Passive Fantasy

Passive fantasy is the decorative, unanchored movement of image that passes through any relaxed mind — what marie-louise-von-franz calls the “internal cinema” that “nearly anyone with any gift for fantasy can cause to parade before his inner eye when in a relaxed state, such as before falling asleep” (von Franz, Psychotherapy). Its marker is that “the party involved ‘knows’ the whole time, as though in some other corner of his mind, that the whole thing is ‘only’ fantasy.”

Jung, in the Tavistock Lectures, sharpens the distinction by invoking the alchemists’ vocabulary: the true opus is done per veram imaginationem et non phantastica — by true imagination and not by the merely phantastic (Jung, CW 18). “A fantasy is more or less your own invention, and remains on the surface of personal things and conscious expectations.” active-imagination, by contrast, discovers that “the images have a life of their own and that the symbolic events develop according to their own logic — that is, of course, if your conscious reason does not interfere” (Jung, CW 18).

Robert A. Johnson locates the difference operationally: passive fantasy is daydreaming — “sitting and merely watching the stream of fantasy that goes on in the back of your mind as though you were at a movie.” Worry belongs here too: the repetitive triumph-and-defeat loops that exhaust themselves without resolution because the ego never enters them as a conscious, ethical force (Johnson 1986). Von Franz notes the clinical danger: people with “very fragmented characters or with latent psychoses cannot do active imagination at all, or they do it just with this fictive ego” — the fantasy then feeds rather than integrates the splitting.

The contrast is therefore not between seriousness and play but between two postures of the ego within the image. Passive fantasy watches; active imagination enters, answers, is answered, and is altered.

Relationships

Primary sources

Collected Works Volume 18: The Symbolic Life — Tavistock Lectures (Jung 1976)
Psychotherapy (von Franz 1993)
Inner Work (Johnson 1986)