Anon If You're Seeing This Great That You Asked The Question - Blog Posts

hey, so i just read "the psychology of the transference" by c.g. jung bc my psychoanalyst told me to. all of the misogyny, rampant racism and overconfident speculation on the role of incestuos desires for the human psyche aside (lmao), i found it a worthwhile read. one of the main points that he seems to make in regards to alchemy is that it wasn't *really* about chemistry/material processes, but more about the images and metaphors used to describe the alchemical process. and jung compares this alchemical imagery, which in large parts revolves around themes of divisions and fusions, to subconscious (psychic) processes that in his opinion also revolve around divisions and fusions (like dissolutions or integrations of the self, contradictions in gender relations and other social relations, etc). and idk, that part makes sense to me. did alchemists really care about the physical world? or did they care about gender, sex, identity, art, death, the horrors, etc?

YES. THE TEXTS HE IS TALKING ABOUT ARE PROTO-CHEMISTRY WORKS.

Alchemy was demonstrably, overwhelmingly, about the physical world. Jung's psychological interpretations of them are --and I cannot stress this enough-- entirely invented ahistorical bullshit.

I cannot overstate the amount of damage that Jung has done to alchemical scholarship. His interpretations of alchemical texts have caused literally thousands of historical proto-chemistry texts to languish in the historical wastebin of "Psychological mumbo jumbo" or "it's just old therapy language tee hee!"

What's worse is he actively misrepresents many of the actual religious or mystical ideas present in the texts he cites. For example, many alchemical texts in the Arab world we're the result of Isma-ili mystics from northern Africa and more gnostic-influenced parts of the early Muslim world. Their equivocation of Hermes Trismegistus with the biblical Enoch, and unique relationship to both hermeticism and Jewish apocrypha, gets ENTIRELY sidelined in Jung's reading, in favor of "it's just early psychology."

Furthermore, Jung tries to make the argument that these images present in alchemical texts are somehow representative of some deeper, universal structure within human psychology. Which is, --again I cannot stress this enough-- howling clown bullshit. Alchemical texts are similar because chemistry works the same wherever you are on the planet. He actively ignores the hermeneutics of different alchemical theories, which change RADICALLY depending on culture and location.

All this in service of adding a pseudo-historical foundation for psychological theories that are about as scientific as astrology.