The Alchemical Couple: Gnosis in the Mirror of Relationship

Intimate relationship is one of the oldest laboratories of transformation because it reveals what solitude can leave untouched. Alone, a person may feel serene, wise, disciplined, and spiritually clarified. Then another human being enters the room, speaks in the wrong tone, forgets the agreement, sees through the performance, needs something inconvenient, or reflects a pattern the ego would rather keep unnamed. The mirror lights up. The work becomes flesh.

The alchemical couple is not a romantic fantasy of perfect spiritual union. It is not a licence for cruelty, intensity addiction, emotional chaos, or the refusal of ordinary care. It is a symbolic way of understanding how two people, when grounded in consent, safety, honesty, and repair, can become mirrors for one another’s shadow, catalysts for growth, and witnesses to the slow transformation of selfhood.

This article explores intimate partnership through alchemical psychology, Jungian projection, Gnostic syzygy, the symbolism of coniunctio, and the hard daily practice of relational gnosis. It asks what happens when relationship is not treated as escape from the Work, but as one of the places where the Work becomes unavoidable. The aim is not to glorify conflict. The aim is to distinguish transforming friction from harm, sacred mirror from projection, and conscious partnership from spiritual theatre wearing wedding clothes.

The alchemical couple does not worship the fire. It learns how to contain it, read it, survive it, and turn its heat into gold.

Table of Contents

• The Laboratory of the Other
• Holding Space, Holy Friction, and the Middle Path
• Syzygy: The Gnostic Pattern of Paired Becoming
• The Mirror Stage of Relationship
• Projection, Anima, Animus, and the Beloved Image
• The Relational Nigredo
• The Coniunctio: Union Without Fusion
• Sex, Sacrament, and the Bridal Chamber
• Practical Work for Two
• The Necessary Boundaries
• The Gnostic Reading: Love as a Mirror of Division
• Related Glossary Terms
• Read Next
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Further Reading
• References and Sources

The Laboratory of the Other

The solitary practitioner can become skilled at curating conditions. Silence, lighting, books, incense, ritual, prayer, meditation, chosen music, and controlled solitude can all help the inner life unfold. But partnership interrupts control. Another person arrives with needs, timing, moods, wounds, language, habits, history, body, desire, and fear. The laboratory is no longer sealed.

This is why intimate relationship can become so revelatory. It reveals what private practice does not always expose: how the body reacts to being misunderstood, how the ego defends itself when criticised, how desire becomes demand, how fear disguises itself as principle, how spiritual language becomes a costume for ordinary avoidance.

The partner becomes a mirror, but not because they are always right. Sometimes they mirror your shadow. Sometimes they mirror their own. Sometimes both shadows meet in the hallway and begin giving speeches. The work is not to believe every reflection. The work is to slow down enough to ask: what is mine, what is yours, what is ours, and what old pattern has entered the room wearing one of our faces?

Alchemy gives a useful symbolic language for this process. The relationship becomes a vessel. Conflict becomes heat. Projection becomes raw material. Repair becomes purification. Difference becomes the condition for transformation.

But the vessel must be real. Without consent, safety, and mutual responsibility, there is no alchemy. There is only fire loose in the house.

Holding Space, Holy Friction, and the Middle Path

The phrase “holding space” is often mocked because it can become vague, passive, or sentimental. Yet its deeper roots are not trivial. In person-centred therapy, the conditions of empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard were not passive niceness. They were disciplined forms of presence.

The problem begins when “holding space” becomes a way to avoid truth, boundaries, differentiation, or necessary confrontation. A person may become so devoted to being supportive that they disappear. Another may demand endless witnessing while refusing accountability. A relationship can become a soft room where nothing sharp enough to transform is allowed through the door.

The opposite mistake is equally dangerous. Some people spiritualise confrontation and call it truth. They confuse bluntness with depth, provocation with courage, contempt with discernment, and emotional intensity with transformation. This is not alchemy either. It is aggression dressed in ceremonial robes.

