The Individuation Process As Reflected By ‘The Rosary Of The Philosophers’ (1550)

In ‘The Psychology of the Transference’ Jung (1946) pursued his theory put forward in Psychology and alchemy (1944), that the alchemists had experienced and described transformative processes of the unconscious in projection, i.e. unconsciously portrayed psychic happenings in chemical happenings.

Recognizing the intimate relationship between projection and transference, Jung attempted to interpret the alchemical processes of projection in terms of the transference processes unfolding during a psychoanalytical treatment. In the transference, the frustrated and neurotic patient projects his unconscious patterns onto the analyst, thereby revealing to the analyst—and to himself—the structure of his unconscious psyche and the aims pursued by its regressive psychodynmics. Jung compared this situation with the similar one created inside the mediaeval framework of the alchemical laboratory: here the frustrated laborant ‘transferred’ his unconscious patterns—not onto the analyst—but onto the living chemical processes, thereby revealing to matter and to himself the structure of his unconscious psyche and the aims pursued by its regressive psychodynamics.

Jung suspected that a regular process of the unconscious was at work in the projection processes taking place in the transference and in the opus alchymicum, and to prove his point he embarked on one of the boldest explorations in the history of depth psychology and alchemy. He undertook an analysis of an alchemical picture series printed in the Rosarium philosophorum (1550) and depicting the evolution of the opus alchymicum. Through careful analysis of the symbolic transformation processes of the series, Jung was able to show