ABSTRACT
The discovery that alchemy was an art of the transmutation of souls rather than
metals is generally attributed to the nineteenth-century American writer, Ethan
Allen Hitchcock. His understanding of alchemy might be described more properly
as ethical rather than psychological, since it is based almost entirely on the
identification of the Philosophers’ Stone with a good conscience.1 Nor were
Hitchcock’s views particularly original; they were anticipated in the seventeenth
century by Patrick Scot in his The Tillage of Light (1623). For Scot, alchemy was simply an allegory of the process of acquiring wisdom. Most occultists, however,
would have agreed with Robert Fludd’s repudiation of Scot: the transmutation of
souls rather than metals was the philosopher’s true goal, but the alchemical process
It was not until the twentieth century that more strictly psychological
interpretations of alchemy were developed.3 That such interpretations should occur
is perhaps not surprising, if we accept the view that psychoanalysis is itself a
secularisation of occultism.4 Daniel O’Keefe, for example, has observed that
‘Freudian psychoanalysis had the social effect of reviving magical curing.’5 The
connection between occult thought and modern psychology is clearest on the
wilder fringes of psychoanalysis. Although he attempts to present his ideas in terms
of a modern scientific discourse, Wilhelm Reich showed a clear affinity with occult
thought. In his later work, Reich postulated the existence of a primordial cosmic
energy, ‘orgone’. His therapeutic technique, involving ‘orgone irradiation’ in an
‘orgone energy accumulator’, seems to be little more than a modernised version of
Several less eccentric psychoanalytical writers have taken an interest in
alchemy, arguing that it performs certain psychological functions. The seminal
work in Freudian accounts of alchemy was Probleme der Mystik und ihrer Symbolik, by the Austrian psychoanalyst and Freemason, Herbert Silberer. He begins his account by analysing a parable in The Golden Tract, noting its dream-
apparent reason; knowledge is achieved without the mediation of perception, or
there is a strange uncertainty and lack of knowledge; sudden, unexpected obstacles
are encountered; and the whole narrative has a ‘peculiar logic’ of its own. Silberer
proceeds to give the parable a psychoanalytic gloss. Obstacles, for example,
represent conflicts of will, and a mill in the story signifies the vagina or womb, since
‘to grind’ means to have sexual intercourse.7 A similar psychoanalytical account of
alchemy has been expounded by Johann Fabricius, who regards this aspect of the
art as an accidental by-product of the attempt to transmute metals: ‘through the
indirect way of projection and free association the alchemists came to activate the
unconscious which allied itself to their work in the form of visionary or
It is possible that Freud’s own work may be rooted in occultism, more
specifically in the Jewish Cabala, if we accept David Bakan’s argument that ‘Freud
consciously or unconsciously secularized the Jewish mystical tradition.’9 In a letter
to Jung, Freud spoke of ‘the specifically Jewish character of my mysticism’, a
strange phrase for a man who also described himself as ‘a completely godless
Jew’.10 Freud seems to have had at least some knowledge of the Cabala; the Cabalist
scholar Chaim Bloch recalled visiting him and discovering that his library included
several German books on the Cabala and a French translation of the Zohar.11 Freud’s closest associate in the period 1887-1902, the period when he was
formulating his distinctive ideas, was Wilhelm Fliess, a writer who seems to have a
connection with the occult tradition.12 Fliess was the author of Die Beziehungen zwischen Nase und Weiblichen Geschlechtsorganon (1897), a work devoted to a supposed relationship between menstruation and the turbinate scrolls of the nose.