The alchemical couple needs a middle path. They learn to hold space without becoming passive, and to speak truth without becoming cruel. They know that love sometimes protects, sometimes challenges, sometimes waits, sometimes names the pattern, and sometimes says: this is not safe, and we need help.

Holy friction is not the absence of care. It is care made honest enough to withstand the mirror.

Syzygy: The Gnostic Pattern of Paired Becoming

Gnostic sources often describe reality through paired principles, or syzygies. In Valentinian language, aeons are frequently imagined in paired relation, not as isolated monads but as dynamic, generative powers. The Pleroma is not a lonely perfection. It is relational fullness.

The Apocryphon of John presents the Invisible Spirit and Barbelo in a relationship of emanation, reflection, and divine thought. Valentinian systems speak through pairs, depths, names, and restorations. The symbolic pattern is important: difference is not automatically division. Difference can become generative when held within a deeper unity.

This is one reason the alchemical couple can be read through a Gnostic lens. The point is not that every romantic partnership is cosmically ordained. That would be too tidy, and the universe is rarely so fond of our neat filing cabinets. The point is that relationship can reveal the same structure found in Gnostic myth: paired powers, rupture, misrecognition, longing, descent, repair, and return.

One partner may carry the role of fire while the other carries water. One may tend towards abstraction while the other brings the body back into the room. One may expose shadow through silence, the other through speech. One may need structure, the other softness. If the difference becomes domination, the vessel cracks. If the difference becomes conscious polarity, the vessel begins to work.

Syzygy is not sameness. It is paired becoming. The alchemical couple does not erase difference. It learns how to let difference generate awareness rather than war.

The Mirror Stage of Relationship

In intimate partnership, the other person becomes a living mirror. This does not mean every irritation is profound. Sometimes the socks really are on the floor. Sometimes the tone really was sharp. Sometimes a practical agreement really was broken. The ordinary must remain ordinary enough to be dealt with plainly.

Yet the intensity of reaction often reveals something extra. The small event becomes a doorway into old material. A forgotten message becomes abandonment. A disagreement becomes humiliation. A request becomes control. A delay becomes betrayal. A partner’s silence becomes rejection. The present situation has been joined by earlier ghosts.

This is where mirror work begins. Not with accusation, but with inquiry. Why did this reaction arrive with such force? What story did the body believe before the mind explained it? What younger pattern is asking to be seen? What fear is trying to protect itself through anger, withdrawal, superiority, seduction, collapse, or control?

The partner is not responsible for healing everything they reveal. That is an important line. They may witness, support, challenge, repair, and remain present where appropriate. But they cannot become the container for every unprocessed wound. The mirror shows the pattern. The Work belongs to the one who recognises it.

Relationship becomes alchemical when both partners are willing to ask: what did this reveal in me, and what repair is needed between us?

Projection, Anima, Animus, and the Beloved Image

Jungian psychology gives intimate relationship a precise and occasionally uncomfortable vocabulary. The psyche does not meet the other person directly. It also meets its own images, needs, fears, ideals, and disowned qualities projected onto the other.

The traditional Jungian terms anima and animus describe inner contrasexual soul-images, though contemporary readers may approach these more flexibly as symbolic figures of inner otherness, not rigid gender law. In relationship, the beloved may become the screen onto which undeveloped parts of the psyche are projected.

What you worship in the other may be a quality not yet fully lived in yourself. What you despise in the other may be a quality disowned in yourself. What you demand from the other may be an inner function you have not yet developed. What you fear losing in the other may be a connection to your own soul that seems to exist only through them.

Projection is not morally bad. It is one of the ways the unconscious becomes visible. The danger lies in refusing to recognise it. When projection remains unconscious, the partner is no longer a person. They become goddess, saviour, tyrant, betrayer, parent, child, enemy, or missing half. The living human vanishes behind a psychic image.

The alchemical task is not to stop loving. It is to withdraw the projection slowly enough that the other person can become real. Love deepens when the image loosens. The beloved ceases to be a private idol and becomes a person with their own centre, shadow, mystery, dignity, limits, and path.

