The History of Alchemical Psychology: From Jung to Modern Research
Tracing the lineage from Jung's alchemical studies to contemporary depth-psychology research.
Jung's engagement with alchemy began in 1928 with his reading of the Golden Flower and culminated in Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955). His central claim — that alchemical texts describe psychic processes projected onto matter — has been alternately celebrated and dismissed, but never fully integrated into mainstream psychology.
This paper traces the lineage from Jung's original work through the post-Jungian school (Hillman, Edinger, Schwartz-Salant) to contemporary research on symbolic transformation. The key finding is that alchemical psychology, despite its marginal status, has continued to generate productive hypotheses: the stages of transformation (nigredo–albedo–citrinitas–rubedo) map onto empirically observable phases of therapeutic process; the coniunctio (union of opposites) describes the integration of psychic polarities that cognitive-behavioral models struggle to address.
The paper argues that alchemical psychology offers something the neurocognitive paradigm does not: a language for the experiential dimension of transformation. Brain scans can show what changes; alchemy can describe what it feels like. Both are needed, and the current overvaluation of the former at the expense of the latter represents not scientific rigor but a category error.
