imaginal realm · imaginal psychology
The term 'imaginal' enters depth psychology principally through Henry Corbin's philosophical theology, where the mundus imaginalis designates an ontologically intermediate realm — neither purely sensory nor abstractly intelligible — through which theophanic visions become possible and spirits are embodied. Hillman received this Corbinian inheritance with transformative fidelity, establishing 'imaginal psychology' as archetypal psychology's methodological signature: a mode of attending to images as autonomous, self-presenting realities rather than signs pointing elsewhere. Within this tradition the imaginal names a disciplined refusal of literalism — holding images in their own ontological register, neither reducing them to factual claims nor dismissing them as mere fancy. The decisive intellectual tension runs between Hillman's affirmative embrace of the imaginal as soul-making and Wolfgang Giegerich's sustained critique, which argues that imaginal psychology, by its very genre-structure, smuggles in a concealed positivity and 'domesticates' images before they can speak their full dialectical truth. For Giegerich, the imaginal stance freezes the movement of psychic life into a stable 'as-if,' immunizing itself against the Dionysian frenzy it professes to honor. Corbin's foundational texts insist, further, that Imagination must be distinguished sharply from mere fantasy, lest the term collapse into a synonym for the arbitrary. These tensions — between the imaginal as liberating ontology and as concealed literalism, between Corbin's sacred cosmology and Hillman's pathologized aesthetics — constitute the live nerve of the concordance.
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 argues that imaginal psychology pre-emptively neutralizes the image's own drive toward absolute truth, producing a 'domesticated' and dialectically arrested form of engagement.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
This is the duplicity of psychology's imaginal. It comes with two conflicting messages that are objectively 'built into' its logical form as a 'genre.'
Giegerich identifies an irreducible structural contradiction within the imaginal genre: it simultaneously posits beings as real and disavows that positing, yielding an unresolved logical duplicity.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
Is imaginal psychology not expressly declared to be a psychology of soul-making and not of the ego? Yes, indeed. And yet: 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.
Giegerich concedes imaginal psychology's self-description as ego-transcending while demonstrating that its formal mode of presentation reinstates the ontological prejudice it claims to dissolve.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
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 establishes the foundational distinction between creative Imagination — grounded in cosmic reality — and mere fantasy, a distinction that underwrites the entire depth-psychological use of 'imaginal.'
, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
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. Imaginal psychology has to eat its own medicine.
Giegerich demands a second-order critique in which even the imaginal mode of consciousness — not merely its contents — is subjected to psychological dissolution.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
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 argues that the imaginal, unless subjected to dialectical thought, inevitably collapses into a covert metaphysical realism despite its professed anti-literalism.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
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 imaginal psychology with a structural irony: its elaborate attention to Dionysian dissolution serves as a defense against actually undergoing the dissolution it describes.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
The imagination of imaginal psychology, however, is in itself no more than the freezing of that moment at which the motion has reached the highest or central point on the bridge, at equal distance between the two sides.
Giegerich characterizes imaginal psychology as a reification of psychic movement, substituting a stable middle-ground posture for the genuine dialectical crossing it promises.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
Corbin laments our degradation of the Imagination into fantasy... and somberly notes that 'there has ceased to be an intermediate level between empirically verifiable reality and unreality pure and simple.'
Corbin diagnoses modernity's loss of the imaginal as the collapse of the ontological middle realm between sense and intellect, with theological and cosmological consequences.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
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 founding role while asserting his own divergence: archetypal psychology embraces the pathological and monstrous within the imaginal, against Corbin's hieratic restriction.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
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 grants that archetypal psychology's use of 'imaginal' is richer than mere pictorial representation, being rooted in archetypes, before proceeding to criticize even this deeper sense.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
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 argues that archetypal psychology's post-hoc elevation of the imaginal to ontological primacy cannot reverse modernity's prior reduction of divine figures to mere contents of consciousness.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
I said that the imagination is responsible for the split between the literal and the imaginal... another bisection of the one logical movement of the soul into two separate aspects.
Giegerich diagnoses the literal/imaginal polarity itself as a product of imagination's failure, arguing that the soul's true movement cannot be captured by either pole of this split.
, 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... though forms appear in mirrors, they are not in the mirrors.
Corbin elaborates the imaginal as a specular science in which theophanic forms manifest without being contained by the medium of manifestation — an ontological subtlety central to the imaginal's non-literal status.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
From the viewpoint of the imaginal realm, numbers themselves are qualities with a symbolic, fantasy aspect. 'Seven' is not just one more integer than 'six.' 'Seven' is an altogether different experience, based on a different imaginal structure.
Hillman illustrates the imaginal realm's qualitative, non-quantitative character by showing how even numbers are governed by imaginal structures irreducible to mathematical enumeration.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
The problem of the imaginal stance is that it has to objectify, reify, personify what actually wants...
Giegerich identifies a structural compulsion within the imaginal stance to solidify into objects and persons what the soul's dialectical life requires to remain fluid and self-negating.
, 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 sublation of imaginal consciousness itself, placing the entire imaginal stage under reflective scrutiny in a way that mythology could not.
, 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 articulates a nuanced position: images and the imaginal are necessary as starting points for thought, but their proper telos is their own dialectical sublation rather than autonomous contemplation.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
The old ego offers a one-sided adaptation; it is inadequate to archetypal psychology because it restrains and ignores the imaginal part of the ego complex.
Hillman argues that the conventional ego concept suppresses its own imaginal dimension, and that adequate psychological theory must restore the imaginal as constitutive of ego life.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
Watkins perceives the task of therapy as 'the articulation of the imaginal other.' This orientation to therapy is grounded on what I have called 'theory indigenous to art.'
McNiff, drawing on Watkins, situates the imaginal as the proper object of therapeutic attention in art-based depth psychology, grounding it in a theory native to artistic expression.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
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 applies Corbin's concept of mundus imaginalis to the analytic relationship, framing the intermediate state of imaginative consciousness as the ground of therapeutic encounter.
, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009supporting
Hillman revered Corbin's 'great cosmology of the imagination, which refuses any chasm between psyche and world.' And, in turn, Corbin called Hillman's Re-Visioning 'the psychology of the resurgence of the Gods.'
Russell documents the Corbin–Hillman intellectual alliance at its most reciprocal, showing how the imaginal cosmology and archetypal psychology mutually authorized each other.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting
This exactitude is not borrowed from the methods of natural science or of scholarship. The precision of psychology stems from the psyche's own native precision, the indigenous exactitude of fantasy, to which reason shows its faithfulness... Exact methods show care for the thesaurus of memoria, the storehouse of the imaginal.
Hillman locates psychological rigor within the imaginal realm itself — in the native precision of fantasy — distinguishing it from scientific measurement and grounding it in the memoria tradition.
, 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 articulates the dialectical relationship between image and concept, arguing that the imaginal is already implicitly conceptual and thus demands to be thought through rather than merely contemplated.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
Lockhart, Russell A. (1978). 'Words as Eggs,' Dragonflies: Studies in Imaginal Psychology 1 (1978).
A bibliographic citation attesting to the institutionalization of 'imaginal psychology' as a named sub-field with dedicated publication venues.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983aside
Lockhart, Russell A. (1978). 'Words as Eggs,' Dragonflies: Studies in Imaginal Psychology 1 (1978).
Parallel bibliographic citation confirming 'imaginal psychology' as an established disciplinary designation within the Hillmanian orbit.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983aside