images
Within the depth-psychology corpus, 'Image' functions not merely as a visual representation but as a primary psychic reality — an autonomous, meaning-laden phenomenon that commands its own mode of engagement. The spectrum of treatment ranges from Jung's foundational insistence that the image is the psyche's native language (the 'bird flown' when explanation supervenes) to Hillman's archetypal psychology, which radicalises this position by granting images the ontological dignity of living presences demanding hospitality rather than interpretation. McNiff extends Hillman's impetus into art-therapy practice, arguing that images — including disturbing ones — never arrive to harm but to orient; they are, in his formulation, 'angels,' guides requiring creative dialogue rather than decipherment. Murray Stein brings the image into the domain of self-formation, reading Picasso's Minotaur and Rembrandt's self-portraiture as evidence of the adult imago emerging through artistic repetition. Campbell and Neumann situate mythic and religious images as collective, archetypal carriers. The central tension throughout is epistemological: whether the image is to be translated into concept or allowed to remain irreducibly imaginal. This debate — between hermeneutic reduction and what Hillman calls 'staying with the image' — defines the fault-line around which most depth-psychological discourse on this term organises itself.
As Jung said, 'the bird is flown' when we try to explain an image. The 'puzzle perspective' on art keeps us stuck in our heads.
This passage argues that interpreting images conceptually destroys their living psychic quality, and advocates instead a hospitality — welcoming images as presences rather than decoding them as problems.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis
the images of our dreams and art never come to harm us. Rather, our own energy adopts menacing guises to gain attention, showing us where we are out of sync with ourselves, others, and our environments.
McNiff proposes that even disturbing images are benign orientating forces — expressions of psychic energy seeking reconnection — and frames images as 'angels,' intimate living guides rather than threats.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis
the nature of an image can never be labeled. In both my group and individual work with art and healing, there is an attempt to respect each image, stay with it, and give it the opportunity to reveal itself over time.
McNiff argues that images resist categorical fixation and require sustained, non-judgmental dwelling — a phenomenological patience that allows the image to disclose meaning on its own terms.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis
When the artists use physical expressions to communicate with the energy of their images, the situation becomes more workable. Uncontained fears are embodied within the artists' movements and actually become sources of creative expression and energy.
This passage demonstrates that somatic engagement with images — breathing and movement — transforms their threatening charge into creative energy, enacting the therapeutic logic of image-as-guide.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
To discover the image of the Minotaur as a self-image is also to become one with the divine (or at least the semidivine) and to gain access to the creative power and energies of the archaic collective unconscious.
Stein reads Picasso's Minotaur as a self-image that simultaneously anchors personal identity and opens onto archetypal, transpersonal depths — demonstrating how the image mediates between individual and collective unconscious.
, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting
another distinctive image begins to come forward. It is this archetypal imago that will carry him to the end and give his late paintings their spiritual quality.
Stein argues that the recurring self-image in Rembrandt's late portraits constitutes an emerging archetypal imago — a formative inner figure that shapes and sustains psychic transformation toward the end of life.
, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998supporting
The archetype underpins psychic life, is both precise and indefinable, and is central to Jung's conception of therapy.
Samuels situates the image within Hillman's archetypal psychology, which treats the image as the fundamental unit of psychic life, more primary than concept or analysis.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
The wounded Christ is an archetypal figure, a living presence in the life of any person or era imagining his suffering and theirs. He brings comfort, love, and healing through the realization that wounds and suffering are both particular and universal.
McNiff illustrates how a canonical religious image functions as a living archetypal presence that amplifies personal suffering to a universal register, facilitating healing through recognition of shared humanity.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
The process of imagining the shaman as an archetypal figure is based upon a poetic state of mind that opens us to the reality of figures of imagination.
McNiff uses the shaman as an example of how approaching any figure as an archetypal image — rather than a literal cultural phenomenon — opens a poetic mode of engagement with the imagination.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004aside
the ability to create purely digital images by painting 'with pixels rather than with pigment'
McNiff briefly notes that digital media expand the substrate for image-making in therapeutic contexts, though he does not develop the depth-psychological implications of this shift.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004aside