples:
Example 1
The author used the term quaternion at least 20 times and never once following Jung's definition of the word. In AION, Jung defined the quaternio or quaternion as two pairs of opposites
One could base the system just as easily on any other marriage quaternio, but not on any other quaternity, such as, for instance, Horus and his four sons. This quaternity is not aboriginal enough, for it misses out the antagonistic, feminine element. It is most important that just the extreme opposites, masculine-feminine and soon,should appear linked together. That is why the alchemical pairs of opposites are linked together in quaternities, e.g., warm-cold, dry-moist.
Boccassini used the word as a collection of things, an incorrect usage. As the peer-reviewer and the editor accepted that, it could only mean two things
a) they are both incompetent
b) it is now permitted in the "scientific" field of Analytical psychology to use the Jungian terminology as you wish. One could talk about the archetype of the big toe and the projection of the nose and maybe the quaternion of the fingers. Jungian psychology is now within Deepak Chopra's field with his Quantum Healing!
Example 2
Jungian commentators usually love to talk about visions, prophecies and the magical world of the Jungian mystique. It conforts them in their view that the world is magical and full of ghosts and spirits.
Speaking about Jung's supposed "vision" in Ravenna the author writes : "For Jung to enter a visionary state in the Ravenna Baptistery, something else was necessary: an inner script had to meet the outer inscriptions. The key element seems to be this: “we stopped in front of this [fourth] mosaic for at least twenty minutes and discussed the original ritual of baptism, especially the curious archaic conception of it as an initiation connected with the peril of death”.
What is an inner script? Where the term comes from? Is it an archetype? A complex? How is this script necessary? Is an inner script, whatever it is, now necessary to interpret inscriptions on a wall? Is the inner script a new thing in Jungian psychology?
Example 3
The author writes
What we need to perceive is not so much what Jung was talking about, but where he was talking from and toward: because what intervened that day in Ravenna was nothing less than an inner reorientation, triggered by the integration of (relatively) unconscious contents regarding not just his theoretical knowledge of baptism “as an initiation connected with the peril of death,” but also the living experience of it he had had during the months preceding his first visit to Ravenna and again while transcribing its record in The Red Book.
Here, we enter in the magical world of Jungian mysteries. Boccassini tells us that Jung has an inner script to talk about baptism but that is not the important point, in reality, he was undergoing an unconscious inner reorientation triggered by his living experiences of the previous months. Such an affirmation should be supported by evidence but the reviewer and the editor thought otherwise. They let themselves be invaded by the beautiful mystery of Jung being lifted in a world of unconscious reorientation during a vision...
Is it scientific? No. The unconscious reorientation is not even supported by clinical data.
Is it fucked up? Sure.
Example 4
Boccasini writes Scholars generally ascribe all of Jung’s hermeneutics of individuation qua alchemical rebirth to the period subsequent to his journey to Ravenna in 1932. Although this is an important affirmation, she does not provide any references to it. In a scientific article, that affirmation should have been supported by references. The reviewer did a lousy job here.
On the contrary, it is certain that all scholars do not ascribe to Mrs Boccassini's theory that Jung's alchemical rebirth occured following his 1932 visit to Ravenna.
Example 5
Boccassini writes
As will become apparent in the pages to follow, both the textual and the visual alchemical quaternions (sic) of Liber Novus are symbolic expressions of an initiatory experience of rebirth.
Once I realized this, I began to understand that when Jung toured Ravenna’s Neonian Baptistery while discussing with Toni Wolff the ancient ritual of baptism, he was likely speaking from the perspective of the insights he had gained at the time of his Black Books and Red Book experiences, which suddenly came alive again for him. I also came to better understand what Jung might have been speaking toward: namely, his impending decision to plunge into the study of Western alchemy, so as finally to see more clearly if, and to what extent, modern individuation dovetailed the ancient alchemical opus.
It is a secret for no one that The Red Book's illustrations are symbolic expressions of an initiatory experience. Boccassini surprisingly found that in 2022 but it does not take a genius to get to that interpretation. Jung himself wrote in Memories, Dreams and Reflections that those active imaginations and those experiences were the basis of all his work. He underwent a depression (Jungians call that the encounter with the unconscious because Jung could not have been sick!) from which he exited as a new man. In the illustration below from The Red Book, it is difficult to not see that he had a profound experience that was probably transcendent.
