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Solutio is Psyche’s method to facilitate transformation: our rigid ego is softened in symbolic water, allowing outworn attitudes to unbind. We can see this reflected in dreams of oceans and baths, or a wall of our house dissolving. This can show up when we slough off our work persona or a creative depression brought on by retirement. Analysis itself—ana-lysis—a deliberate loosening, can deepen the process by offering a safe container to let go and yield to the process. The work is careful because the waters that purify (baptism or tears) can also drown us (psychosis or crowd contagion). We require a supportive relationship, a daily spiritual practice, or the analytic hour to hold us as our ego reorganizes like a butterfly in a chrysalis. Once our ego solidifies, we notice we’re more permeable to symbols or less defended against feelings. We’re more skilled at breaking problems into their component parts with a determination to resist regressing. The alchemical process was not created; it was noticed as a natural pattern of transformation. It leaves us with more of who we really are, but we couldn’t have claimed until we became soft enough to receive it.
Solutio as Psychic Operation
Solutio is the alchemical operation of dissolution—matter made water. Solutio is the root of alchemy, and we are advised, until all be made water, perform no operation. Alchemical stages are linked to the four elements, calcinatio belongs to fire, coagulatio to earth, sublimatio to air; solutio belongs to water. Psychologically, solutio is the softening and loosening of rigid psychic structures so transformation can occur. A fixed attitude cannot change until it is returned to a more fluid, undifferentiated state—prima materia—so a new form can be born. The image is womb-like: water as matrix, dissolution as a return for rebirth.
Prima Materia and the Return to Origins
Alchemy insists that transformation requires reduction to first matter: they tell us bodies cannot be changed except by reduction into their first matter. Entrenched attitudes allow for no change until analysis dissolves them back to essentials where reorganization is possible. The drowning of the old king dramatizes this return: he submits to the solutio of drowning. Return is not regression-for-its-own-sake; it is the precondition for renewal.
Deathly Nigredo vs. Living Waters
Solutio is Janus-faced. One face is nigredo: the blackness that tells us our dissolution is accomplished. Heraclites writes, “To souls it is death to become water.” The other face is regeneration: “when… the composition is dissolved, it is the day of the restoration; then darkness and Death fly away… and Wisdom proceeds.” Psyche experiences both: annihilation of a former stance and emergence of a more vital attitude.
Containment by the Greater
Solutio occurs when a lesser standpoint is immersed in a greater one that can contain it. Jung tells us the simpler personality “is surrounded, if not actually swamped… swallowed up in his more complex partner,” the classic problem of “the contained and the container.” In analysis, the patient’s one-sided attitude meets the therapist’s more comprehensive standpoint and “goes into a state of solutio,” often felt as drowning—hence legitimate resistance that “should be respected. Ultimately, the Self—felt within or projected onto person or group—is the dissolving agency.
Erotic Waters
Eros dissolves. Alchemical texts speak of the king drowning in the fountains of Venus; psychologically, Aphrodite’s sea-birth marks love as a watery force that liquefies fixed masculine structures. Classical images warn: Hylas is pulled under by nymphs and “never seen again”—fatal solutio. A blissful solutio is the most dangerous becasue the uroboric longing to be dissolved and absorbed, is a dangerous regression into the Great Mother. Desire is a necessary solvent—but if it replaces consciousness, it becomes undertow.
The Moon and Dismemberment
We’re told, solutio takes place in the moon. This suggests the lunar mode dissolves boundaries, sometimes violently. In mythology Actaeon surprises Artemis bathing. He is transformed into a stag, and torn apart by his hounds. We can frame this as a portrait of an immature ego thrown into regressive solutio by raw instinctual activation.
Inflation and Inner Drowning
Another dissolving agent is one’s own swollen ego. Jung comments: “hypertrophy of the ego… when he drinks he is overwhelmed by the water—that is, by the unconscious.” Here inflation provokes its compensatory correction: solutio is a necessary defeat of psychic grandiosity so that a sounder principle can emerge.
Collective and Group Solutio
Groups dissolve individuality. Identification with party, sect, or school swallows the individual who succumbs to it—a collective solutio where the person is contained by a larger, often unconscious, standpoint. Religious language preserves the image: to be in Christ Jesus signifies being contained in a matrix that dissolves separateness—both an inner unification and an outer risk of collectivization.
Seven Major Aspects of Solutio
There are seven aspects of solutio: (1) return to womb/primal state; (2) dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; (3) containment of a lesser by a greater; (4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in creative flow; (5) purification ordeal; (6) solution of problems; and (7) melting or softening.
Analytic Practice
Dream analysis is a water-work. It confronts the conscious standpoint with the statements of the unconscious, loosening cramped attitudes—alchemical aqua permanens applied to the materia of life; as bodies are dissolved by solution, so our doubts are resolved by knowledge. Crucially, both patient and analyst must be soft and fluid. The operation requires mutual susceptibility—two psyches cooperating in dissolution and re-formation. This is a disciplined liquidity.
Surviving Transformation
Psychic quality is indicated by its ability to soften, to melt into a liquid flowing state. Water benefits all; it takes the low place; it does not contend. But liquidity is not collapse. The goal is not to drown the ego; it is to dissolve its rigidity so that new traits can surface from a deeper center. The opus is always solve et coagula. Consciousness must swim—and then stand.
Edinger, E. F. (1994). Anatomy of the psyche: Alchemical symbolism in psychotherapy. Open Court.
HERE’S THE DREAM WE ANALYZE:
I see a head, which I know is my own, even though I can’t see my face clearly. What I can see is a close-up of one side of my face, specifically the jaw. My skin seems to have burned off, exposing my mouth. There’s both black tissue and ash along the edges where the burn occurred. Something is making me inspect the wound, to see if there’s anything left. Like a dentist, I dig in to find what remains, and in the blackness—almost the texture of coal—I find a single tooth, intact. I’m surprised to discover it hidden so deep beneath all the layers.
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I relate deeply to this episode because I lost my oldest son . My grief has taken me on a journey that includes the experience of solutio- dissolving who I was.
My grief support group facilitated by David Kessler emphasizes a goal of remembering with more love than pain….. because love never dies. The idea is that you keep a connection with your loved one. So in this episode when you said that in grief the bond is dissolved- this is untrue and misleading.
I am keeping a connection with my son even though he died.
Thanks for your podcast! It continues to support me in finding meaning in my life.