The Two-Person Mundus Imaginalis

Samuels’s name, in Jung and the Post-Jungians, for the clinical space in which analyst and patient move together within a shared imaginal field. The concept is Samuels’s attempt to bring the Developmental School‘s microscopy of transference-countertransference into the same frame as the Archetypal School‘s insistence on the imaginal realism of psychic life.

“We can place the interaction of patient and analyst firmly within the imaginal realm,” Samuels writes, “without forgetting that there are two people present. Illusion, fantasy and imagery are the stuff of transference and the analyst is rarely what the patient claims or feels he is. I wonder whether, in the analytical setting, we may speak of a shared, two-person mundus imaginalis” (Samuels 1985, p. 213). The factor that makes the shared field possible is countertransference as reconceived by Fordham: “syntonic” countertransference, in which the analyst “can think, feel or behave as if he were the patient, and also how he can become a part of the patient’s inner world” (Samuels 1985, p. 213).

The mundus-imaginalis proper is Henry Corbin’s term for the autonomous realm of image — an intermediate world between the sensible and the intellectual. Samuels’s gesture is to install Corbin’s concept inside the consulting room: the two people present are not opposite-facing subjects but co-inhabitants of a third, imaginal space.

Relationships

• mundus-imaginalis
• transference-countertransference
• developmental-school
• archetypal-school

Primary sources

• samuels-jung-postjungians (Samuels 1985)