The Spiritual Inflation Loop

One of the more subtle dangers in spiritual partnership is mutual inflation. Two people begin confirming each other’s specialness, vibration, destiny, lineage, mission, or exceptionality until the relationship becomes a sealed chamber of grandiosity. They no longer challenge each other into humility. They polish the same mask.

Inflation can feel like intimacy because both partners are sharing a charged story. But if the story makes them less accountable, less grounded, less kind, less honest, or less capable of ordinary repair, it is not gnosis. It is a perfume sprayed over insecurity.

A healthy alchemical couple can name inflation without humiliating each other. The sentence may be simple: “We sound grandiose here. What ordinary responsibility are we avoiding?” That question is not glamorous. It is also more useful than another hour of cosmic self-congratulation.

The Relational Nigredo

In alchemy, nigredo, the blackening, is a stage of dissolution, decomposition, shadow, and loss of the old form. In relationship, nigredo may appear when the fantasy collapses. The partner can no longer carry the projection. The old arrangement stops working. A wound is revealed. A pattern repeats one time too many. A truth appears that cannot be neatly folded back into the drawer.

This stage can feel like failure, but not every collapse means the relationship is wrong. Sometimes the old form is dying so a truer form can appear. Sometimes a fantasy must end before love can become more real. Sometimes the couple is not being destroyed, but stripped of an agreement that was never honest.

Yet discernment is essential. Not every dark phase is alchemical nigredo. Sometimes it is depression. Sometimes it is trauma activation. Sometimes it is burnout. Sometimes it is incompatibility. Sometimes it is abuse. Sometimes it is a sign that the relationship needs outside support, a pause, a boundary, or an ending.

Spiritual language becomes dangerous when it asks people to endure harm because “the Work” is difficult. The Work is difficult, yes. But difficulty alone does not make something holy. A wound is not a sacrament just because someone has named it with Latin.

The relational nigredo requires three questions:

• Is there safety? Are both people free from violence, coercion, intimidation, sexual pressure, threats, and chronic contempt?
• Is there mutual accountability? Can both people name their part, repair harm, and accept feedback without domination or collapse?
• Is there movement? Is the dark phase producing deeper honesty and change, or is it simply repeating suffering?

If the answer to these questions is no, the relationship may not be in a sacred blackening. It may be asking for protection, treatment, outside help, or departure.

The Coniunctio: Union Without Fusion

Alchemy speaks of coniunctio, the union of opposites. The image appears as Sol and Luna, king and queen, sulphur and mercury, fire and water, masculine and feminine, spirit and body, above and below. In psychological terms, coniunctio is not merely romance. It is the reconciliation of divided principles into a wider wholeness.

The mistake is to confuse conjunction with fusion. Fusion erases difference. It says: we are one because one of us has disappeared. Coniunctio preserves difference inside relation. It says: we remain distinct, and because we remain distinct, something new can emerge between us.

Jung warned against participation mystique, the undifferentiated merging in which individuals lose themselves inside the shared field. In relationship, this may appear as constant togetherness, shared identity, spiritual dependency, emotional enmeshment, or the belief that love requires the collapse of separate inner lives.

The alchemical couple must therefore practise both intimacy and separation. They need shared ritual and private practice. Honest dialogue and solitude. Common values and individual teachers. Mutual devotion and separate nervous systems. Love must be close enough to transform and spacious enough not to consume.

The coniunctio is not two people becoming one blur. It is two people becoming real enough that relationship can generate a third thing: a quality of consciousness, a field of honesty, a shared vessel, a living lapis that neither person owns.

Sex, Sacrament, and the Bridal Chamber

Alchemical and Gnostic symbolism often uses erotic language because the body knows union before the intellect has finished drawing diagrams. The Gospel of Philip speaks of the bridal chamber, or nymphon, as a profound sacramental image. Alchemical illustrations depict the royal couple, the rebis, and the union of opposites through embodied symbolism.

This language must be handled carefully. Sacred sexuality is one of the easiest places for spiritual language to become manipulative. No practice, ritual, lineage, “energy work”, alchemical aim, tantric language, or claim of transformation can override consent. Desire must remain free. Boundaries must be explicit. Any practice involving sexual energy belongs only where there is mature consent, equality, sobriety, care, and the freedom to stop without punishment.

