Imaginal cognition occupies a contested but generative position in the depth-psychology corpus, designating a mode of knowing that neither reduces to sensory perception nor to abstract conceptual thought, but dwells in the intermediate territory between them — what Corbin designated the mundus imaginalis. Hillman is the central architect of the concept within post-Jungian discourse, drawing on Corbin’s Islamic Neoplatonism to argue that psyche becomes knowledgeable ‘by means of an imaginal method: the ostentation of images, a parade of fantasies as imagination bodies forth its’ own self-display. Against this, Giegerich mounts the most sustained and technically rigorous critique, insisting that imaginal psychology operates through a constitutive duplicity — positing its contents as if real while formally retracting that positing — and that soul’s actual life is ‘other than imaginal,’ demanding sublation into logical thought. Bosnak and Romanyshyn extend the territory phenomenologically, emphasizing embodied and intermediate states of awareness. Alcaro and Carta approach imaginal cognition from neuro-ethology, linking it to primary-process dreaming and the predictive architecture of the brain. The central tension, then, is between those who regard imaginal cognition as the proper organ of psychological truth and those who see it as a necessary but ultimately insufficient mode that must be superseded by rigorous conceptual thought.
psyche becomes aware by means of an imaginal method: the ostentation of images, a parade of fantasies as imagination bodies forth its
Hillman argues that psyche achieves self-knowledge not through philosophical introspection or logical cognition but through an inherently imaginal mode in which images display and articulate themselves.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
by its very form, it does primarily posit beings, persons, animals and so on as positively existing. It thus constantly reaffirms the ‘natural’ ontological prejudice, supports our habitual sense of positivity
Giegerich contends that imaginal cognition harbours an inherent duplicity, covertly reinstating a naive ontological realism even while claiming to operate beyond the literal.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
Imaginal psychology holds the image in limbo. It works with the images only as a priori defused ones. The image, if left to its own dynamic, would immediately establish itself as a metaphysical or empirical truth.
Giegerich diagnoses the structural compromise at the heart of imaginal psychology: it domesticates the image by preventing it from realising its own full ontological or logical claim.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
the imaginal world is by its essence the intermediate world, and the articulation between the intellectual and the sensible, in which the Active Imagination as imaginatio vera is an organ of understanding mediating between intellect and sense
Romanyshyn, citing Corbin, establishes imaginal cognition as a third epistemological position — an organ of understanding irreducible to either intellect or sensory experience.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis
Corbin refers to ‘the organ which perceived the mundus imaginalis’ as ‘imaginative consciousness,’ a state between waking and sleeping, where patient and analyst are linked by and can hopefully gain access to a central, imaginative function.
Wiener transmits Corbin’s formulation of imaginative consciousness as a specific organ of imaginal cognition operative in the clinical space of transference and countertransference.
, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009supporting
imaginal psychology does not see through the substrate character that inevitably comes with the images on account of the imaginal mode… The actual nature of the soul’s life is ‘other than imaginal.’
Giegerich’s most decisive formulation: imaginal cognition fails to sublate its own ontological presuppositions and must ultimately be superseded by a logic adequate to soul.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
A fantasy becomes a (subjective, depotentiated) fantasy because it implicitly, through the form of its genre, says, ‘don’t take me literally, I am only a product of the poetic imagination.’
Giegerich explicates the logical form of imaginal cognition as a genre with built-in self-cancellation, wherein the image disclaims its own reality claims through its formal structure.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
this imaginal region of the psyche, does not submit to numbering… it is better comprehended as a storehouse of qualities and a movement of changing images that are the formal causes of experience
Hillman positions imaginal cognition as irreducible to quantitative psychology, arguing that the imaginal realm operates as a qualitative, formally causal dimension of psychic experience.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
An ‘analytical’ psychology offers ‘analysis’ of memoria, but Jung said we must dream the myth along… it restrains and ignores the imaginal part of the ego complex.
Hillman argues that classical analytical psychology, by privileging ego-cognitive analysis over imaginal participation, suppresses the very mode of cognition most native to the psyche.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
Image, I said earlier, is ‘in itself’ Notion or ‘implicit’ Notion, while conversely Notion is sublated image. Because this is so, image and the imaginal must not
Giegerich concedes that imaginal cognition represents a high-order psychological achievement while insisting it must be dialectically sublated into conceptual thought to fulfill soul’s proper logical life.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
In stressing the pathologized aspect of the imaginal, I am aware of diverging here from the view of Henry Corbin who is the founder of the term ‘imaginal’ and to whom my work is, and will forever remain, profoundly indebted.
