The Nigredo

Based on Jung’s writings prior to his essays on alchemy, the authors offer a succinct study of the premises of the shadow. They then relate the process of confrontation with the shadow to the nigredo of the alchemists. This confrontation is an inevitable and never-completed step in the individuation process; similarly, the withdrawal of projections is an unnatural effort to separate and differentiate opposites, in which the ego loses its power and finds itself stretched to the breaking point.