Embodied Imagination

Embodied imagination is robert-bosnak‘s name for the practice that treats the dream image not as a mental picture to be interpreted but as a quasi-physical environment to be inhabited. “From the point of view of dreaming perception, an image is a place, an environment in which we find ourselves. While dreaming, the environment presents itself as physical. … This quasi-physical environment creates strong responses in the body, embodied states” (Bosnak 2007). The method takes dreaming, not waking, as its paradigm for creative imagination.

Three commitments distinguish it from the Jungian standard. First, images have bodies — they are perceived as physical presences, with weight, posture, temperature. Second, “images are the embodiments of their own intelligence”: the figures encountered in dream and in imaginal work are “not sub-personalities of the dreamer, but … beings in their own right” (Bosnak 2007). Third, the perceiver is embodied in return — the living body takes on postural and physiological shape from the images it inhabits, a principle that aligns the method with somatic and trauma work without subordinating the image to either.

Bosnak grounds his lineage in henry-corbin explicitly. Embodiment is dedicated “in memory of Henry Corbin” and cites Corbin on the “metaphysical tragedy” of the disappearance of the world of “substantive Images, whose organ of knowledge was the active Imagination” (Corbin, quoted in Bosnak 2007). The practice is therefore an attempt to restore the mundus-imaginalis through a clinical procedure that does not require the patient to share Corbin’s metaphysics. One works with hypnagogic flashback into dream states, with attention to simultaneous multiplicity — the “self-organizing multiplicity of selves” — and with the cultivation of a state between sleeping and waking in which the dream’s physicality can be re-entered.

The method retrieves a working practice that was scattered through the Jungian tradition — Jung’s own attention to bodily accompaniment of archetypal content, Giegerich’s insistence on the soul’s logical life as embodied, Woodman’s somatic feminine. Bosnak systematizes it. Embodied imagination is the transmission channel by which dream-ego re-enters waking with its dream-tissue intact — the antidote to the disembodied archetypalism that the archetypal school was sometimes accused of. This is active-imagination extended into the body and onto dreaming’s own ground.

Relationships

Primary sources

Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel (Bosnak 2007)
A Little Course in Dreams (Bosnak 1986)