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In this paper, a sequel to his 1983 paper in the same journal about the theory of archetypes (reviewed in this Journal in July 1984, Vol. 29, No. 3), Samuels is at pains to convey Jung's study of the phenomenology of alchemy in relation to analytical psychology to a readership of psychoanalysts whom he expects to have dismissed it until now as disreputable. ‘What on earth can the discredited occult art of alchemy have to do with contemporary analysis and therapy?’ he asks, having made the point that Jung's paper The psychology of the transference' (Coll. Wks, 16) includes a 120-page ‘Account of the transference phenomena based on the illustrations to the Rosarium Philosophorum’, a sixteenth-century alchemical tract.
Samuels's presentation of Jung's understanding of alchemy is somewhat marred by an early diversion into metaphor, its definition and clinical evaluation, which I found more distracting than enlightening. Jung was much less interested in the clinical use of metaphor derived from alchemy than he was in the individuation processes of the alchemists as shown by the combination of external events (i.e., the