Alchemical Psychology

I’ve been reading/listening to a course by James Hillman, The Alchemy of Psychology from the mid-oughts, on alchemy and the light it can shed on psychology. Hillman takes his cue from Carl Jung with whom he studied in Zurich and who was deeply interested in alchemy. Hillman returned to alchemy again and again in his writing. In Re-Visioning Psychology, for instance, he writes:

The materials, vessels, and operations of the alchemical laboratory are personified metaphors of psychological complexes, attitudes, and processes. Every one of the alchemist’s operations upon things like salt, sulphur, and lead were also upon his own bitterness, his sulphuric combustion, his depressive slowness… By means of concretely physical fantasies, the alchemical psychologist worked at the same time on both the soul in his materials and the soul in himself… So much is this the case that when we enter the thought of alchemy these events lose their stigma of sickness and become metaphors for necessary phases of the soul-making process.

Hillman is very concerned with soul and psyche and, obviously, metaphor, though he is less charitable when others draw the “wrong” conclusions about the metaphorical significance of alchemy, specifically, moral. The lectures are chaotic and brilliant, but the audio is so bad that the questions are not audible, so the answers to them are puzzling. Still worth a listen, though. I have not dipped my toe much into alchemy and I imagine there are worse ways to do so!