In The Plural Turn in Jungian and Post- Jungian Studies The Work of Andrew Samuels (2022), editor Stefano Carpani brought together the works of many PhDs supervised by Professor Andrew Samuels across the years. In the introduction, Carpani suggest that those Neo-Jungians could be the representatives of the Essex school, a particular approach in the study of the Jungian corpus.
Samuels is known for his 1985 statement about the three main post-Jungian traditions – the ‘classical’, ‘developmental’ and ‘archetypal’. Sadly, neither of them has been able to understand Jung's use of alchemy and Gnosticism in his theoretical teachings on individuation. A new orientation in Jungian study could throw a different light on Jung's theory: radical empiricism, a philosophical theory developed by William James that posits that all knowledge is derived from experience, including the relationships between things, and that these relationships are as real as the things themselves. Using Jungian terminology, this would mean that Jung's writings should be understood through both Sensation and Intuition cognitive functions.
In The Plural Turn, Carpani has inserted the thesis of late Clare Crellin on Alchemy and Individuation. Her thesis was that Jung's theory of personality was shaped with the alchemical concepts he studied for more than thirty years. Carpani writes
She proposes that a full understanding of the subtleties of meaning of the main concepts and theoretical constructs in his theory of personality is impossible without first understanding the alchemical ideas that helped to shape these concepts.
In fact, Crellin is wrong and it is the opposite that is true. Alchemy did not shaped Jung's main concepts, but instead he found in alchemy and Gnosticism the mystical experiences he thought were part of the individuation process and he used their terminology to express the procedure he went through, namely the consciously performed individuation process. In Mysterium Conjunctionis, Jung was direct about his central subject of research:
"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)
We should state from the outset that Jung thought the esoteric or hidden meaning of alchemy was an adyton protected by the desidaimonia¹, in english: a secret protected by the wrath of the gods. Therefore, he always used a second-degree writing process when talking about mystical experiences. Jungians have great difficulties with this kind of writing and when they leave the therapeutic techniques of psychoanalysis to enter Jung's description of the individuation process, they seem to loose grip on logic.
With radical empirism, Jung's journey is clear. There is an Ariadne's thread that explains logically Jung's life and corpus of writings. On December 21st, 1913, Jung had a transcendent experience. This is what he later called a conjunction of opposites or, in latin, a conjunctio oppositorum. Mystical experiences are an extremely numinous symbol of conjunction of opposites that enters consciousness for a short moment. The conjunction of the opposites particle-whole appear regularly and accounts often depicts the conjunction me-God, me-nature or me-universe. For Jung, the conjunction was his becoming the deus leontocephalus or Aion god and seeing himself as the crucified Christ. This was a conjunction of the opposites me-god.
In The Red Book, he titled the section where he recalled this experience as MYSTERIUM, a clear indicator of the importance of that experience to him. That experience changed his whole worldview and his psychology. He never stopped, after that, searching for the meaning and the cause of that experience. This is why he turned to the study of Gnosticism. His first intuition was that the gnosis of the Gnostics were mystical experiences and his research proved he was right (the findings are layed out in his book AION).
When Jung wrote The Seven Sermons to the Dead in 1916, he had been into the study of gnosticism for at least two years. The sermons are not an intuition or a dictation from the realm of archetypes as Murray Stein suggests. It is a well-organized and fully thought-out lesson on conjunction of opposites in Gnosticism. It may have been written in three nights (approx. 20 pages which is not that much) but it was certainly well prepared in advance.
The Ariadne's thread continues with his essay The Transcendent Function also written in 1916. In the essay, he links transcendent experiences to active imagination and the integration of the unconscious. The problem with that essay is that Jung did not proceed to its publishing in the months and years that followed its preparation. Something was too dangerous for his career in this essay. It was only published in 1958 after some students of the C. G. Jung Institute found it. He knew at that moment that no one would be able to understand it because no one had understood his alchemical studies in Psychology and Alchemy (1944) and the core of his research in AION (1951).
