ABSTRACT
According to Patrick Harpur, the ‘perennial philosophy’, the golden chain of which Memories, Dreams, Reflections speaks, includes the following tenets, many of which we have found as points of affinity between Goethe and Jung: that ‘the human soul is but an individual manifestation of the world-soul’, that ‘the chief faculty of the soul is imagination’, and that ‘the experience of personal transmutation, of gnosis, is of the essence’.1 This tradition is closely associated in the West with alchemy, and in Memories, Dreams, Reflections we find an insistence on the affinities between analytical psychology and alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists, it is claimed, were Jung’s; their world was his. If alchemy formed ‘the historical counterpart’ to analytical psychology, if ‘the possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the uninterrupted chain back to Gnosticism’ were able to ‘give substance’ to the psychology of the unconscious (MDR, 231), then this could have been possible only on the basis of an identical structural principle – namely, that ‘collective transformation processes’, alchemical symbolism, and analytical psychology were concerned with the same thing, the ‘process of individuation’ (Individuationsprozeß) (MDR, 235).
