Imaginal Resonance

imaginal field

Imaginal Resonance — sometimes designated as the imaginal field — names the responsive, participatory quality by which psyche and world co-disclose themselves through image. The depth-psychology corpus approaches the phenomenon from at least three distinct angles. Henry Corbin supplies the foundational ontology: the mundus imaginalis is an intermediate reality, neither purely sensory nor abstractly intellectual, possessing its own organs of perception and its own mode of truth — what Ibn Arabi calls the Imagination as a ‘pillar of true knowledge.’ James Hillman translates that Corbinian ground into a clinical-cultural psychology, arguing that soul inhabits precisely this middle position; images resonate because they are not representations of something else but are themselves formal causes of experience, self-presenting and autonomous. Robert Romanyshyn extends the concept into research methodology, insisting that the transference field between researcher and work is itself an imaginal field in which body, mood, and unconscious complex co-vibrate. Wolfgang Giegerich represents the major dissenting current: he grants the imaginal its diagnostic power but contends that arresting psyche at the image — treating resonance as terminus rather than as passage — domesticates what wants to become rigorous dialectical thought. The tension between imaginal sufficiency and imaginal limitation remains the generative fault line of the post-Jungian conversation.

In the library 21 passages

the intermediary character of the Imagination, which places it at once in the sensible and the intelligible, in the senses and in the intellect, in the possible, the necessary and the impossible, so that it is a ‘pillar’ (rukn) of true knowledge

Corbin establishes the ontological ground of imaginal resonance by identifying the Imagination as the intermediary faculty that binds sensory and intellectual orders into a distinct cognitive domain.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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the notion of the Imagination as the magical production of an image, the very type and model of magical action, or of all action as such, but especially of creative 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 articulates the creative-incarnational logic of imaginal resonance: the image is not a sign pointing elsewhere but a body in which soul’s thought and will take form.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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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, following Paracelsus, insists that genuine imaginal resonance is grounded in the nature of things rather than in arbitrary subjective fantasy, establishing a crucial epistemological distinction.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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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, presents the imaginal world as the ontologically intermediate field in which psyche resonates between matter and intellect, providing the theoretical ground for his research methodology.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007thesis

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The science of the Imagination is also the science of mirrors, of all mirroring ‘surfaces’ and of the forms that appear in them. As the science of the speculum, it takes its place in speculative theosophy, in a theory of the vision and manifestations of the spiritual

Corbin identifies the imaginal field with a science of mirroring and theophanic reflection, making resonance between inner and outer forms the cognitive axis of Sufi gnosis.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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the researcher’s mood and body belong to the body of his or her work and that his or her work is embodied. One’s work settles into one’s flesh and indeed is spun out of one’s flesh.

Romanyshyn argues that the transference field operates as a somatic-imaginal resonance in which the researcher’s body registers what the work demands, collapsing the Cartesian split between investigator and subject.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007supporting

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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 the historical transmission of Corbin’s imaginal-field cosmology to Hillman, showing how the concept of a world-bridging imagination became central to archetypal psychology.

Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting

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it 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 defines the imaginal region of psyche as a field of qualitative formal causation rather than quantitative measurement, explaining why images resonate rather than calculate.

Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting

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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’s foundational role while marking his own divergence — that the imaginal field includes pathological resonances that Corbin’s sacred cosmology excludes.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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Speech is not of the tongue, but of the heart. The tongue is merely the instrument with which one speaks. He who is dumb is dumb in his heart, not in his tongue … As you speak, so is your heart. – Paracelsus

The Paracelsian epigraph frames Hillman’s investigation of cardiac cognition as the locus where imaginal resonance between soul and world is registered and expressed.

Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting

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imagination, a moving heaven of theriomorphic gods in bestial constellations, stirring without external stimulation within our animal sense as it images its life in our world.

Hillman characterizes imagination as an autonomous imaginal field that stirs of its own accord within embodied sense, embodying the resonance model in which image and instinct are inseparable.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting

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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 proximity to artistic expressions activates imaginal resonance — the full emanation of autonomous imaginal figures — whereas distance from art arrests that field.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

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autonomous agencies act upon us and produce ‘offspring’ that are unique to that particular engagement and ‘can never meet with someone else and generate the same offspring’

Drawing on Plato’s Theaetetus, McNiff frames imaginal resonance as a unique generative encounter between autonomous imaginal agencies and the particular person they address.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

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refraining from literalizing the imaginings is our work. We resist the image’s pull toward a literal, ontological understanding. We meet the image with a mental reservation. The imaginal approach to things in archetypal psychology is a compromise formation between letting oneself in for the image and holding back, reserving oneself.

Giegerich diagnoses imaginal psychology’s structural problem: the imaginal field is constitutively held in suspension, producing a ‘compromise formation’ that prevents the image from completing its own logical movement.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis

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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 concedes that the imaginal in archetypal psychology carries a richer meaning than mere pictorial representation, being grounded in archetypal structures — even as he argues this ground is still insufficient for rigorous psychology.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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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 field carries an inherent ontological prejudice: despite formal disclaimers, imaginal resonance covertly reaffirms the positivity of ordinary perception.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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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 identifies the self-canceling duplicity built into imaginal resonance as a genre-effect: the imaginal field immunizes itself against full commitment to its own contents.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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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. While it remains standing on the middle ground as a bridge, neither on this side nor the other, it is longingly looking forward to the other side.

Giegerich recasts the imaginal middle ground as a liminal bridge that remains structurally incomplete, never actualizing the resonance it promises between literal and archetypal registers.

Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting

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An imaginal approach to research acknowledges two dynamics in this process … re-search with soul in mind is about attending to what the researcher wants from the work and brings to the work through his or her complex attachments to it, and also what the work wants from, brings to, and stirs up in the researcher.

Romanyshyn applies the imaginal field model methodologically, framing research as a bidirectional resonance between researcher’s complex and the work’s own autonomous demands.

Romanyshyn, Robert D., The Wounded Researcher: Research with Soul in Mind, 2007aside

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By considering the personified archetypes as Gods, they become more than constitutional propensities and instinctual patterns of behavior, more than ordering structures of the psyche, the ground of its images and vital organs of its functions.

Hillman’s personification of archetypes as Gods supplies the polytheistic substrate within which imaginal resonance operates as a field of distinct divine presences rather than abstract structural forces.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975aside

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The inner soul and the outer soil have a permeable osmotic connection, so that where there is forcible expulsion, migration, or radical destruction of the actual earth … they feel their own souls deteriorating

Hillman illustrates imaginal resonance as an ecological-psychic porosity in which disruption of outer landscape reverberates directly within inner soul-life.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007aside

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Related terms