Image consciousness stands at one of the most generative intersections in the depth-psychology corpus: the question of whether consciousness is constituted by, or merely expressed through, the image. Jung’s foundational claim — that ‘nothing can be known unless it first appears as a psychic image’ — anchors the tradition, and Hillman radicalizes it by insisting that consciousness arising from soul is irreducibly ‘imaginal,’ rendering ego-consciousness a mere derivative cave-perspective. Damasio approaches the same territory from a neuroscientific direction, arguing that images are the currency of mind and that the entire architecture of core consciousness depends on the brain’s generation of ‘imaged, nonverbal accounts’ of organism-object relationships. Bosnak, working clinically with hypnagogic states, introduces a crucial phenomenological nuance: the dual consciousness of the waking imaginal state, in which one register attends to the image environment while another knows it is imagining. Gallagher’s phenomenological analysis of body image complicates the picture further by interrogating whether image consciousness is necessarily reflective or whether it can operate beneath the threshold of explicit attention. The central tension in the corpus is therefore between imaginal consciousness as the ground of all psychic existence (Hillman/Jung) and image-making as one among several neural-mapping processes that together produce the conscious state (Damasio). These positions are not wholly incompatible, but their epistemic frameworks diverge sharply, making image consciousness a productive fault line across the entire library.
Consciousness arising from soul derives from images and could be called imaginal. According to Jung, the sine qua non of any consciousness whatsoever is the ‘psychic i
This passage makes the strongest programmatic statement in the corpus: imaginal consciousness is not a subspecies but the very ground of consciousness itself, citing Jung’s authority that the psychic image is the indispensable condition of all knowing.
, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985thesis
core consciousness occurs when the brain’s representation devices generate an imaged, nonverbal account of how the organism’s own state is affected by the organism’s processing of an object, and when this process enhances the image of the causative object
Damasio proposes that core consciousness is constituted by an imaged, nonverbal self-account, making the production of mental images structurally necessary to the emergence of any sense of self in the act of knowing.
, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999thesis
images are the currency of our minds… any symbol you can think of is an image, and there may be little leftover mental residue that is not made of images.
Damasio argues for the comprehensive scope of image consciousness: from verbal to nonverbal cognition, and from somatic feelings to abstract symbols, all mental content resolves into images.
, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1999thesis
one consciousness is acutely aware of the image environment, while another knows she is imagining. In the common dream state we are in a single consciousness, which is exclusively experiencing the reality of the environment.
Bosnak distinguishes a dual structure within waking image consciousness — one pole attending to the image, the other retaining meta-awareness — contrasting this with the unified, unreflective single consciousness of dreaming.
, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis
The images in the mind—sounds, visual images, feelings, you name it—are properly formed, exhibited with clarity, and inspectable. They would not be if you were under the action of ‘psychoactive’ molecules
Damasio characterizes the conscious state partly by the quality of image formation: properly formed, clear, and inspectable images are markers of intact consciousness, while their distortion signals its disruption.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
One of the components of consciousness corresponds to this large-scale integration of images. The integration occurs as a result of activating varied separate regions simultaneously and in sequence.
Damasio identifies image integration — the coordinated activation of separate neural regions — as one structural component of consciousness, grounding image consciousness in a neurodynamic process.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
Many of the conceptual ambiguities concerning body image and body schema revolve, in part, around the question of whether and to what extent an image or schema involves consciousness.
Gallagher identifies the consciousness-question as the central aporia in the body image literature, noting that different theorists locate the image at different levels of awareness from subliminal schema to explicit reflective representation.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
the majority of psychological studies in this area concern the body image defined as involving perceptual or conceptual content, derived from or expressed as an explicit consciousness of the body
Gallagher surveys mainstream psychological usage where body image is anchored in explicit, reflective consciousness, a position he subjects to phenomenological critique.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
images likely evolved bottom up, early on, well before consciousness did… Especially valuable images, given their importance for survival, were ‘highlighted’ by emotional factors.
Damasio places image-making in an evolutionary frame prior to the emergence of consciousness, arguing that value-based selection of images via somatic markers was a precondition for conscious experience.
, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010supporting
the prefrontal and posterior parietal regions of the cortex seem to relay the decision regarding which image is to be enhanced to the visual system, which then brings the image into consciousness.
Kandel describes a neural mechanism by which selective image enhancement — governed by frontal and parietal cortex — is the proximate process that brings an image into consciousness.
, In search of memory the emergence of a new science of mind, 2006supporting
To the extent that one attends to or becomes aware of one’s own body in terms of becoming conscious of limb position, movement, or posture, then such an awareness helps to constitute the perceptual aspect of the body image.
Gallagher argues that conscious attentional direction toward the body actively constitutes the body image, establishing a dynamic reciprocity between image consciousness and its bodily object.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
Even if we say that embodiment constrains consciousness in certain ways that involve concepts such as body image and body schema, one may think that at some point in individual development this is not true.
Gallagher examines the developmental question of whether a less embodied, pre-image consciousness precedes the formation of body image, engaging the traditional empiricist view against a phenomenological counter.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
One set is made of images from the old interior world, the world of chemistry and viscera, which supports feelings, the valenced images that are so distinctive in any mind.
Damasio classifies feelings as valenced images from the body’s interior world, thereby extending image consciousness to include affective and somatic dimensions that provide the qualitative character of conscious experience.
, The strange order of things life, feeling, and the making, 2018supporting
imagining a real possibility concerning, e. g., a thing, event, situation, etc. that one believes to exist in the real world” and “imagining a mere possibility
Thompson’s citation of Marbach distinguishes modalities of imaginative consciousness — realistic versus purely possible — relevant to understanding the intentional structure of image consciousness in phenomenological terms.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside
The body image consists of a complex set of intentional states and dispositions—perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes—in which the intentional object is one’s own body. This involves a form of reflexive or self-referential intentionality.
Gallagher specifies the intentional structure of body image as reflexive self-referential consciousness, providing a phenomenological framework for understanding how image consciousness can take the subject’s own body as its object.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005aside
an archetypal image is psychologically ‘universal,’ because its effect amplifies and depersonalizes… it resonates with collective, trans-empirical importance.
Hillman argues that archetypal images carry a universalizing force that exceeds personal consciousness, linking image consciousness to collective and transpersonal dimensions of psychic life.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983aside
The polarity between the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ points of view is a creation of the left hemisphere’s analytic disposition. In reality there can be neither absolutely
McGilchrist’s hemispheric analysis suggests that the division between image-as-object and image-as-experience is itself a product of left-hemisphere processing, implying that image consciousness is originally undivided.
, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009aside