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Active Imagination

Active Imagination

Active imagination is the procedure Jung developed during the 1913–1930 “confrontation with the unconscious” for engaging the images of the psyche as real interlocutors. The editorial account in The Red Book records the origin: Jung “developed a technique to ‘get to the bottom of his inner processes,’ ‘to translate the emotions into images,’ and ‘to grasp the fantasies which were stirring … “underground.” ’ He later called this method ‘active imagination’ ” (Jung 2009). Liber Novus is the method performed in full — Elijah, Salome, the black serpent, and philemon appear not as symbols to be decoded but as figures to be met.

Jung gave the first theoretical account in the 1916 essay “The Transcendent Function” and the first public exposition in his 1929 commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower. The 1935 Tavistock Lectures (CW 18) formulated the distinction that governs the practice. There Jung insists on the alchemical terminology: the opus is to be done per veram imaginationem et non phantastica — by true imagination and not by a fantastical one. “A fantasy is more or less your own invention, and remains on the surface of personal things and conscious expectations. But active imagination, as the term denotes, means that the images have a life of their own and that the symbolic events develop according to their own logic” (Jung, CW 18).

marie-louise-von-franz describes four phases: the emptying of directed thought; the rising of an image; the objectification of the image in writing, painting, sculpting, or (rarely) dancing; and the moral confrontation in which the real ego — not a fictive hero-ego — must meet what has arisen. A written dialogue, she observes, “is the most differentiated form and usually leads to the best results” (von Franz 1975). The whole effectiveness of the method depends on collapsing the distance the ego keeps by telling itself “this is only fantasy.”

Active imagination is the hermeneutic in which individuation becomes operationally visible. It is the instrument by which the transcendent-function generates the uniting symbol, by which the inferior-function is assimilated, by which the ego enters sustained relation with shadow, anima, animus, and the self. It is the Jungian heir of imaginatio-vera in the alchemists and of creative-imagination in Ibn ‘Arabi and Corbin. It is the practice of the mundus-imaginalis approached under discipline.

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