ABSTRACT
The notion of the soul is Jung's most fundamental psychological thought; underpinning his entire psychology is this insightful recognition of psychology as the logos of the soul. For, he observes: Psychology is neither biology nor physiology nor any other science than just the knowledge of the soul. The difference is not purely between the soul and an actual individual personality, but pertains to empirical personality at the level of abstract concept. The notion of the positive-factual individual as the real reference of alchemical discourse has to be dialectically surpassed, logically overcome: that is, the logic of notion of empirical subjectivity, its conceptual self-definition, has to be subjected to the wounding negations of psychological thinking. The negation of the negation raises the thought to a higher notional level. From this thinking, embedded in alchemical imagination, was distilled the notion of the spirit in the stone; a spirit reducible to neither a literal nor imaginal stone. Alchemists called this the philosopher's stone.
