Imaginal Reality names the claim — originating with Henry Corbin's reading of Ibn Arabi and entering depth psychology principally through James Hillman — that the imagination discloses a tertium quid: neither sensory fact nor abstract concept, but an ontologically genuine intermediate world (mundus imaginalis) with its own figures, laws, and truth-claims. Corbin grounded this in Islamic theosophy, insisting that the Active Imagination is an organ of cognition rather than a faculty of subjective fantasy. Hillman radicalized the move for archetypal psychology, treating the imaginal as the primary mode through which soul presents itself, and explicitly diverging from Corbin by including the pathological and monstrous within its compass. The term subsequently ramified: Romanyshyn applied it to research methodology; Samuels extended it to the analytic dyad as a shared mundus imaginalis; McNiff located it in art therapy's commitment to the autonomy of artistic figures; Tozzi incorporated imaginal practice into active imagination training. The most sustained critical pressure comes from Wolfgang Giegerich, who argues that the imaginal, despite its anti-literalist pretensions, harbors an inherent duplicity — it domesticates the image by holding it in a perpetual 'as-if,' thereby immunizing consciousness against the full logical demand of soul-life and ultimately requiring sublation into dialectical thought. The tension between Corbin-Hillman affirmation and Giegerich's critique defines the central fault-line in the contemporary literature.
In the library
28 substantive passages
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
Drawing on Corbin, Romanyshyn establishes imaginal reality as an ontologically distinct middle domain — neither matter nor pure mind — that requires the Active Imagination as its legitimate cognitive organ.
Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis
Even though the imagination admittedly does not theoretically and explicitly posit its contents as actually existing... nevertheless, by its very form, it does primarily posit beings, persons, animals and so on as positively existing.
Giegerich argues that the imaginal's anti-literalist self-description is undermined by the ontological positing built into its very form, revealing an inherent duplicity at the heart of imaginal psychology.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, 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.' ... A fantasy becomes a (subjective, depotentiated) fantasy because it implicitly, through the form of its genre, says, 'don't take me literally'
Giegerich diagnoses imaginal psychology's defining logical structure as a compromise formation that defuses the image's own drive toward absolute truth-claim, thereby constituting what he calls its 'duplicity.'
Giegerich, Wolfgang, 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 contends that archetypal psychology's imaginal mode perpetually arrests the image before it can achieve its own inherent momentum toward metaphysical or empirical truth.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
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 term 'imaginal' while explicitly extending its scope beyond Corbin's hieratic register to include the pathological and monstrous as legitimate modes of imaginal reality.
The science of the Imagination is also the science of mirrors, of all mirroring 'surfaces' and of the forms that appear in them... it takes its place in speculative theosophy, in a theory of the vision and manifestations of the spiritual
Corbin presents imagination as a rigorous theosophical science — not mere subjectivity — that governs the apparition of spiritual forms in a domain analogous to but irreducible to both sensory and purely intelligible reality.
Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
this Imaginatio must not be confused with fantasy. As Paracelsus already observed, fantasy, unlike Imagination, is an exercise of thought without foundation in nature, it is the 'madman's cornerstone.'
Corbin insists on a categorical distinction between Imaginatio vera — the ontologically grounded creative faculty — and mere fantasy, establishing the epistemological seriousness foundational to any claim for imaginal reality.
Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
the notion of the Imagination as the magical production of an image, the very type and model of magical action... and, on the other hand, the notion of the image as a body (a magical body, a mental body), in which are incarnated the thought and will of the soul.
Corbin elaborates imagination as a creative-cosmological power in which images possess bodily, not merely mental, status — a foundation for treating imaginal products as genuinely real rather than merely subjective.
Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
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 argues that imaginal psychology fails to submit its own mode of image-presentation to self-critique, and that consistent application of its own logic would compel it to recognize soul-life as surpassing the imaginal form.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
to insist, after the fact, on the image (or the imaginal at large in CORBIN's sense) as psychological reality... cannot undo this castration, because this castration happened prior to that declaration and remains the basis for it.
Giegerich contends that declaring imaginal contents to be 'psychological reality' merely names, rather than reverses, the prior reduction of divine and mythic powers to contents of a psychological subject.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Hillman revered Corbin's 'great cosmology of the imagination, which refuses any chasm between psyche and world.' Hillman wrote that Corbin's Eranos lectures epitomized the creative imagination's 'theophanic power of bringing the divine face into visibility'
Russell documents Hillman's deep intellectual debt to Corbin's cosmology of imagination, which provided the philosophical warrant for treating imaginal reality as continuous with rather than separate from the world.
Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting
Imaginal Practice: Greeting the Angel... soul loses ideas by putting them into practice in answer to How? ... there is nothing more practical than forming ideas and becoming aware of them in their psychological effects.
Hillman presents imaginal practice as paradoxically the most practical engagement with soul, arguing that ideational attention to the imaginal is itself already action rather than a preliminary to it.
Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
If the idea of a two-person mundus imaginalis is taken seriously then we must regard the interpersonal in terms of psyche speaking, and the imaginal in terms of an avenue of communication between two people.
Samuels extends imaginal reality beyond the intrapsychic to encompass the analytic dyad, proposing a shared imaginal space that mediates between internal imagery and interpersonal communication.
Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
the split between the literal and the imaginal. We feel that we have to deliteralize in order to get access to the imaginal. For a mind explicitly knowing about the difference between the literal and the imaginal, there cannot be a direct participation in myth
Giegerich argues that modernity's very consciousness of the literal/imaginal distinction forecloses the immediate mythic participation that the imaginal once naturally afforded, rendering the distinction historically symptomatic.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
All the substances used in alchemy were not seen as merely chemical, positive-factual ones in our sense... They were at once physical and imaginal, even fantastic. Imagination was the basis of alchemy, its natural 'element.'
Giegerich situates the imaginal historically within alchemy, where physical and imaginal dimensions were originally undivided, before the modern split between literal fact and imagination imposed itself.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
this aspect of the psyche... is better comprehended as a storehouse of qualities and a movement of changing images that are the formal causes of experience, giving it shape, color, change, and significance.
Hillman characterizes the imaginal realm as the domain of formal causation in psychological life — the source of qualitative shape and meaning that quantitative methods necessarily miss.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
if the imaginal is not taken as metaphysical reality, then it requires a constant conscious effort of deliteralization
Giegerich identifies a structural demand within imaginal psychology: its integrity depends on a sustained, effortful resistance to the image's natural tendency toward literal or metaphysical positing.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
therapeutic methods that stay close to the expressions of art and enter their world demonstrate how everyone benefits by encouraging the full emanation of imaginal figures.
McNiff argues that art therapy's therapeutic efficacy depends on honoring the autonomous reality of imaginal figures rather than reducing them to vehicles for the expression of personal emotion.
McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
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 acknowledges that the term 'imaginal' in archetypal psychology carries an archetypally grounded depth of meaning distinguishable from its ordinary philosophical sense of pictorial or sensory representation.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Even the strongest ego, hard and toughened through its repetitious coping with its 'problem,' is forced ever and again to submit to imaginal powers. As if to a living God, the I is forced to serve.
Hillman illustrates the compulsive authority of imaginal reality by showing how the ego cannot ultimately override the archetypal patterns that impose themselves with the force of divine necessity.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
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 charges that imaginal psychology's thematic attention to Dionysian dissolution functions as a defense against actually undergoing what the Dionysian demands, ironically immunizing it against the very forces it celebrates.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
they neglect our history and the claims of its images upon us... By circumventing our imaginal tradition, they cut us off even further from it.
Hillman insists that authentic engagement with imaginal reality requires fidelity to one's specific cultural and historical imaginal inheritance rather than escape into alternative spiritual traditions.
Hillman, James; Roscher, Wilhelm Heinrich, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972supporting
the imaginal practice in small groups and/or individually. Obviously, the international and transcultural context is a challenge, because the method must be calibrated according to local sensibilities and idiosyncrasies
Tozzi treats imaginal practice as a transmissible training methodology, noting that its effective transmission across cultural contexts requires sensitive calibration to the 'cultural unconscious' operative in each setting.
Tozzi, Chiara, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017supporting
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 articulates his dialectical resolution: images are indispensable to thought but their proper destiny is sublation — interiorization into logical form — rather than preservation as autonomous imaginal realities.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
The 'as-if' is the partition wall that keeps objective positing safely apart from the subjective retraction of it. It prevents the retraction from hitting home to that which is to be retracted
Giegerich identifies the 'as-if' construction as imaginal psychology's structural defense mechanism, preserving the ego from full exposure to the contradictions that rigorous psychological thought would require it to bear.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
this anthology offers readers an overview of Hillman's path-breaking approach to 'imaginal' psychology, encompassing Greek mythology, Renaissance philosophy, the study of art, history, and literature
The editorial overview positions Hillman's 'imaginal' psychology as a wide-ranging revisionary project that draws on multiple humanistic disciplines to reconceive the psychological.
Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989aside
Exact methods show care for the thesaurus of memoria, the storehouse of the imaginal.
Hillman frames psychological precision as a form of fidelity to the imaginal's own native exactitude — an indigenous standard internal to fantasy rather than borrowed from natural science.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside
Imagination in an IMT 'waking dream' enters the world of metaphor. Imagination can be viewed as providing a symbolic bridge between our conscious and unconscious thoughts.
Tozzi describes how Imaginal Movement Therapy's 'waking dream' technique operationalizes imaginal reality as a bridging domain between conscious and unconscious, here understood in more clinical and metaphorical terms.
Tozzi, Chiara, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017aside