Jung and Alchemy

From the 1930s on, Jung read the alchemists as psychologists in disguise — the retort and the philosopher's stone read as figures for the unconscious and the Self, laid out at length in Psychology and Alchemy (1944) and Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955–56), his last major work.

⭐⭐ THE SYSTEM HE CHOSE OVER THE ONE THAT WAS CLOSER. Drob's argument, stated as a hypothesis rather than a settled fact, is uncomfortable and worth keeping uncomfortable: Jung had access to Kabbalistic material — via Knorr's Latin — that maps onto his own psychology at least as well as alchemy does, and arguably better, yet spent his most productive decades on alchemy instead, during exactly the years his public remarks about a "Jewish" versus "Aryan" unconscious were most exposed. ⚠⚠ Whether that was a considered scholarly preference or a distancing from Jewish sources under real historical pressure is not settled, and this app states the hypothesis as Drob's, not as proven.