The fantasy image occupies a pivotal position in the depth-psychological corpus, functioning simultaneously as the primary datum of psychic life and as the contested boundary between productive imagination and mere reverie. Jung established the foundational topology: fantasy images inhabit a spectrum running from the infrared of instinctual drive to the ultraviolet of patterned, formed desire, thereby refusing Freud's sublimation model and insisting instead on the image as the very shape of instinct. From this premise, Hillman extrapolated the most thoroughgoing imaginal psychology: all consciousness depends upon fantasy images, which are not secondary representations of prior events but the way psyche presents itself directly. For Hillman, to encounter fantasy images is to encounter soul in its own medium. Moore, following Ficino, grounds this in Renaissance epistemology, where idolum and fantasia together constitute the soul's cognitive apparatus, holding the individual forms of things. A significant counter-tension appears in Corbin and his Paracelsian sources, who insist that true Imaginatio must be sharply distinguished from fantasy as undisciplined, groundless thought. This distinction — creative imagination versus mere fantasy — recurs throughout the corpus and represents the central fault line. The active imagination literature (Chodorow, von Franz, Johnson) treats the fantasy image as the threshold through which unconscious contents enter waking consciousness, requiring ethical engagement rather than passive consumption. In sum: the fantasy image is, variously, the soul's self-presentation, the pattern of desire, the substrate of consciousness, and the raw material requiring active transformation.
In the library
18 substantive passages
Jung places images and instinct on a psychological continuum, like a spectrum… fantasy images, according to Jung's model, are the pattern and form of desire. Desire isn't just a blind urge; it is formed by a pattern of behavior, a gesture, a writhing, a dancing, a poetics
This passage articulates Jung's core thesis that fantasy images are not epiphenomenal but constitute the very patterning structure of instinctual desire, distinguishing his position decisively from Freud's sublimation model.
if you are in search of soul, go first to your fantasy images, for that is how the psyche presents itself directly. All consciousness depends upon fantasy images.
Hillman, drawing directly on Jung, elevates the fantasy image to the primary epistemological datum: it is not a symptom or secondary product but the immediate self-presentation of psyche and the ground of all consciousness.
try to find out what sort of fantasy-image it will produce, or what image expresses this mood. You then fix this image in the mind by concentrating your attention. Usually it will alter, as the mere fact of contemplating it animates it.
Edinger transmits Jung's procedural account of active imagination, showing the fantasy image as a living entity that animates under sustained attention, linking conscious and unconscious through a chain of dramatic transformations.
Edinger, Edward F., The Mysterium Lectures: A Journey Through C.G. Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis, 1995thesis
the fantasy-image is merely seen and felt, it is two-dimensional, as it were, because he himself is not sufficiently involved. Therefore the fantasy remains a flat image, concrete and agitating perhaps, but unreal, like a dream.
Jung here distinguishes passive reception from active participation in the fantasy image, establishing that psychological reality is only activated when the ego engages rather than merely observes the image.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 1953thesis
this Imaginatio must not be confused with fantasy. As Paracelsus already observed, fantasy, unlike Imagination, is an exercise of thought without foundation in nature, it is the 'madman's cornerstone.'
Corbin, following Paracelsus, draws the sharpest available distinction in the corpus between the creative Imagination as cosmically grounded and fantasy as undisciplined, groundless ideation — a warning that complicates uncritical celebration of the fantasy image.
Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
the notion of the Imagination as the magical production of an image, the very type and model of magical action… the image as a body (a magical body, a mental body), in which are incarnated the thought and will of the soul.
Corbin's Sufi-inflected ontology renders the image as a substantial body — not a mental representation but an incarnated locus of soul's thought and will — providing a metaphysical underpinning for the image's autonomy in depth-psychological work.
Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
Fantasy consists of the images and stories we have within us as we go about our daily affairs… the fantasy is the image, conscious or unconscious, lying beneath the behavior or permeating the action; and it is the fantasy that truly tells the expectations one has
Moore, interpreting Hillman through Ficino, defines fantasy as the operative image underlying all behavior, making the fantasy image not a retreat from reality but its animating explanatory structure.
Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990supporting
Fantasy consists of the images and stories we have within us as we go about our daily affairs… the fantasy is the image, conscious or unconscious, lying beneath the behavior or permeating the action
An earlier edition of Moore's formulation, confirming that the fantasy image functions as the sub-behavioral stratum that structures expectation, satisfaction, and frustration in lived experience.
Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982supporting
Fantasy, an aspect of idolum, holds a kind of conception called 'intention', which can be stored in the memory. Ficino observes that 'the fantasy is full of the individual forms of things.'
Moore locates the fantasy image within Ficino's faculty psychology as idolum's operative dimension, endowed with intentionality and memory, grounding the depth-psychological concept in a Renaissance epistemological lineage.
Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990supporting
Fantasy, an aspect of idolum, holds a kind of conception called 'intention', which can be stored in the memory. Ficino observes that 'the fantasy is full of the individual forms of things.'
Parallel formulation confirming Ficino's view that fantasy — as a mode of idolum — carries intentional cognitive content, providing the Renaissance philosophical grounding for treating fantasy images as epistemically serious rather than merely entertaining.
Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1982supporting
Let an unconscious fantasy image arise; Give it some form of expression; and Ethical confrontation.
Von Franz's four-stage active imagination sequence, transmitted through Chodorow, establishes the fantasy image as the threshold object at the center of a disciplined psychological practice requiring both expression and ethical response.
Chodorow, Joan, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997supporting
Ruland says, 'Imagination is the star in man, the celestial or supercelestial body.' This astounding definition throws a quite special light on the fantasy processes
Jung's alchemical hermeneutic connects imaginatio — the generator of fantasy images — to the soul's celestial dimension, indicating that the alchemical tradition regarded fantasy processes as participating in a transpersonal, cosmic register.
Jung, Carl Gustav, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944supporting
whether the images are of the interior imagination, as in Jung's case, the self-moving figures of an animated fantasia… being and power and reality are invested in images. They are numinous because they are animated, soul-charged
Hillman defends the iconophilic position that fantasy images — whether externalized as icons or held internally — carry genuine ontological power, their numinosity deriving from animation rather than abstract theological designation.
fantasy… is the sense of the senses, the most general sense organ… Compared to the animal-like perception in sense organs, fantasy is a more divine perception, linked to the soul.
This hermetic-philosophical passage positions fantasy as a superior sensory organ — more divine and soul-linked than ordinary sense perception — providing historical warrant for the depth-psychological elevation of the fantasy image to primary epistemic status.
Jung, C.G., Dream Interpretation Ancient and Modern: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936-1941, 2014supporting
if it is true… that the World Soul is the world itself enlivened through fantasy, then we may read these abstruse statements of Ficino as having to do with fantasy… 'Seminal rationes' then become the seed fantasies that germinate in imagination
Moore identifies Ficinian seminal rationes with seed fantasies, extending the fantasy image's significance from the personal psyche to the World Soul, positioning it as the animating principle of cosmological as well as psychological life.
Moore, Thomas, The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino, 1990supporting
soul refers to that unknown component which makes meaning possible, turns events into experiences, is communicated in love, and has a religious concern.
Hillman's foundational definition of soul provides the metaphysical surround within which fantasy images operate as soul's primary self-disclosures, contextualizing the image within his broader imaginal psychology.
Jung's resuscitation of images was a return to soul and what he calls its spontaneous symbol formation, its life of fantasy (which, as he notes, is inherently tied with polytheism).
Hillman frames Jung's imaginal project as a recovery of soul's autonomous fantasy life against iconoclastic traditions, linking the primacy of fantasy images to a polytheistic rather than monotheistic psychological sensibility.
Hillman, James, Peaks and Vales: The Soul/Spirit Distinction as Basis for the Differences between Psychotherapy and Spiritual Discipline, 1975aside
the imagination is an organ of coherent communication, that it employs a highly refined, complex language of symbols to express the contents of the unconscious.
Johnson's practical framing situates fantasy images within imagination as a structured symbolic language, supporting the view that such images carry coherent unconscious content rather than random noise.
Johnson, Robert A., Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, 1986aside