Imaginal figures occupy a contested but generative position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as clinical phenomena, philosophical concepts, and ontological challenges. Hillman provides the most sustained account: imaginal figures are the personified forms through which the psyche naturally articulates its multiplicity, distinguished from ego-fragments and best understood as daimones, genii, and mythical personae with their own logos, their own styles of consciousness, their own ethical claims. His archetypal psychology insists that these figures are not projections to be reabsorbed by the ego but autonomous presences demanding relation. Mary Watkins, as reported through McNiff, extends this into therapeutic practice, locating the articulation of the imaginal other as the very task of depth therapy. Corbin’s Islamic philosophy of the mundus imaginalis supplies the cosmological ground: the imaginal is a genuine ontological register between sense and intellect, populated by beings of their own order. Against this consensus, Giegerich mounts a rigorous philosophical critique, arguing that imaginal psychology’s positing of figures as quasi-substantial beings perpetuates an ontological naivety, reinstating the ‘natural’ prejudice of positive existence even while disclaiming literalism. This tension—between the therapeutic and philosophical affirmation of imaginal figures and the demand that psychology think beyond the image—constitutes the deepest fault line in contemporary Jungian and post-Jungian thought.
Rather than being imagined as split-off fragments of the ‘I,’ they are better reverted to the differentiated models of earlier psychologies where the complexes would have been called souls, daimones, genii, and other mythical-imaginal figures.
Hillman reframes psychic complexes as mythical-imaginal figures with their own consciousness, autonomous from and irreducible to the ego.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
Rather than being imagined as split-off fragments of the ‘I,’ they are better reverted to the differentiated models of earlier psychologies where the complexes would have been called souls, daimones, genii, and other mythical-imaginal figures.
Identical to Hillman’s Archetypal Psychology passage: the canonical Hillmanian thesis that imaginal figures are autonomous psychic personae, not ego-derivatives.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
Each of us tends to be Hercules in ego when we begin to engage imaginal figures. Gestalt psychology seems to circumvent this obstacle by approaching all figures through empathy.
Hillman diagnoses the ego’s characteristic aggression toward imaginal figures and critiques approaches that dissolve their autonomy into ego-identification.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
Watkins perceives the task of therapy as ‘the articulation of the imaginal other’… everyone benefits by encouraging the full emanation of imaginal figures.
McNiff, via Watkins, positions the full emanation and articulation of imaginal figures as the foundational purpose of depth-oriented creative arts therapy.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis
The intellect’s reaction is to attempt an intellectual diakrisis (discernment, differentiation). Jung’s conversation with the images was a psychological diakrisis giving them the opportunity to present their own logos.
Hillman situates imaginal figures within a Neoplatonist tradition of daimones and argues that Jung’s method gave them discursive autonomy through psychological diakrisis.
, Healing Fiction, 1983thesis
Images and metaphors present themselves always as living psychic subjects with which I am obliged to be in relation… Personifying is the soul’s answer to egocentricity.
Hillman argues that personifying images are not rhetorical devices but living psychic subjects, and that personification is the soul’s structural defense against ego-dominance.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
They become now recognizable as persons, each with styles of consciousness… These persons, by governing my complexes, govern my life. My life is a diversity of relationships with them.
Hillman claims that archetypal figures function as governing persons in psychic life, making individuation a relational practice with imaginal others.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
The ontologizing and substantiating that goes on in personifications is taken at face value… imaginal psychology does not see through the substrate character that inevitably comes with the images on account of the imaginal mode.
Giegerich argues that imaginal psychology uncritically accepts the ontological substrate implied by personification, failing to see through the imaginal mode itself.
, 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, I am just an image.’
Giegerich exposes the structural duplicity of imaginal psychology’s genre: imaginal figures simultaneously claim and disclaim real ontological status.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Even though the imagination admittedly does not theoretically and explicitly posit its contents as actually existing… by its very form, it does primarily posit beings, persons, animals and so on as positively existing.
Giegerich identifies a formal contradiction in imaginal psychology: its figures are presented as real beings even as theory denies their literal existence.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Imaginal psychology feels free to cut off this entire second half of the notion of a God, reducing him to something like a timeless Platonic Form or a stationary image, and nevertheless still imagines (!) to be speaking of a real God.
Giegerich contends that Hillman’s imaginal figures are anorectic abstractions severed from the living historical reality of what a God actually was.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
This attentiveness to the imaginal other—i
McNiff identifies sustained attentiveness to the imaginal other as the defining therapeutic orientation of depth-informed creative arts practice.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
a psychic image takes on special weight and meaning, appearing often or in various circumstances within one’s imaginative journey… to establish a special interior rapport which can be an important point of reference as time goes on.
Tozzi describes the practical cultivation of ongoing relationship with recurring imaginal figures as central to the active imagination method.
, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017supporting
In the one figuration of my friend are my subjective personal traits and potentials and the archetypal personae who are the deeper potentials within each of our subjectivities. These personae lead us out of the subjective as it is usually conceived.
Hillman argues that dream figures layer personal and archetypal dimensions, with the archetypal personae functioning to transcend personal subjectivity.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979supporting
The science of the Imagination is also the science of mirrors, of all mirroring ‘surfaces’ and of the forms that appear in them… though forms appear in mirrors, they are not in the mirrors.
Corbin establishes the ontological register of imaginal figures as genuinely existing between matter and spirit, appearing in but not reducible to their reflective medium.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
Imaginal beings felt present. As Robbie Bosnak, a regular attendee in the 1970s, put it: ‘One of his passions was angelology, and it seemed he was seeing them as he spoke about them.’
Russell documents Corbin’s experiential reality of imaginal beings at Eranos, illustrating the phenomenological seriousness with which the tradition treated these figures.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting
The imagination never really leaves behind the ego-world of everyday reality and its modes… it gets to see (to ‘envision’) what is going on there (the archetypal images), but it is seeing it through the old eyes and categories it brought with it from this side.
Giegerich argues that the imaginal mode remains epistemologically trapped within the perceptual categories of ego-consciousness despite its claims to a higher register.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
The personifications in dreams, including images of scenes and inanimate objects, reflect the structure of psychological complexes in the personal unconscious, all of which rest upon archetypal cores in the objective psyche.
Hall situates dream personifications within the classical Jungian framework of complexes resting on archetypal cores, providing the structural background against which imaginal figures operate.
, Jungian Dream Interpretation: A Handbook of Theory and Practice, 1983aside
I was in the imaginal world that Henry Corbin describes in his eloquent commentaries upon the Sufi masters.
Bloom’s retrospective testimony to entry into Corbin’s imaginal world illustrates the experiential reality claimed for that domain across the tradition.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969aside
It is imperative to liberate images from ourselves, give t
McNiff, drawing on Platonic and gestalt sources, argues for granting images their own generative autonomy rather than subordinating them to the self.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004aside