“The right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is a longissima via, not straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites in the manner of the guiding caduceus, a path whose labyrinthine twists and turns are not lacking in terrors.” ~ C.G. Jung1
There is a kind of madness in the work of the inner life — at least by conventional standards. It is a path of meaning, not a pursuit of material satisfaction. It tends toward self-surrender rather than mastery of one’s world. It chooses the lonely, individual trail, not the crowded avenues or highways. The way is long. The work is hard. The reward intangible.
Though they were engaged in actual physical and chemical operations, the alchemists could not help finding in their work the secrets of their own souls. According to Jung, this was because the substance with which they were working — the prima materia — was so profoundly unknown and even unknowable that it was ripe for projection: “[The alchemist] experienced his projection as a property of matter; but what he was in reality experiencing was his own unconscious.”
This happened, not because the alchemists were a special or unusual type of human being, but simply because they were, in fact, ordinary human beings. Projection, as Jung declares, “can take place always and everywhere.” It is an unavoidable element of our psychological functioning.
Faced with something unknown — and everything has something unknown in it — we fill in our experience with fantasies, assumptions, anticipations, and fears. Some of this is based on memory, the vestiges of past experiences good and bad. Some of it is based on possibility, the potentials within our personality — that which is not yet but could be. As Jung puts it, “In the darkness of anything external to me I find, without recognizing it as such, an interior or psychic life that is my own.”
The first great task of psychological growth, then, is to recognize and to “withdraw,” as best as we can, our projections. In other words, it is the long, difficult process of learning to see things as clearly and objectively as possible. This corresponds, as Marie-Louise von Franz suggests, to the first task of the alchemical opus — the albedo. This stage of the work is said to involve “constant washing.” The goal is to move from the dense blackness of the primary nigredo state to the bright whiteness of the albedo. According to von Franz, “Whiteness suggests purification, no longer being contaminated with matter, which would mean what we call technically, and so lightly, taking back our projections.”2
As I pointed out in my last post, Washing Away the Mud, the stage of the albedo was considered to be the hardest work of the opus. Psychologically, it has to do with trying to see through the cloud of projections which cause us, we might say, to be constantly getting in our own way. “That is not an easy thing to do,” says von Franz in something of an understatement. She goes on to elaborate:
“It is something very complicated and difficult, for it is not as though one understood that one was projecting and would therefore not do it anymore. It needs a long process of inner development and realization for a projection to come back.”
She points out that the alchemical texts speak of the washing of the prima materia as requiring “endless repetitions” — sometimes nine times, sometimes fifteen, sometimes more. In some texts the process is said to take many years. Just so, she says, “we fall again and again into complexes which have not been worked out and have to be looked at time and again.”
In her book, Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psychology, von Franz describes several elements that are involved in the “remarkable and complicated process” of withdrawing projection. The first thing that is needed, of course, is to be able to begin to recognize that the projection exists, to be able to differentiate between what is experienced subjectively and what is happening objectively. For instance, we have to be able to acknowledge that our reaction to a particular event or person may not have anything to do with those external occurrences.
This is uncomfortable as it can take a great deal of psychological effort to gain some distance from our immediate emotional state. Here the temptations of rationalization and self-justification must be avoided and the capacity for reflection brought to bear on the situation. “Through the act of reflection,” I write in my book, “we can hold our experiences in mind, relate to them, and come to accept them. This is what it means to become conscious.”3
It is only after all of this, according to von Franz, that the actual task of integration takes place. She speaks of this as “moral integration,” suggesting by this both the effort involved and the necessity of taking responsibility for our reactivity and the behavior that stems from it. This is by no means a neat and orderly progression. We are constantly confronted with our habitual responses and reactions to life. These, says von Franz, must be “brought repeatedly into the view of the conscious ego and recognized as belonging to its own personality.”4
All of this, as I’ve said, is long, hard work. It is a work, in one sense, that is never finally completed. Still, there is important progress that can be made. This way of reflecting on our experience can definitely become more of a habitual mode of consciousness. In the alchemical opus, the culmination of the albedo, though it was not the end of the work, was considered a major achievement in itself. One of the symbols for the fulfillment of this stage of the opus was the cauda pavonis, or the peacock's tail.
Though the color of the albedo is white, it is said to contain all the colors, and this is one of the meanings of the peacock’s tail. The realization of this part of the work leads to the fanning open, so to speak, of many possibilities. All the potentials that lie within one's personality become both differentiated and psychologically organized. Through this process we become aware of all the colors — both bright and dark — of our psychological makeup.
This, finally, brings about a state of inward calm and composure. The work is indeed hard and the path can be very long, but through it all we arrive at a place of unity within. Here is how Marie-Louise von Franz describes that arrival:
“As soon as a projection is really withdrawn a sort of peace establishes itself — one becomes quiet and can look at the thing from an objective angle. One can look at the specific problem or factor in an objective and quiet way … without constantly becoming emotional, or falling back into an emotional tangle. That corresponds to the albedo.”
Until next time.
Upcoming Events
I have several online programs coming up in March. I hope you’ll join me at one of the following events:
The Symbol of the Grail: Parzival and the Path of Individuation
Jung Archademy, starting on Monday, March 6th, 2023. For more details visit: jungarchademy.com/parzival
The Finer Forge: Inner Work and the Alchemical Imagination
Jung Society of Washington, Friday, March 17th, 2023. For more details visit: www.jung.org
The Fires of Transformation: Life as a Work of Art
Jung Society of Washington, Saturday, March 18th, 2023. For more details visit: www.jung.org
Religious but Not Religious
Maine Jung Center, Friday, March 24th, 2023. For more details visit: Religious but Not Religious: Living a Symbolic Life.
Deep Listening: Developing Symbolic Sensitivity
Maine Jung Center, Saturday, March 25th, 2023. For more details visit: Deep Listening: Developing Symbolic Sensitivity.
All quotes from C.G. Jung taken from Psychology and Alchemy, CW12
Except where indicated all quotes from Marie-Louise von Franz are taken from Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology
Religious but Not Religious: Living a Symbolic Life by Jason E. Smith
Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psychology by Marie-Louise von Franz
I much enjoyed this. I haven't quite achieved an adequate way to describe what this article sparked in my imagination, but I see a connection between the Observer Effect of Quantum Physics (maybe "entanglement" would be better 😎) and that of Projection in regards to that of Psychology. Food for thought? At least something to ponder . . .