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Do you get overwhelmed by intense feelings and old patterns, feeling stuck because you can’t make sense of what’s happening, and reacting on impulse instead of pausing to choose a steady, thoughtful response? Jung’s alchemical insights will help. Sublimatio is an old alchemy term for heating a solid so that it turns directly into a gas, rises, and then cools back into a solid higher up. As a psychological metaphor, this happens when we discover an archetypal image or idea that adds a fresh perspective on an old problem. The vapor becomes a solid again when we apply the new attitude to the lived problem. This stage is both spiritual and practical—the perfect combination that helps us outgrow our issues.
Sublimatio As The Operation Of Air
Sublimatio belongs to air. The alchemists described it as volatilizing a substance and elevating it to the vessel’s upper, cooler region, where it re-solidifies. The psychological analog is an ascent of standpoint that converts dense experience into articulate awareness. The Latin root, sublimis (“high”), defines the core action: an upward translation that refines material into a higher form. In the alchemical laboratory, this corresponds to a solid, skipping a liquid state and passing directly into vapor, then condensing above. This upward movement does psychological work by lifting a person “above” a situation, allowing it to be seen, named, and handled as part of an archetypal pattern. The moment a mood or complex can be clearly defined, the person steps onto higher ground and gains room to think.
The Symbol System: Birds, Heights, And The Vessel
Alchemists described sublimatio via images: a bird springs from heated matter and rises to the upper chamber of the vessel, a microcosm of earth below and heaven above. These motifs establish a lexicon: ladders, stairs, mountains, towers, elevators, and flight indicate ascent states. A white soul often appears as a white bird released by the heating, an imaginal sign of spirit once trapped in matter, freed. Dreams in which doves pour forth from a screaming mouth like vapor escaping pressure, linking anxiety to a birth of sublimated content. Bird imagery, therefore, warrants attention in analysis, as avian release often correlates with successful elevation. Bird fears can signal fear of a required ascent. When flying, climbing, rising, or upper-vessel imagery appears, sublimatio is operating.
Extraction Of Spirit And Meaning: Mercurius As Sublimate
Sublimatio doubles as an extraction procedure. Heat drives out the volatile spirit, yielding a sublimate that appears above as a purified deposit. In alchemical language, this is the expulsion of the quicksilver, a release of Mercurius from its bondage in the heavy matrix. Sublimatio redeems the Self from its original unconscious state by lifting the hidden spirit out of the dense facts of life. The same action applies to daily work: extracting significance from concrete events, dark moods, or stubborn literalism. The practitioner learns to draw out the heart, which is to say, the living value concealed in the matter at hand.
Attenuation, Filings, And The Grinding Sense Of Sublimatio
Philologically, the Greek term behind sublimatio (rhinisma) meant filings, which captures the idea of thinning and attenuating matter. Alchemical directions instruct the operator to grind and subtilize the substance until it becomes almost impalpable. The moral nuance embedded in this image: fine powder carries a different value than coarse particles, indicating a discriminating texture of experience. Encounter with the numinous can pulverize rigid structures until they become workable dust. A certain hammering is required to break through rugged resistance and create pliable possibilities. This foliation thins what was thick, making it permeable to air and, by analogy, to spirit. Psyche often requires such reduction before elevation can proceed; heaviness yields to subtlety through repeated blows of insight. That attenuation is a preparatory art of refinement, leading to future alchemical processes.
Purification Through Separation And The Discipline Of Reflection
Paracelsus states the rule: “in the process of sublimation… the spiritual is raised from the corporeal, subtilized, and the pure separated from the impure.” This informs cultural disciplines that train objectivity. Stoic practice aims at apathia, a state of being above passions; Platonic idealism describes realities as eternal forms; both enact sublimatio’s separation of the subtle from the gross. Reason serves as a tool for the climb, as it grants a vantage point outside of personal likes and dislikes. Schopenhauer describes the shift with clarity: a “second life in the abstract” allows a person to become a spectator of concrete life. That stance cools emotional storms long enough to see secret structures. The work of reflection crushes enmeshment and identifies what is essential. Separation frees Psyche for a higher order of integration.
