In the book Anthology of contemporary theoretical classics in analytical psychology: the new ancestors¹, (2022) edited by Stefano Carpani, the chapter two is “A Critical Appraisal of C.G. Jung’s Psychological Alchemy” which was originally published in Jung: An Introduction by Ann Casement (1938-2025) in 2021. This is a critic of this chapter.
On the first reading, one is shocked to find so many falsehoods and so little respect for Jung's thought in what is considered a theoretical classic and part of the Jungian anthology by the editor. Casement describes a psychological alchemy that has never existed and is therefore a complete fiction. Our goal is to identify some of the most important errors and to restore the original meaning of Jung's writings.
Beginning with a Dream
Whenever a Jungian commentator starts with the recollection of one of Jung's dreams, the reader can already infer that the text will dive into the wonderful and magical world of Jungian mystique where reality and logic are left aside in favor of myth, projections and fantasies. Casement chooses that road and states
Jung’s interest in alchemy was presaged by dreams, culminating in a crucial one in 1926 that showed him and a little coachman in danger on the Italian wartime front with shells exploding all around them. They arrive at an idyllic landscape with a manor house, and as they drive into the courtyard, the gates clang shut behind them. Jung thought they were now trapped in the seventeenth century
We need to underline that the description of the dream she refers to was made by Aniela Jaffe, the author of Memories, dreams and reflections, who depicted Jung as a seer and a godlike figure. As is well-known, Jung did not agree, in a personal letter, on that biased interpretation of his life but Jungians are generally incapable to adopt a view that is not blurred by a wall of projections. The dream had tens of other possible meanings before it could be linked to a presage of his interest to alchemy. Casement falls for the Jungian mystique right away and shows no interest to stick to a logical and a down-to-earth interpretation.
Flirting with common sense but.....finally not
At the beginning of her interpretation, Casement let the reader believe that the practice of alchemy is linked to the making of gold, to the search for a panacea (the elixir or philosopher’s stone) that would prolong life and to produce various substances that would increase the production of vegetation. This is a first-degree reading of alchemy and only ingenuous people still believe that. In two occasions, she flirts with logic when declaring that Isaac Newton and the alchemists had to protect themself from the Church and the Inquisition. If she had been able to push her reasoning just a little further, she would have approached a logical understanding of the goal of alchemy. In her text, she demonstrates no capacity to consider the central question: What made the creation of gold or the universal remedy such a threat that it required safeguarding from the Church when it is described in plain sight in the alchemical books? One does not protect himself by using the very words that could be detrimental to his safety. What was needed to be protected was the secret that was hidden under the alchemical symbols, a knowledge that was against the Christian values and dogma.
She writes
Jung came to realize that the alchemists were expressing themselves in symbols through their oft-repeated saying that their gold was not the common gold. As symbols are key components of Jung’s psychological approach, this led to his conclusion that analytical psychology and alchemy overlap. He went on to speculate—a key stance in psychological alchemy—that the alchemists preferred to be thought of as gold-makers rather than to be accused of heresy, a serious charge at that time.
Really? What was more dangerous under the Inquisition? Doing Jungian psychology that did not even existed in other forms or names at that time or making gold? The answer is easy: neither of them. The first one is a construction by Casement because she did not understand Jung's interest in alchemy. She surprisingly proposes that analytical psychology, which she later describes in her text as the alchemy between the analyst and the analysand, was a heresy in the Middle Ages. That is the reason those who were supposedly doing it had to protect themselves from the Church. Apart from being an extremely entertaining fiction to Jungians, this kind of assertion should not be incensed as a scientific contribution. Any twenty-year-old with a good head would be very skeptical about Casement's interpretation which is obviously false. Nevertheless, this is the basis of her whole text: alchemists were doing analysis with ... someone and had to hide themselves from the Inquisition. One should wonder how the editor has let this insane hypothesis being inserted in a scientific and theoretical work without having warned the reader at the beginning of this chapter about the extremely limited worth of the ideas and interpretations expressed in it. She adds
Furthermore, the earthy, erotic images of alchemy were compensatory for the sexless imagery of Christianity.
If we understand her correctly, the erotic images of alchemy, which are compensatory for the sexless Christianity, could not be considered an heresy by the Church but a highly hypothetical symbolic description of the relation between the analyst and the analysand is. Here, the logic is completely deficient and it is only the beginning.
Mercurius and its opposites (!)
