Page 52 - A critical exposition of Jung's theory of alchemy

summarised in Psychology and Alchemy was, according to Hillman,
Wolfgang Pauli a noble prize winning physicist with an interest in the
history of science. Given that Pauli’s dreams are heavily summarised
and selected (Jung uses 59 out of 400 recorded dreams) and that Jung
removes the personal detail from these summaries (CW 12: 215), it is no
wonder the dreams appear to be have the impersonal type of symbolism
Jung was looking for. Even so the connection with explicit alchemical
symbolism is often tenuous.

Jung also seems to concretize, or conceptualise, some of the terms
of the work, in a way which seems incompatible with some of his earlier
remarks. Thus Sulphur becomes the motive factor in consciousness,
will, compulsion etc (CW 14: 128). Luna is wisdom and intuitiveness
(ibid: 130), Salt is cultivated wisdom (ibid: 241), The King is collective
conviction, but becomes renewal (ibid: 309) and the Nigredo is the
darkness of the unconscious. In some ways this turns the terms from
symbols indicating mysteries into signs pointing at only one thing - even
if the thing pointed at is obscure. Likewise there is a possibility that
Jung reduces different kinds of oppositions to the one model of
opposition.

Reading the works I am also struck by how reductionist Jung’s
model is. Everything in alchemy becomes synonymous of a very few
things, either consciousness, the unconscious, complexes, the Self, or
the union of opposites. Whereas what strikes me about the actual texts is
their incredible concrete specificity, not just any old couple but a
specific type of couple, in a specific environment, with specific degrees
of heat (and I mean metaphorical specificity), a specific type of mercury
etc.

Jung seems to lose this concreteness within the generalities of his
theoretical system, in which ‘the self’ and the coniunctio, despite being
‘unrepresentable’ become so abstract that they leach this specific life

transmuted into one another (1847a: 75- ), in the later theory (1740) it appears
that (most?) particles are round and properties of material depend upon the
geometry of the arrangement of particles. “There is a first substance of the
World, with others in their order similar to it” (1992: 162-). This is a difficult
issue, in the Principles of Chemistry of 1721, the cubical particles of salt seem
to be formed out of the interstices of the round particles of water when these
latter particles are arranged in a cubical shape (1847b: 28-), which implies that
at least some particles can be created by the physical arrangement of other
particles.

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