Imaginal Modes designates the specific forms or registers through which psychic life organizes itself as image rather than as concept, percept, or literal fact. Within the depth-psychology corpus the term carries two distinguishable valences. In Hillman’s archetypal psychology, imaginal modes are understood as the primary ontological currency of soul: modes of experience and perception — exemplified by childhood, dream, myth, and fantasy — that the adult ego habitually abandons in favor of conceptual and volitional life. For Hillman these modes are not stages to be transcended but permanent psychological realities demanding cultivation. Corbin’s prior formulation supplies the metaphysical scaffolding: the mundus imaginalis names an intermediate ontological stratum, neither sensory nor purely intellectual, from which imaginal forms emerge; Hillman appropriates this structure and psychologizes it, situating imaginal modes as metaphors for modes of experience rather than metaphysical claims. Giegerich, by contrast, mounts the most sustained critique of the tradition, arguing that the imaginal mode as practiced by archetypal psychology is a compromise formation — a domesticated, defused image held in limbo between literal and metaphysical belief — and that the soul’s actual life has moved into logical forms that cannot be captured by imaginal picturing. This tension between imaginal modes as supreme psychological truth and imaginal modes as epistemologically limited genre defines the central controversy the term carries in the corpus.
childhood is mainly a word we use to cover these modes of experience and perception, imaginal modes, which we abandon every moment for the sake of more adult behavior, that is, more conceptual and more willed.
Hillman defines imaginal modes directly as the modes of experience and perception associated with childhood that are displaced by conceptual and volitional adult consciousness.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
It is not enough to see through imaginal contents … The status of figures, the imaginal form, the very mode of ‘imagining things’ and its inherent consequences, also has to be seen through and sublated.
Giegerich argues that the imaginal mode itself — not merely its contents — must be subjected to critical sublation, since imaginal psychology fails to turn its own hermeneutic on the formal structure of imagining.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
Psychology’s imaginal (or metaphor or fantasy) becomes what it is because it has internalized the ‘subjective mental reservation.’ … This is the duplicity of psychology’s imaginal.
Giegerich exposes what he calls the constitutive duplicity of the imaginal mode: it presents images as literal presences while simultaneously instructing the reader not to take them literally, producing an irresolvable logical tension.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
The imaginal approach to things in archetypal psychology is a compromise formation between letting oneself in for the image and holding back, reserving oneself. Imaginal psychology holds the image in limbo.
Giegerich characterizes the imaginal mode as a psychologically defensive stance that pre-emptively defuses the image’s metaphysical force, preventing genuine engagement with the soul’s own dynamics.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
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 identifies imaginal psychology’s methodological assumptions as systemic rather than idiosyncratic, using Moore’s Actaion interpretation as an exemplary instance of the imaginal approach’s characteristic operations.
, 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 originator of the imaginal as a technical term while marking his own departure in extending imaginal modes to encompass pathological and monstrous dimensions Corbin excluded.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
Its Gods now are only ‘imaginal,’ ‘fictions,’ ‘as-if’s,’ Virtual Reality type ‘Gods,’ since the notion of truth has been eliminated with systematic intention.
Giegerich argues that reducing gods to imaginal modes — metaphors for modes of experience — empties them of ontological truth and produces a theology of virtual fictions unable to sustain genuine religious or psychological seriousness.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
The sign for the fact that this is indeed the case is our split between the literal and the imaginal. We feel that we have to deliteralize in order to get access to the imaginal.
Giegerich identifies the modern psyche’s felt need to actively deliteralize as evidence that the imaginal mode no longer arises naturally but must be laboriously constructed against the grain of contemporary logical consciousness.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
psyche becomes aware by means of an imaginal method: the ostentation of images, a parade of fantasies as imagination bodies forth its
Hillman describes the imaginal mode as constituting its own epistemological method — a non-philosophical, non-introspective mode of self-knowledge through the ostentatious display of images.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
The imagination never really leaves behind the ego-world of everyday reality and its modes, but it also does not give up its longing for the yonder.
Giegerich argues that imagination, as the faculty underwriting imaginal modes, remains structurally stranded between ordinary reality and the archetypal, unable to fully inhabit either pole.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
an imaginal approach values each method for what it is able to reveal about soul while remaining aware of what it also conceals or forgets. Every method, then, is always incomplete.
Romanyshyn extends the imaginal mode into research methodology, treating it as an epistemological stance that affirms methodological plurality while maintaining awareness of each method’s constitutive limitations.
, The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting
Soul as tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed … as the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin, and by Neoplatonic writers on the intermediaries
Hillman roots the imaginal mode in the Neoplatonic-Corbinian concept of the mundus imaginalis as the soul’s position between body and mind, grounding imaginal modes in a specific metaphysical topology.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
the culture of imagination and the modes of living carried what had to be formulated in the North as ‘psychology.’
Hillman locates imaginal modes historically as pre-psychological cultural forms — Southern European practices of imagination — that served functions later systematized as psychology in Protestant-Northern Europe.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
the culture of imagination and the modes of living carried what had to be formulated in the North as ‘psychology.’
A parallel passage confirming Hillman’s historicization of imaginal modes as the experiential substrate beneath what modern culture has had to name psychology.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
This is one reason why we have to go beyond ‘the imaginal’ and imaginal psychology. The imaginal can of course be taken as metaphysical reality, in which case it is a mystification and would have been reified and positivized.
Giegerich contends that the imaginal mode inevitably tends toward either mystification through metaphysical reification or toward an unstable deflationary stance, and that neither pole represents adequate psychological thinking.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
The science of the Imagination is also the science of mirrors, of all mirroring ‘surfaces’ and of the forms that appear in them.
Corbin defines imagination as a specular science, framing what Hillman will call imaginal modes as forms appearing in the intermediate mirror-space between sensory and purely intelligible reality.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
taking more world-time so as to encourage the efflorescence of its own imaginal time
Casey, cited by Hillman, posits a distinctive imaginal temporality irreducible to linear time, implying that imaginal modes operate according to their own discontinuous, polyform temporal logic.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983aside
taking more world-time so as to encourage the efflorescence of its own imaginal time
A parallel citation establishing that imaginal modes carry their own temporal structure — imaginal time — distinct from clock time and resistant to therapeutic teleology.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983aside
what these men of theoretical knowledge are unaware of is the intermediary character of the Imagination, which places it at once in the sensible and the intelligible … so that it is a ‘pillar’ (rukn) of true knowledge
Corbin, via Ibn Arabi, establishes the ontological ground for imaginal modes by insisting on the intermediate character of imagination — neither sensory nor purely rational — as a necessary condition of genuine gnosis.
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969aside
Jung’s conversation with the images was a psychological diakrisis giving them the opportunity to present their own logos.
Hillman reads Jung’s active engagement with imaginal figures as a mode of discriminative attention — diakrisis — consistent with the autonomous logic of the imaginal mode rather than ego-directed manipulation.
, Healing Fiction, 1983aside