Example 6
Boccassini adds
Hence, it is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that, like an Anabaptist of old, that day of September 1932 Jung was reborn into what would become the last long stretch of his enduring commitment to serving the rebirth of the Anthropos, the mystery of the new god for the troubled times ahead.
This is the most absurd affirmation of the whole paper and it shows and prove that the Jung Journal is not a scientific review. The reviewer, the editor and the editorial committee have been unable to see the falsity of this assertion.
Jung was not "reborn" in September 1932. There are no proofs of that. It is an exxageration of a very little event in Jung's life. Anyone, a bit awaken, has deciphered that the experience of December 26th, 1913 where Jung felt becoming the god Aion is the transcendent experience that changed everything for him. This is a conjunction of the opposites me-God that he explained fully in his book AION. In Mysterium Conjunctionis, Jung wrote
“Experience shows that the union of antagonistic elements is an irrational occurrence which can fairly be described as ‘mystical,’ provided that one means by this an occurrence that cannot be reduced to anything else or regarded as in some way unauthentic.” (CW 14, ¶ 515)
“For thirty years I have studied these psychic processes under all possible conditions and have assured myself that the alchemists as well as the great philosophies of the East are referring to just such experiences, and that it is chiefly our ignorance of the psyche if these experiences appear ‘mystic.’” (CW 14, ¶ 762)
Subsequently, he wrote his essay The Transcendent Function in 1916 but was left unpublished until 1958, a clear indicator that the subject would have been detrimental to his career. He eventually proposed his first theory about the origin of transcendent experiences in Psychological Types (1921) chapter 5. Jung started his studies in Gnosticism in 1914 because he thought his experience was the gnosis of the Gnostics. He eventually found in alchemy a description and a path to obtain a transcendent experience.
Example 7
Boccassini talks of the illustration on page 121 of The Red Book under which Jung added this text:
This stone, set so beautifully, is certainly the Lapis Philosophorum. It is harder than diamond. But it expands into space through four distinct qualities, namely breadth, height, depth and time. It is hence invisible and you can pass through it without noticing it. The four streams of Aquarius flow from the stone. This is the incorruptible seed that lies between the father and the mother and prevents the heads of both from touching: it is the monad which countervails the Pleroma.
Boccassini adds:
Here, to my knowledge, is the first reference to the alchemical lapis in Jung’s work and certainly his only visual expression of it explicitly acknowledged as such—aside from the stone he would chisel, many years later, at Bollingen. The central image is a mandala within a mandala, a blue and white kaleidoscopic square inscribed within a golden circle. It represents a water that is a stone that is a light: an archetype was obviously beckoning at Jung. But why name it lapis philosophorum, and why associate it with the representation of the quaternion in the guise of rivers connecting two intertwined, all-encompassing water principles?
Here, the author, as well as the reviewer and the editor, show all their ignorance about Jung's references to the Philosoper's stone (lapis philosophorum). This is one but another proof that the Jung Journal is a high school journal. Their reviewers and editorial committee lack competence in Jungian studies.
In Mysterium Conjunctionis, Jung wrote
“it now appears that the ‘alchemystical’ philosophers made the opposites and their union one of the chief objects of their work. In their writings, certainly, they employed a symbolical terminology that frequently reminds us of the language of dreams, concerned as these often are with the problem of opposites.”
Boccassini does not show any knowledge that the lapis philosophorum is a conjunction of opposites and, consequently, a transcendent experience. If she has read Psychology and Alchemy as well as AION, she did not understand both of them. The illustration of page 121 of The Red Book represents the transcendent experience called lapis in alchemy. Jung wrote, in a letter to his wife in June 1917, that he had a mystical experience the night before. We should consider that this particlar experience was the lapis philosophorum. That would explain his illustration of the lapis on page 121 of The Red Book done in 1919.
Boccassini's whole hypthesis of Jung's rebirth in September 1932 is baseless. Apart from the proof she gives the reader that she does not understand Jungian texts, she disprove the very hypothesis of her paper about the 1932 event. The questions she asks in the quote above are answered in Jung's book AION but it seems too advanced for her.
Conclusion
Jungians are not reliable sources to understand and explain Jung. They generally repeat what Jung and the first generation of analyts wrote but they don't understand the meaning of Jung's interest in Gnosticism and Alchemy.
The reader is better served by reading Jung directly.
For more, see
Carl Jung's Second Mystical Experience