In a grounded reading, sexual sacrament does not mean turning intimacy into performance. It means meeting the body with presence rather than compulsion. It means noticing when desire becomes demand, when shame becomes withdrawal, when fantasy replaces contact, when power hides beneath tenderness, and when the other person has become an instrument instead of a subject.

The bridal chamber is not a technique for special couples. It is a symbol of restored relation: divided parts reconciled, body and spirit no longer at war, the other met without possession, and eros returned from appetite into recognition.

The sacred is not proven by intensity. It is revealed by reverence, consent, truthfulness, and the capacity to remain human before, during, and after the encounter.

Practical Work for Two

The alchemical couple does not need constant ceremony. It needs repeatable forms of honesty. These practices are not replacements for therapy, conflict resolution, medical care, or safety planning. They are small vessels for relational awareness.

1. The Daily Mirror

Once a day or several times a week, each partner answers three questions:

• What did I avoid today?
• Where did I project something onto you?
• What repair, gratitude, or truth needs to be spoken?

This is not an interrogation. It is an offering. The tone matters. The aim is not to catch the other person failing. The aim is to make unconscious material speak before it becomes behaviour.

2. The Pause Before Fire

When conflict rises, pause before interpretation. Each partner names the body first:

• My chest is tight.
• My jaw is locked.
• I want to withdraw.
• I feel heat in my face.
• I am scared this means abandonment.

Body-first language slows the rush into accusation. It does not solve the issue, but it moves the conversation from attack into awareness. The fire is still there, but now someone has placed it inside a container.

3. Projection Return

When a partner appears as villain, saviour, judge, parent, child, goddess, tyrant, or missing half, ask:

• What image am I placing on you?
• What old pattern does this resemble?
• What quality in you am I refusing to develop in myself?
• What quality in you am I refusing to own in myself?

The goal is not to withdraw all emotion. The goal is to give the real person room to reappear behind the psychic image.

4. Separate Containers

The couple that shares everything can suffocate the very difference that makes transformation possible. Separate practice matters. Separate friendships matter. Separate teachers, interests, walks, journals, therapy, reading, and silence may all matter. The relationship should not become the only altar in the house.

Separate containers protect the coniunctio from becoming fusion. Each partner returns with gifts rather than dependencies.

5. The Repair Ritual

After conflict, the work is not complete until repair has occurred. A simple repair ritual can include:

• What happened?
• What did I feel?
• What was I protecting?
• What harm did I cause?
• What do I need to repair?
• What boundary or agreement would help next time?

Repair is not submission. It is the craft by which love becomes trustworthy after heat. Without repair, the couple does not become alchemical. It becomes scorched.

The Necessary Boundaries

Because alchemical language is intense, it needs clear boundaries. Fire imagery can illuminate transformation, but it can also be misused to romanticise harm. The following distinctions are essential.

Friction Is Not Abuse

Transforming friction may include disagreement, discomfort, truth-telling, shadow exposure, grief, or difficult conversations. Abuse includes intimidation, threats, violence, coercive control, forced isolation, humiliation, sexual pressure, monitoring, financial control, repeated contempt, and fear-based compliance.

No spiritual framework should blur this line. A person does not need to become more enlightened before they are allowed to be safe.

Shadow Work Is Not an Excuse

“This is your projection” can become a weapon. So can “you are triggered”, “this is your shadow”, “you are in ego”, or “you are resisting the Work”. In healthy relationship, psychological language increases responsibility. In unhealthy relationship, it becomes a way to escape accountability.

A useful rule: if spiritual language makes one person smaller, silenced, frightened, or easier to control, it has stopped serving transformation.

Outside Help Is Not Failure

Therapy, counselling, mediation, trusted elders, spiritual direction, trauma-informed support, or medical care may all be necessary. A couple does not prove depth by handling everything alone. Sometimes the vessel needs a third presence to keep the fire from turning into smoke.