Hillman acknowledges Corbin as the originating theorist of the imaginal while marking his own departure in affirming pathology as a legitimate dimension of imaginal cognition.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
MOORE’s methodological tenets are not just his personal ones; they are those of imaginal psychology as such; his study is a fine example of archetypal psychology in action.
Giegerich uses Moore’s Actaion interpretation as an exemplary case to expose the general methodological presuppositions that define imaginal cognition within archetypal psychology.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
in archetypal psychology the term imaginal has a different and much deeper, richer, more fundamental meaning. It refers to, and is rooted in, the archetypes
Giegerich carefully distinguishes the archetypal-psychological sense of ‘imaginal’ from the philosophical concept of Vorstellung, insisting the former is rooted in archetypal reality rather than mere representational thought.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
The imaginal can of course be taken as metaphysical reality, in which case it is a mystification and would have been reified and positivized… it requires a constant conscious effort of deliteral
Giegerich identifies the chronic risk of imaginal cognition: without sustained critical vigilance, the imaginal collapses into metaphysical reification, betraying its own essential logic.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin, and by Neoplatonic writers on the intermediaries
Hillman situates imaginal cognition within the Neoplatonic tradition mediated by Corbin, establishing the mundus imaginalis as the ontological ground for archetypal psychology’s epistemology.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
Rather than experiencing imaginary figures as unreal and pathological, Watkins perceives the task of therapy as ‘the articulation of the imaginal other.’
McNiff, citing Watkins, presents imaginal cognition as a therapeutic orientation in which the practitioner attends to autonomous imaginal figures as genuine interlocutors rather than epiphenomenal productions.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
In imaginal psychology it is fashionable to talk about the Dionysian and its exemplary importance for the soul. However, paying a lot of attention to something can have the purpose of avoiding being subjected to what one is talking about
Giegerich argues that imaginal psychology’s thematic celebration of Dionysian dissolution paradoxically serves as a defense against genuine psychological transformation.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
the alchemist, by contrast, has put, not particular imaginal events, but the whole stage of mythological, imaginal consciousness into the small retort before him that he is able to observe from all sides
Giegerich reads alchemy as the historical moment at which imaginal consciousness was itself made into an object of reflexive scrutiny, marking the transition beyond purely imaginal cognition.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
We need the images, because without them we would not be able to think anything—the mind would just be blank. But we need them only to sublate them.
Giegerich’s dialectical resolution: imaginal cognition is a necessary precondition of all thought yet must be negated and preserved within a higher logical form.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
the primary process of thinking permits a ‘psychic rehearsal of possibilities’ that unfolds a prospective adaptive function, helping to anticipate possible future events or to find solutions to unresolved problems
Alcaro and Carta ground imaginal cognition neuroscientifically, linking primary-process image-formation to predictive and prospective cognitive functions continuous with dreaming.
, The ‘Instinct’ of Imagination: A Neuro-Ethological Approach to the Evolution of the Reflective Mind and Its Application to Psychotherapy, 2019supporting
imagination, a subtle animal; the imagination, a great beast, a subtle body, with ourselves inseparably lodged in its belly: imagination, an animal mundi and an anima mundi
Hillman characterises imaginal cognition as an instinctual, organismic process inseparable from somatic and psychic life, resisting any purely mentalistic or disembodied account.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
with the help of the ‘as-if’ you can play the one truth of this kind of the imagination against its other truth: if you are accused of reducing everything to ‘nothing but’ fantasy, you can jump to the other side
Giegerich exposes the rhetorical flexibility afforded by the ‘as-if’ structure of imaginal cognition, arguing it allows the imaginal approach to evade rather than resolve fundamental epistemological challenges.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside
Hillman revered Corbin’s ‘great cosmology of the imagination, which refuses any chasm between psyche and world.’
Russell documents Hillman’s biographical and intellectual debt to Corbin, whose refusal to separate psyche from world provided the cosmological foundation for imaginal cognition as a distinct mode of knowing.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023aside
The precision of psychology stems from the psyche’s own native precision, the indigenous exactitude of fantasy, to which reason shows its faithfulness
Hillman argues that imaginal cognition carries its own intrinsic rigour — a native exactitude of fantasy — irreducible to the measurement-based precision of natural science.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside
They cannot be objects of sensual intuition or imagination. They have to be thought. They are concepts even if still expressed in terms of a pictorial thinking.
Giegerich uses alchemical paradox-formulas to demonstrate that certain psychological realities exceed the cognitive grasp of imaginal thinking and demand properly conceptual treatment.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020aside