The beautifully written and Jungian appealing paragraph below shows the lamentable state of Analytical psychology today. Casement writes
Mercurius is the central figure in alchemy associated with mercury—slippery, difficult to get hold of—which appears to be all things to all people. Furthermore, Mercurius consists of all conceivable opposites: that is, feminine-masculine; matter-spirit; the alchemical process itself that transmutes the lower into the higher and vice versa; and the devil’s as well as God’s reflection in physical nature. It is the dialectical work of psychological alchemy to release the mercurial spirit from the base matter of unconsciousness, namely, nature, through a recursive process of fermentation, corruption, putrefaction, mortification, refinement, and distillation—alchemical terms—in the laboratory of the mind. The hypothesis upon which we focus in this chapter, however, stems from a deeply personal reason for Jung’s undertaking this work, namely, incest.
Is mercurius a symbol of the unconscious or consciousness? Casement only affirms that it comes from the "matter of unconsciousness". It is therefore either an unconscious content, a conscious content or .... something else. Casement does not care to explain what mercurius is although it is the ruler of alchemy according to her. In fact, she has no idea what it is. This is a problem that occurs constantly in Jungian psychology. The authors make assertions even if their logic is highly questionable. They take for face value what Jung and the first generation of analysts have written and do not question their validity. To a grown adult, Jung was a man and he made mistakes but to Jungians he is a god and his words, the ultimate Truth.
Here, the problem is the declaration that mercurius contains all the opposites. She does not explain why this should be considered a fact and what, in psychology, it refers to. It is only a mix of words that appeal to Jungians. The recipe is simple and repeated ad nauseam by Jungians: you put in a paragraph the words, mercurius, alchemy, psychology, unconscious and you add putrefaction, to spice up the content a little and you are certain Jungians instantly lose all forms of logic and scientific discrimination.
The unconscious is not composed of opposites if this what she meant. The personal and collective unconscious are not opposites. What was her goal in stating that mercurius contains all opposites? Her hypothetical relation between the analyst and the analysand? Why not explain it in simple words? I don't know how an analyst could write this and keep a straight face. And I certainly do not know how it could have slipped through peer-review and be considered a theoretical classic. It is consciousness that is composed of opposites cognitive functions and its development was the goal of alchemy as it will be explained next. That concept completely eluded her.
The goal of alchemy and what Jung taught
To support her claims, Casement dive into the ten illustrations of the Rosarium Philosophorum that Jung made the core of his book The Psychology of Transference. By doing this, she makes a big mistake because her interpretation proves her inability to understand Jung. The first illustration is the depiction of the entire alchemical process.
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| The alchemical goal |
[The figure] contains much alchemical symbolism: the sun and moon as opposites; the four elements depicted by four stars; the mercurial fountain and vessel (vas); and the alchemical retort as an analogy of the psychoanalytic container wherein transmutation takes place. The rise and flow of the water in the fountain characterize Mercurius, ruler of alchemy, as the serpent endlessly fertilizing and devouring itself until it gives birth to itself again, the uroboros that is the recursive work of alchemy.
Even at this early stage one sees the recursive nature of the alchemical process. The aroused energy of transformation is depicted by the image of the water flowing from the fountain, underlining the fact that psychoanalysis is not an intellectual exercise but one that is driven by affect, which must be distilled and contained in the vas.
It is so beautifully written that Jungians are easily put to sleep as are children who are read a fairy tale. Her hypothesis is still that alchemy is a symbolic description of the psychoanalytic relation even if nothing supports that view in Jung's writings or any interpretation of spiritual alchemy. Let's see the flagrant errors.
The four elements and the three faucets
The four stars, one in each corner, represents the four elements. They are the basis of alchemy but Casement gives no sign that she understands them. If we stick to the production of gold thesis, they are the elements that composed matter: air, fire, water and earth. But if alchemy was not about the production of gold but instead a symbolic depiction of a secret knowledge that had to be hidden from the Church, what are the four elements a symbol of?
The number four should instantly ring a bell in the mind of Jungians: the four cognitive functions. From the Ancient Greeks through the Low Middle Ages, the four elements represented two things. First, the composition of matter which was not, as we know, the interest of alchemists. Second, the composition of the spirit or consciousness. Their logic was that if God's creation is composed of four elements, consciousness also is. That is why the Greeks based their four temperaments on the four elements. Astrology also was and still is based on the four elements, each being the basis of a type of interaction with the world. Jung did not invent the four cognitive functions; he borrowed them from the Ancient Greeks and astrology and renamed it.
