The Alchemical Androgynous Individuale: An Unfinished Becoming

For the alchemists, the androgynous figure was an image of a psychic goal; the complete fulfillment of a personality, as shown in the twenty-one-figure series of the Rosarium philosophorum. But Jung made it the symbol of incomplete development. The androgynous archetype as an emblem of the mixture of opposites (and not their conjunction) symbolizes either, on the collective level, a phase of the Anthropos Principle, or, on the individual one, an intense transferential phase and/or an encounter with the psyche’s archaic elements. As for the Self, it is most often represented in analysis by quaternary structures like mandalas, not by dual forms.