Imaginal

Imaginal psychology holds the image in limbo. It works with the images only as a priori defused ones… It has pulled the image’s teeth, cut the claws with which the image would violently snatch from us our literal belief in it.

Giegerich argues that imaginal psychology neutralizes the image’s own dynamic by pre-emptively domesticating it, preventing it from establishing itself as ontological truth and thereby arresting the soul’s genuine movement.

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

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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 identifies the central paradox of imaginal psychology: despite its anti-literalist declarations, the imaginal mode structurally reaffirms the ontological prejudice it claims to overcome.

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

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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’… This is the duplicity of psychology’s imaginal.

Giegerich identifies an inherent logical duplicity in the imaginal genre, whereby the image simultaneously presents itself as ontologically real and disclaims that status, producing an unresolvable double message.

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

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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 that imaginal psychology reflexively apply its own hermeneutic of seeing-through to its own mode of operation, which would necessarily dissolve it as imaginal psychology.

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

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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, drawing on Paracelsus, establishes the founding distinction between Imagination as a grounded, creative potency rooted in nature and fantasy as mere unanchored fabrication—the distinction that underpins all subsequent imaginal discourse.

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

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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. As frozen motion, it is not movement any more; it is reified motion.

Giegerich characterizes imaginal psychology as a static arrest of the soul’s dynamic movement, transformed into a fixed structural position rather than living dialectical passage.

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

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Hurqalya, the alternate Earth, is an Imaginative universe that stands between two worlds, our sensory Earth and the intelligible universe of the Angels… it is the world through which spirits are embodied, and bodies spiritualized.

Corbin presents the imaginal realm (Hurqalya) as a genuine ontological intermediate world mediating between sensory and intelligible reality, the metaphysical foundation for the entire imaginal tradition in depth psychology.

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

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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 acknowledges, before his critique, that archetypal psychology’s use of ‘imaginal’ is philosophically richer than mere pictorial representation, being grounded in the archetypes themselves.

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

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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 explicitly credits Corbin as the founder of the term ‘imaginal’ while acknowledging his own significant departure in including the pathological and monstrous within imaginal psychology.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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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 faces a structural dilemma: taken as metaphysical reality it becomes mystification, but without such grounding it requires constant conscious effort to avoid collapsing back into literalism.

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

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French philosopher Corbin puts forward the concept of mundus imaginalis, the world of the image. Corbin refers to ‘the organ which perceived the mundus imaginalis’ as ‘imaginative consciousness,’ a state between waking and sleeping.

Wiener transmits Corbin’s foundational concept of the mundus imaginalis into the clinical domain, linking it to imaginative consciousness as a liminal state enabling therapeutic access to the imaginal world.

Wiener, Jan, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009supporting

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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… though forms appear in mirrors, they are not in the mirrors.

Corbin describes the imaginal as a specular science of theophanies—images that appear within a medium without being contained by it—establishing the non-literal, non-empirical ontological status of imaginal phenomena.

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

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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 argues that imaginal psychology’s thematic embrace of the Dionysian functions paradoxically as a defense against genuinely undergoing the dissolution the Dionysian demands.

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

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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, and ipso facto he has sublated it.

Giegerich positions alchemical consciousness as a historical advance beyond the imaginal stage, having enclosed the entire mythological-imaginal world within a reflective container that subjects it to scrutiny and sublation.

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

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this imaginal region of the psyche, does not submit to numbering… 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 as a qualitative, image-based domain that constitutes the formal causes of experience, inherently resistant to quantitative psychological methods.

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

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to insist, after the fact, on the image (or the imaginal at large in CORBIN’s sense) as psychological reality… and to declare that psychological reality is primary cannot undo this castration, because this castration happened prior to that declaration.

Giegerich argues that archetypal psychology’s post-hoc elevation of the imaginal to primary psychological reality cannot reverse the prior reduction of phenomena to contents of consciousness that made such a declaration necessary.

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

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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, drawing on Mary Watkins, advocates a therapeutic approach grounded in proximity to artistic expression that allows imaginal figures to emerge with full autonomy and vitality.

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

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the model of thinking is nineteenth-century… a psychological imperialism, colonizing the unconscious or the id with a reality-coping ego consciousness… modeled upon the hero’s opposition to an irrational imaginal world beyond his powers of control.

Hillman critiques the ego-developmental model of Jungian psychology for treating the imaginal world as irrational territory to be conquered, rather than as the primary medium of psychic life.

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

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I said that the imagination is responsible for the split between the literal and the imaginal. We can also describe the split as which the imaginal approach exists as another bisection of the one logical movement of the soul into two separate aspects.

Giegerich diagnoses the literal/imaginal split as itself a product of imaginative thinking, arguing that the imaginal approach fragments what should be a single dialectical movement of soul.

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

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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 dialectical position on the imaginal: images are epistemologically necessary as the medium of thought but must be sublated—not destroyed—in order for thinking to advance to its proper logical level.

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

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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 reciprocal intellectual debt between Corbin and Hillman, showing how Corbin’s imaginal cosmology became foundational for Hillman’s archetypal psychology and its re-animation of the Gods.

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

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this psychological precision is not intellectual definition, because it never loses sight of the paradoxical aspect; thus it retains the ambiguity that is present in all psychological and symbolic events… it retains the thesaurus of memoria, the storehouse of the imaginal.

Hillman links psychological precision to the imaginal storehouse of memory, arguing that authentic psychological language must preserve the paradoxical ambiguity inherent to imaginal experience rather than resolving it into definition.

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

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An ‘analytical’ psychology offers ‘analysis’ of memoria, but Jung said we must dream the myth along… it is inadequate to archetypal psychology because it restrains and ignores the imaginal part of the ego complex.

Hillman argues that analytical psychology’s ego-orientation systematically suppresses the imaginal dimension of the ego complex, requiring a shift to an archetypal frame that honors imaginal reality.

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

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