Seeking support is not anti-alchemical. It is often the most mature expression of the Work.

The Gnostic Reading: Love as a Mirror of Division

Gnostic myth often begins with division: fullness becomes fractured, wisdom falls, false powers arise, the spark forgets its origin, and the world of appearances becomes mistaken for final truth. Relationship repeats this drama in miniature. Two people meet, and each brings not only love, but exile, projection, longing, fear, imitation, and unfinished history.

The partner becomes a mirror of division. They reveal where the self is split: spirit against body, freedom against attachment, devotion against fear, longing against defence, truth against performance, eros against shame, care against control.

In this reading, the alchemical couple does not seek a perfect romance. It seeks the restoration of relation. The fallen parts of the self are not rejected. They are named, held, differentiated, and slowly integrated. The beloved is not used as escape from the world. The beloved becomes one of the places where the world’s spell is exposed.

False rule depends on unconscious repetition. Couples repeat family patterns, gender scripts, spiritual fantasies, attachment wounds, desire loops, silence, blame, pursuit, withdrawal, and rescue. Gnosis begins when the pattern is seen while it is happening.

The alchemical couple is not saved by intensity. It is saved, if it is saved at all, by recognition becoming behaviour: apology, boundary, truth, laughter, tenderness, solitude, repair, ethical action, and the willingness to see the other as real.

The mirror is not there to flatter. It is there to return the spark to itself without stealing the humanity of the one who holds it.

Related Glossary Terms

For quick definitions, use the main ZenithEye Glossary. The key terms for this article are:

Read Next

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Frequently Asked Questions About the Alchemical Couple

Further Reading

These ZenithEye links continue the themes of relationship, projection, shadow, sacred sexuality, integration, grounding, and ordinary-life transformation:

• The Somatic Sacrament: Embodied Sexuality as Gnostic Practice – Consent, body, eros, sensation, and embodied spiritual practice.
• The Nymphon: Why Valentinians Called Sex the Holy of Holies – The bridal chamber, Valentinian sacrament, and symbolic union in the Gospel of Philip.
• Shadow Work: Excavation, Integration, and the Redeemed Archon – Essential reading for understanding the material that relationship often reveals.
• Spiritual Inflation: How to Recognise Yourself Before the Fall – The grandiose loop that can turn spiritual partnership into mutual self-deception.
• Dark Night of the Soul: Depression or Transformation? – Distinguishing spiritual crisis from mental health distress, especially when relational intensity is involved.
• Integration and Grounding After Mystical Experience – Somatic and practical foundations for stabilising insight in daily life and partnership.
• The Psychic Vampire: Energy Parasitism in Occult Tradition – A symbolic and practical lens for recognising extraction, dependency, and energetic imbalance.
• The Withdrawal of Consent: Breaking the Karmic Contract of Compliance – How unconscious agreements, compliance patterns, and spiritualised obligation can be revoked.
• Fear: The Opposite of Love and the Engine of Spiritual Transformation – How fear shapes attachment, defence, and the refusal of vulnerability.
• Return to Ordinary Life After Awakening – The practical test of recognition inside domestic rhythm, work, relationship, and responsibility.
• Transmission and Lineage: How the Thread Survives – Why separate teachers, lineages, and supports can protect partnership from spiritual dependency.
• The Hilarity of Liberation: Cosmic Humour as Archonic Sabotage – Why humour, humility, and irreverence help prevent spiritual solemnity from hardening into performance.

References and Sources

The following sources support the alchemical, Jungian, Gnostic, relational, and safety framework used in this article.

Gnostic and Valentinian Sources

• [1] The Apocryphon of John. Nag Hammadi Codices II,1; III,1; IV,1 and Berlin Codex 8502,2. See Waldstein, Michael and Wisse, Frederik. The Apocryphon of John: Synopsis of Nag Hammadi Codices II,1; III,1, and IV,1 with BG 8502,2. Brill, 1995.
• [2] The Gospel of Philip. Nag Hammadi Codex II,3. In Robinson, James M. (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Library in English. HarperOne, revised edition, 1990.
• [3] Meyer, Marvin (ed.). The Nag Hammadi Scriptures. HarperOne, 2007.
• [4] Layton, Bentley. The Gnostic Scriptures. Yale University Press, 1987.
• [5] Thomassen, Einar. The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the “Valentinians”. Brill, 2006.
• [6] Brakke, David. The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and Diversity in Early Christianity. Harvard University Press, 2010.
• [7] King, Karen L. What Is Gnosticism?. Harvard University Press, 2003.
• [8] Williams, Michael Allen. Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. Princeton University Press, 1996.