Jung had a second mystical experience on June 21, 1917. He depicted it on page 125 of The Red Book. Here, the opposites are interior-exterior and the experience is felt as if the whole world is inside the psyche. In alchemy, this experience is illustrated with the symbols sun (spirit) and moon (matter). Jung carved a stone in his Bollingen retreat that is based on the alchemical symbol of the pelican. It shows the sun and the moon on each side of Telesphorus, the bearer of light. He carved it as a token of his appreciation.
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| The Alchemical Pelican |
In 1921, he published the book Psychological Types and the chapter 5 is entirely dedicated to the study of transcendent experiences. His hypothesis is that transcendent experiences are caused by an accumulation of psychic energy in the unconscious. In 1928, he received The Secret of the Golden Flower, a chinese treatise on mystical experiences. He found in it the description of a conjunction of opposites or a mystical experience. The book says: the silver moon stands in the middle of the sky and one has the feeling that the great earth is a world of light and clarity², Here, Jung recognized his own second experience, the moon (matter) being in the middle if the sky (spirit). This was the beginning of his three decades long research on alchemy.
Alchemy was for Jung the Holy Grail. He found in it the continuation of Gnosticism. Alchemy was primarily preoccupied with the conjunction of opposites depicted as the king and the queen, the moon and the sun, the homunculus, the hermaphrodite, the rebis, the hieros gamos. In the writings of Gerard Dorn, Jung found the purest form of alchemical philosophy. While other alchemists stopped their process after the second mystical experience, Dorn taught that there was a third conjunction of opposites. Jung never achieved this stage and it was probably his greatest regret. In Mysterium Conjunctionis, he wrote that the third conjunction was not possible in our time but Thomas Merton realized it in 1968 before his death. In her thesis, Clare Crellin missed the central meaning of Jung's relation to alchemy. Her supervisor, Andrew Samuels, was no better. The "Essex school" has brought nothing new to the study of Jung's alchemical writings on the individuation process. They only repeated what the first generation of Jungians said.
In a private letter to Eugene Rolfe in 1960, a few months before his death, Jung wrote:
“I had to understand that I was unable to make the people see what I am after. I am practically alone. There are a few who understand this and that, but almost nobody sees the whole. (…) I have failed in my foremost task, to open people’s eyes to the fact that man has a soul and there is a buried treasure in the field, and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state.³
The first generation of Jungian analysts never found the treasure in the field of Analytical Psychology. Jung was magnanimous to take that responsibility on his shoulders. His students were the ones to blame. Jung's sad realization should have been the spike to look more deeply for that treasure, but the analysts were unable to do so.
Crellin concluded her thesis by writing
It was no coincidence that Jung became interested in alchemy, in which immortality was a central concern. Jung’s ‘collective’ unconscious is immortal in an unusual sense of the word. Jung’s conception of immortality is not of the person as he or she has been in life. He drew on Paracelsus’s vision, which affords immortality both to the Astrum (the Divine spark) and, to a degree, the Iliaster (the autonomous dynamic individualising principle). The Paracelsian way of envisioning a human form of immortality gave Jung an important new perspective, the ‘third idea’ that allowed him to answer his questions about opposites, about how to reconcile infinite diversity with oneness and death with immortality. (P. 109)
The high-flying acrobatics of these lines are representative of six decades of Jungians' inability to understand Jung's alchemical writings. Crellin's conclusion serves here as a proof that Jungians have been unable to see at the same time, the facts and the relations between facts. They have not searched the treasure in the field, content with a first-degree reading of Jung's essays. With radical empirism, the use of both Sensation and Intuition cognitive functions, one can find Jung's central subject of study and read his books with the clarity he deserves.
B. R.
See also
Jung's understanding of the philosopher's stone
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¹ Jung's letter to Dr. Baur-Celo
² https://www.gnosisjung.org/2025/03/carl-jung-and-secret-of-golden-flower.html
³ Rolfe, Eugene. Encounter with Jung. Sigo Press. 1989. P.158