Finally finished Marie Louise Von Franz’s book, Alchemy. There were a few more passages which I wanted to earmark for later on. Mainly, because I always end up having all these passages I want to reference later on from books, but then I go back to look for them, and I can never quite place where they were in the book. So I’m trying to head that off at the pass, so to speak.

The first ones on the personality being exploded by schizophrenia:

Very often the reason for schizophrenia is not so much the invasion of the unconsious, but that it happens to someone who is too narrow for the experience, either mentally or emotionally. People who are not broad-minded and have not enough generosity and heart to open to what comes are exploded by the invasion. (p. 217)

This whole thing about how a religion is a boat which you can use to protect you from unconscious contents:

…He is trying to return to his former conscious attitude, or you could say to retire from the flood which drowned him, and there you see what an official creed, or religious attitude, is good for; it is a boat into which one can retire when the sharks attack.

One can go out bathing in the unconscious, but if the sharks come there is the boat to get back into, which is why the Church has been compared to a boat, or an island, to which one can retire when the influx of the unconscious becomes too strong. If I have only my human reason and just tell myself to be reasonable, that is not enough to keep back the influx of the unconscious, but to have a belief which still exists in consciousness is like a boat, a place to which one can retire. (p. 264)

A section about what to do in analysis when you suspect someone has a latent psychosis which is likely to come to the fore soon - that you load them up with as much symbolic and mythological knowledge as possible, to help them navigate the experience when it happens:

It is therefore extremely important, if you have to reckon with such a possibility, that you treat such people as though they had a latent psychosis and provide them with a tremendous amount of symbolic knowledge. Into such people, if you suspect a possible outbreak or invasion of the collective unconscious, you must force as much symbolic knowledge as you can, making them read Jakob Boehme and alchemical texts and mythology as much as possible. They will not know why and might even think it rather strange, but then if the overwhelming experience comes they can perhaps express it, or at least describe it. If you can do that well enough, that is, prepare the ground of symbolic understanding ahead of time, even though they do not know its use, then when the experience comes they have a net in which to catch it and re-express it. (p. 191)

About real-life “mad alchemists”:

Many years ago I had an interesting experience showing that here in Switzerland there are still mad alchemists. When I was working on these texts in the Central Library, one of the officials asked me whether I was studying alchemical texts, and when I said I was he told me that I had a colleague to whom he would introduce me. He thought that would be a great joke and he went over to a little, shrivelled up old man sitting in the Central Library poring over an alchemical text and introduced me, saying I was a specialist in alchemy. I looked at this man, whose name I have forgotten, and when I saw his eyes I saw at once that he was completely schizophrenic.

I sat down beside him and after a while he said: “Have you got the secret?” I said: “No, not yet.” And then he said: “I am very near it, I think I shall have it in another two or three months.” I said that was marvellous, and then he asked me if I knew Greek, because his trouble was that he didn’t know Greek, and that if I could help him with the Greek we could get it. I said: “Yes, yes, but not now! That was a real alchemist who had fallen into the mania of the lead.” (p. 91)