This is the first task of the alchemist: to discover that consciousness has four directions, four orientations. If consciousness is the core subject of alchemy, mercurius is its symbol. In the illustration above, the mercurial fountain represents consciousness and not the pseudo-psychoanalytic container as Casement states. What are the three faucets then? The logical conclusion is that the alchemists knew that the human consciousness was defective. Only one direction of consciousness was completely developed and the three others were the wisdom lost in matter. Therefore, the three faucets represent the goal of the alchemical process: to make consciousness flow from the three faucets (cognitive functions in our jargon) that are unused or partly unused. Observ that one of those faucets flow leftward and the other two, rightward. The first one is the partly used auxiliary function.
The opposites sun and moon appearing in the illustration are known representations of spirit and matter but also light and dark, lighted and hidden. The alchemical work consists in finding the three consciousness directions that are hidden and unused and to bring them to light. The serpent with two heads has nothing to do with the uroburus being a serpent eating its tail (which is not depicted here). The serpent with two heads in the illustration represents the two directions of the search: the exterior world and the interior world. One finds the hidden directions of consciousness in studying others and himself. The fifth star represents the quintessence, the fifth element which is optimal consciousness.
Alchemy was about the development of consciousness and Jung knew it as we will show.
The King and the Queen
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| The king and the queen |
She writes
[The figure] brings out into the open the element of incest, an essential component of archetypal transference-countertransference. The king and queen, bride-groom and bride, are depicted standing on the sun and the moon, these latter pointing to the incestuous relationship of Apollo and Artemis, the brother and sister from Greek mythology. This is emphasized by the left-handed contact between the two—that is, from the sinister or unconscious side. Further associations with the left side are to do with the heart, which is related to love, but also to do with all of the moral contradictions that are connected with affective states.
The couple are holding a stem of two flowers in their right hands, which repre-sents the criss-crossing of the analytic relationship as set out in the preceding section. This depicts the multiple relations that may be constellated between analyst and analysand in the course of in-depth analysis.
Let's put aside the phenomenon of transference for the moment. Casement sees incest in the depiction of the king and the queen above. What is the element of the illustration that supports this claim? To my knowledge, none and she does not explain it either. In the illustration, she sees Apollo and Artemis but I am still looking for any signs that it might be the case. That is a fiction. She puts words in her text that have no meaning to her.
To her, the king and the queen are the two persons in the analytic relation and their relation is automatically psychologically incestuous. This is based on her misunderstanding of the cross-cousin marriage used by Jung. As you might suspect, the psychoanalytic relation between the analyst and the analysand was not the hidden secret of the alchemists who knew nothing about psychoanalysis, the psychoanalytic relation or any related subjects. It is Casement's construction developed after the facts. She gives a meaning to alchemy that did not even exist during the Middle Ages. It is a pure illogical construct.
Casement's hypothesis is based on her first-degree reading of Jung's The Psychology of Transference. She did not notice that transference and countertransference are not the central subject of this book. It occupies less than ten percent of the work. Wolfgang Giegerich had previously rightfully underscored that the book was not about the transference phenomenon. What was it about then? Jung wanted to share his understanding of the alchemical process without revealing the secret.
We need first to understand that alchemy and Gnosticism were, in Jung's mind an adyton protected by the desidaimonia², which means a secret protected by the wrath of the gods. He probably read that somewhere during his research and sticked to it. Therefore, his message is always only accessible on a second-degree reading. The subject of the transference is incidental in Jung's book. He used the quaternio of opposites Adept-Anima-Soror- Animus but the subject is not really transference, it is cognitive functions. Jung's intentions in mentioning the cross-cousin marriage is part of the secret he believed was protected by the gods. He proposes this quaternio:
ADEPT SOROR
ANIMA ANIMUS
It is in his book AION, that he gives the key with the Moses quaternio which is represented as
Here, Moses is the ego, Myriam, the Anima, Jethro is the fatheror the sage and Zipporah, his daughter, the child. When Jung uses the cross-cousin marriage diagram, he speaks about cognitive functions. The structure also represents cognitive functions:
Ego
Moses (dominant function)
Parent Child
Jethro (auxiliary function) Zipporah (tertiary function)
Anima
Myriam (inferior function)
The equivalences are therefore easy to make:
Dominant function=hero=adept=Moses
Auxiliary function=Parent/Sage=Animus=Jethro
Tertiary function=Child=Soror=Zipporah
Inferior function=anima=Miriam
Jungians tend to credit John Beebe for these equivalences but this is not correct. Jung already made the correspondences between the figures of his December 26th, 1913 active imagination and the cognitive functions in the 1925 Seminar on Analytical psychology. He associated Elijah (the sage)with his auxiliary Thinking function, Salome (the child) with his tertiary Feeling function, the serpent (anima) with his Sensation inferior function and himself, the hero, with his Intuition dominant function.