High Perspective And Its Trade-Offs
Sublimatio grants a broad, comprehensive view. Elevation magnifies understanding while thinning contact with immediacy. The higher the vantage, the grander the pattern that encompasses the personal problem; the higher the vantage, the less particulars matter. Analysis recognizes this effect when archetypal interpretation cools a situation and yields relief. Dreams often mark that success with released birds or other upward signs. The sky view, therefore, functions as a necessary stage of individuation, revealing universals and patterns. The clinician monitors a person’s distance from concrete life while encouraging the application of clarity gained by the height. The art lies in using altitude without forfeiting efficacy.
Lesser And Greater Sublimatio: Ascent And Translation To Eternity
There is a “lesser” and a “greater” sublimatio. The lesser requires a following descent; it is part of the ongoing work of life. The greater accompanies the dying process and corresponds to the translation into eternity of that which has been created in time. Jung’s 1944 visions are a model for the greater form, an elevation to an objective form in which one’s entire history is transformed into a single accomplishment. In the end, we come to realize our lived experiences will abide in the collective unconscious. Lesser ascents stabilize a new perspective; the greater places are in the universal. This distinction clarifies the range of ascent imagery in dreams and visions. It also calibrates therapeutic goals against eschatological experiences.
Clinical Risk: Dissociation, Isolation at Altitude, and Corrective Grounding
The capacity to get above our issues can trigger a dissociation. Modern people frequently overuse sublimatio and drift into a thin, splendid isolation. Such a person may dream of rising in a wall-less elevator, far from earth. The imagery shows an autonomous ascent that outpaces the personality’s ability to ground the expanded perception. We need to help Psyche circulate between abstract archetypes and human contact. Soul needs the sky; soul needs the ground.
Ladders Of Revelation: Scriptural, Mystical, And Ritual Forms
Ascent imagery has a rich revelatory history. Jacob’s ladder becomes a Christian ladder in patristic exegesis, with the cross itself being seen as a ladder set upon the mountain as a way leading up to God. Dante’s Ladder of Saturn presents the contemplative’s path, rising beyond the reaches of sight as radiance moves along its rungs. Prophetic and shamanic patterns echo the same pattern: Ezekiel lifted between earth and heaven, Enoch rode through the heavens, the Prophet vaulted upward for inspiration, and the shaman climbed the world pillar or flew to gain knowledge. A Mithraic initiation directs the candidate to inhale the solar breath until he finds himself soaring towards the Height, hearing and seeing only the things of air. These ancient sources describe ascent as an epistemic method, not a mood. They also show breath, height, and vision linked as a single operation. Psyche imagines revelation as altitude.
Circulatio: The Necessary Rhythm of Upward and Downward Movement
Circulatio is the cycle that alternates ascent and descent until the work is complete. Descending birds symbolize the incarnation of archetypal content, just as ascending birds mark translation to the eternal. The Emerald Tablet of Hermes describes the whole process with precision: “It ascends from the earth to the heaven, and descends again to the earth,” thereby gaining “the power of the above and below.” Chemically, this appears as reflux; psychologically, it appears as repeated cycles through opposing states that gradually constellate a center. The Tower of Babel warns against sterile heights cut away from a necessary circulation, while the mystics’ ladders picture living traffic between realms. Ascent eternalizes while descent personalizes; both are indispensable functions. The alchemical practitioner cultivates this oscillation so that vision and embodiment mature together. The opus then moves, breathes, and endures.
Edinger, E. F. (1985). Anatomy of the psyche: Alchemical symbolism in psychotherapy. Open Court Publishing Company.
HERE’S THE DREAM WE ANALYZE
I am in the kitchen with my mom, and there is a dead body on the floor. The kitchen is nothing like my real kitchen but feels like it’s my kitchen in my dream. I am looking at the body, which I assume I have murdered, and feel quite calm until I realize that there are people coming over to my place soon or already in the house, outside the kitchen. I don’t know exactly who these are but it seems like are people from work whom I don’t know well but see often. Once I realize they are coming, I focus on hiding the body. First, I start to drag the body to try to hide it somewhere it can’t be seen. As I drag the body, however, a track of blood is left on the floor and I also realize the body is too big to hide. The people are getting closer to the kitchen. I can see and hear them talking in the living room. My heart is racing, and I am scrambling to find a way to hide the body. I come up with the idea of chopping the body into small pieces, which I proceed to do. I don’t feel guilty or disgusted by the blood, flesh, or anything as I do this. I just want to hide the body as soon as possible. And my mother is there silently helping me.
