Image

Image in the Seba lineage is not the visual representation of a thing but a technical term for the primary datum of the psyche: what psyche presents to itself in dream, fantasy, active imagination, symptom, and symbol. The image is neither percept (there is nothing outside it being reflected) nor concept (it is not abstracted or general) but a third reality with its own phenomenological register.

Jung‘s theory of the archetypal image articulated the thesis: the archetype itself is unknowable (a formal structuring principle), but the archetypal image is what is given to consciousness. Hillman radicalized this into the thesis that Seba calls image as psyche: the image is not the expression of something else (a wish, a drive, a meaning, an archetype) but psyche itself in its primary mode. The disciplined work of depth psychology is the sustained attention to the image in its own register, against the modern habit of moving immediately to the concept the image is taken to illustrate. See archetypal-image, dream-image, mundus-imaginalis.

Relationships

• image-as-psyche
• archetypal-image
• mundus-imaginalis