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| The 1925 seminar on Analytical psychology |
The underlying message of the book The Psychology of Transference is the key to understand alchemy: it is about the work on the differentiation of the cognitive functions. The ten illustrations Jung studied were the steps to achieve optimal consciousness, a message Casement was not able to decipher. The same message is also present in AION, Answer to Job as well as Mysterium Conjunctionis. Casement's interpretation is a pure fiction, an unreliable depiction of the alchemical process and the proof she was not able to read Jung correctly.
What else is expressed is the second illustration?
The king and the queen are equivalent to the symbols of the sun and the moon and represent the two states of the cognitive functions or elements of consciousness (differentiated and undifferentiated). It is silly to think that they represents the analyst and the analysand. Their right hands are holding four flowers that represent the cognitive functions. The fifth flower comes from above and is the quintessence.
The king holds two flowers that represent the differentiated and partly differentiated functions (dominant and auxiliary). The queen holds flowers that represent the undifferentiated functions which are the opposite of the previous ones. The lesson that has to be learned from this image is that the process needs an open mind to what is unknown and, more importantly, opposite to the cognitive identity. That is why the opposition is so obvious with the symbols king-queen, male-female and sun-moon. The king shows his two functions to the queen and he has to be open-minded about the opposite qualities of the functions that are presented by the queen and needs to be developed. Those functions are absolute opposites of the firsts because they are opposite functions and directions of energy. To the alchemists, those oppositions were symbolized by the four elements: opposition water-fire and air-earth.
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| The sacrifice |
In the image above, the rhird that Jung studied, the king sacrifices a function to induce the rise of its undifferentiated opposite. This is the alchemical process, the sacrifice, the nigredo, and the pelican who hurts itself.
It will not be necessary to verify the rest of text. As you now realize, everything is based on a misconception of alchemy and Jung's teachings on that matter.
The reader interested in the whole explanation if the ten illustrations of the Rosarium Philosophorum shall read
Conclusion
Ann Casement did a shallow interpretation of Jung's teaching on alchemy. She read Jung literally and never asked herself the basic questions about her illogical affirmations. It shows an immaturity which is commonplace in the field of Jungian psychology. To a majority of analysts, everything is magical, full of mysteries, visions and prophecies. As an example, archetypes, not proven to this date, are the primary force in their life because it is akin to magic. This is a childish way to apprehend reality.
The editor, Stefano Carpani, is also responsible for promoting such a text. His choice of Casement's text shows a misunderstanding of the Jungian theory which is appalling. The text discussed above should never have been considered a theoretical classic. I do not question that those people can be extremely good analysts. However, I am extremely skeptic about their ability to comprehend the most advanced concepts of Analytical psychology and to discriminate between fact and fiction. It is highly questionable to publish and promote texts that have more to do with fiction than real scientific studies. The publisher, Taylor and Francis Group, seems to accept anything as long as it fuels the participation mystique of their readers. As the head of their editoral board are poets, it is unlikely that a rigourous scientific examination of the texts they publish could be in place. They promote the Jungian mystique because it pays.
The first part of the underlying problem is the predominance given to the name instead of the ideas in Analytical psychology. Casement was a big name. That was the important factor for her being chosen although almost every paragraph of her text is erroneous. Jungians see the name and say to themselves: that must be true. This is an unscientific behavior.
The second part of the problem is the peer-reviewing in Analytical psychology. How is it possible that a text so packed with falsehoods could be published? The "scientifc" reviews (I use here the term loosely) of Analytical psychology have a defective system of peer-review that accept articles that only entertains the participation mystique of the Jungians. The authors use the recipe of Casement: you insert a few keywords such as alchemy, vision, premonition, unconscious, incest and the Jungians fall immediately into the daydreaming state they love so much: the magical and wonderful world of Jungian mystique. Because the peer-reviewers are already contributors to the Jungian mystique, they are prone to accept everything that comforts them in their dreamlike view of Analytical psychology. It is a catch-22 system that excludes all forms of logic and any new ideas.
If it were a joke, we would laugh but it is not. It is the lamentable state of Analytical psychology today. I am sure I will find many other "pearls" in Carpani's anthology of theoretical classics. Jungians cannot refrain to nourish their insatiable taste for mysteries and magic, a puerile behavior.
Analytical psychology needs more logicians and less daydreamers in order to become a real science.
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¹Anthology of contemporary theoretical classics in analytical psychology: the new ancestors / edited by Stefano Carpani. New York, NY. Routledge, 2022.
² in his letter to Dr. Baur-Cello.