Alchemy and Symbolic Psychology

• [9] Jung, C. G. Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy. Collected Works, Vol. 14. Princeton University Press.
• [10] Jung, C. G. Psychology and Alchemy. Collected Works, Vol. 12. Princeton University Press.
• [11] Jung, C. G. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part II. Princeton University Press.
• [12] Edinger, Edward F. Anatomy of the Psyche: Alchemical Symbolism in Psychotherapy. Open Court, 1985.
• [13] Edinger, Edward F. The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C. G. Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis. Inner City Books, 1995.
• [14] von Franz, Marie-Louise. Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology. Inner City Books, 1980.
• [15] Fabricius, Johannes. Alchemy: The Medieval Alchemists and Their Royal Art. Diamond Books, 1976.

Projection, Relationship, and Depth Psychology

• [16] Jung, C. G. Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Collected Works, Vol. 7. Princeton University Press.
• [17] Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, Vol. 9, Part I. Princeton University Press.
• [18] Johnson, Robert A. We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. Harper & Row, 1983.
• [19] Johnson, Robert A. Inner Gold: Understanding Psychological Projection. Koa Books, 2008.
• [20] Hollis, James. The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other. Inner City Books, 1998.
• [21] Welwood, John. Journey of the Heart: The Path of Conscious Love. HarperCollins, 1990.
• [22] Welwood, John. Toward a Psychology of Awakening. Shambhala, 2000.

Relationship, Attachment, Repair, and Differentiation

• [23] Rogers, Carl R. “The Necessary and Sufficient Conditions of Therapeutic Personality Change.” Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2), 95-103, 1957.
• [24] Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. Vols. 1-3. Basic Books, 1969-1980.
• [25] Johnson, Sue. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. Little, Brown, 2008.
• [26] Gottman, John M. and Silver, Nan. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Harmony Books, 1999.
• [27] Schnarch, David. Passionate Marriage: Keeping Love and Intimacy Alive in Committed Relationships. W. W. Norton, 1997.
• [28] Hendrix, Harville. Getting the Love You Want. Henry Holt, 1988.
• [29] Brown, Brené. Atlas of the Heart. Random House, 2021.

Trauma, Abuse Awareness, and Safety

• [30] Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. Basic Books, 1992.
• [31] van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Viking, 2014.
• [32] Ogden, Pat, Minton, Kekuni, and Pain, Clare. Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton, 2006.
• [33] Treleaven, David A. Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing. W. W. Norton, 2018.
• [34] Levine, Peter A. In an Unspoken Voice: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness. North Atlantic Books, 2010.
• [35] Stark, Evan. Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life. Oxford University Press, 2007.
• [36] Bancroft, Lundy. Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men. Berkley Books, 2002.

Embodiment, Sexuality, and Integration

• [37] Perel, Esther. Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. Harper, 2006.
• [38] Kleinplatz, Peggy J. and Menard, A. Dana. Magnificent Sex: Lessons from Extraordinary Lovers. Routledge, 2020.
• [39] Basson, Rosemary. “The Female Sexual Response: A Different Model.” Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 26(1), 51-65, 2000.
• [40] Kornfield, Jack. After the Ecstasy, the Laundry. Bantam, 2000.
• [41] Grof, Stanislav and Grof, Christina. Spiritual Emergency: When Personal Transformation Becomes a Crisis. Tarcher, 1989.
• [42] Lindahl, Jared R., et al. “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience: A Mixed-Methods Study of Meditation-Related Challenges in Western Buddhists.” PLOS ONE, 12(5), 2017.