This is genuine Jung, and the famous wording is his translators’ wording. It sits on page 49 of Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), in the essay “Problems of Modern Psychotherapy,” translated from the German by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes.
“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed” Carl Jung, "Problems of Modern Psychotherapy," in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933), p. 49. First published in German as "Die Probleme der modernen Psychotherapie," Schweizerisches Medizinisches Jahrbuch, 1929.
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Provenance
The source
Work
Modern Man in Search of a Soul
Essay
“Problems of Modern Psychotherapy” — chapter 2, which begins on p. 28
Published
1933 · Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner (London) and Harcourt, Brace (New York) · the sentence is on p. 49
Translation
W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes, from Jung’s German
German original
“Die Probleme der modernen Psychotherapie,” Schweizerisches Medizinisches Jahrbuch, 1929
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
Modern Man in Search of a Soul, p. 49
Only this sentence is reproduced. The 1933 Dell–Baynes translation is still under copyright and the scan is access-restricted, so the surrounding paragraph is not quoted here — we have not printed text we could not read in the source.
Quote Investigator has no article on this line, so there is no specialist finding to defer to — a site search returns nothing on it ↗. Wikiquote does carry it, and not in a “disputed” bucket: it appears under a work heading, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), cited to p. 49 ↗.
That page number checks out independently. Searching inside the volume on Google Books for “contact of two chemical substances” returns a hit on page 49 ↗, and the same book’s chapter 2, “Problems of Modern Psychotherapy,” begins on page 28 ↗ — which is where p. 49 falls.
For the German origin, Jung’s own The Practice of Psychotherapy records that the essay was “Published as ‘Die Probleme der modernen Psychotherapie’ in Schweizerisches Medizinisches Jahrbuch, 1929” — a note echoed in Jolande Jacobi’s bibliography ↗.
Both the wording and the work are still protected. Modern Man in Search of a Soul was first published in 1933 ↗, after the US public-domain cutoff, and the famous English sentence is itself a 1933 translation by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes — a separately copyrightable work. Quote the sentence briefly with attribution; do not reproduce the surrounding pages.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What goes wrong with this one
Nobody else is claiming this sentence, and Jung really wrote it. What drifts is the setting it gets quoted in, and which English translation you are reading.
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The settingFriendship, romance and gift anthologies Context stripped
The line is lifted into books about love and friendship — a full-text search turns it up in The Friendship Book, Little Book of Friendship, 365 Kisses, Soul Magic and even a guide to civilised separation (Open Library full-text search ↗). Jung wrote it in a psychotherapy essay, about the analyst as much as the patient.
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The wordingJung’s Collected Works Rival translation
Jungian scholarship almost always quotes a different English rendering — “…is like mixing two different chemical substances: if there is any combination at all, both are transformed” — the version carried in the Collected Works and used by Edinger, Cambray, Stein and others (Open Library ↗). The famous wording is specifically the 1933 Dell–Baynes translation.
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PunctuationSemicolon reprints Minor drift
Plenty of reprints swap the colon for a semicolon — “two chemical substances; if there is any reaction” — and some drop the comma before “both” (compare printings ↗). Harmless, but it is a reliable sign the quoter never opened the book.
✓The sentence is real and correctly credited: page 49 of Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), in Jung’s essay “Problems of Modern Psychotherapy” (Wikiquote’s sourced list ↗).
Context
What Jung was actually talking about
The line reads today like a note about chemistry between people — new lovers, new friends, a good first meeting. Jung wrote it inside an argument about work. “Problems of Modern Psychotherapy” is an essay about what analysis costs the analyst, and the point of the metaphor is that a doctor cannot run a reaction from outside the beaker. If the encounter changes the patient, it has changed the physician too; if it changes nobody, nothing has happened.
That is why the sentence keeps company, in Jung’s discussion and in the Jungian literature that quotes it, with the idea of the wounded healer — the practitioner whose own injury is the thing that makes the treatment work. Read that way it is less a compliment about compatibility than a warning about exposure.
If there is any reaction, both are transformed — including the one holding the clipboard.
The essay’s route into English
Jung first published the essay in German as “Die Probleme der modernen Psychotherapie” in the Schweizerisches Medizinisches Jahrbuch in 1929 — a bibliographic note recorded in Jung’s own The Practice of Psychotherapy and in Jolande Jacobi’s survey of his psychology.
It reached English readers in 1933 as chapter 2 of Modern Man in Search of a Soul, translated by W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes for Kegan Paul in London and Harcourt, Brace in New York. The translators’ preface notes that all the essays in the volume had been delivered as lectures. That 1933 rendering is the one the internet quotes.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1875–1961 · Swiss psychiatrist & founder of analytical psychology
Carl Gustav Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist who broke with Freud and built his own school, analytical psychology, around ideas like the collective unconscious, archetypes, introversion and extraversion, and individuation. Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933) was the book that carried him to a general English-reading audience: eleven essays, originally delivered as lectures, several of which had already appeared in German. This sentence comes from the second of them, where Jung is arguing that a therapist who stays sealed off behind professional armour cannot actually treat anybody.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Chicago
C. G. Jung, “Problems of Modern Psychotherapy,” in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1933), 49. First published in German as “Die Probleme der modernen Psychotherapie,” Schweizerisches Medizinisches Jahrbuch (1929).
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-meeting-of-two-personalities-is-like-the-contact-of-two/