Occult Confessions

Carl Jung made a fairly extensive study of Western alchemy and came to understand alchemical processes as explorations of the unconscious. The effort to liberate the spirit from the prima materia was a kind of descent into the depths of the mind.

C. G. Jung was a colleague of Freud's before they split over Jung's belief that there was more to the unconscious than Freud's sexual theory. Jung went on to theorize the existence of a collective unconscious, informed by his research in Arthurian legend, Alchemy, Gnosticsm, and Western Occultism. Jung's ideas not only informed psychology but inspired the field of comparative re...