The term ‘Imaginary’ occupies a contested and multivalent position across the depth-psychological corpus, operating simultaneously as a structural category in Lacanian metapsychology, a pejorative designation for mere fantasy in Corbinian and Jungian traditions, and a domain of image-mediated psychological reality distinct from both literal perception and abstract thought. Lacan’s triadic schema — Symbolic, Imaginary, Real — provides the most architecturally rigorous treatment: the Imaginary designates the register of identification, mirroring, projection, and introjection, approximating what the Jungian tradition calls the personal unconscious. Samuels and Frank both draw on this Lacanian frame to illuminate processes of self-sedimentation through images absorbed from elsewhere. Corbin’s opposing emphasis — Imaginatio as creative, theophanic, and metaphysically generative — insists on a strict distinction between mere imaginary (fantasy, illusion) and the imaginal (mundus imaginalis), a distinction Hillman inherits and partially subverts by embracing pathologized imagery. Giegerich mounts the most sustained critical pressure on both positions, arguing that imaginal psychology, despite its anti-literalist posture, secretly reinstates positivity through its genre’s built-in duplicity. The tension between the Imaginary as a site of entrapment and mirror-identification (Lacan) versus the imaginal as a via regia to soul (Corbin, Hillman) is the field’s constitutive fault line.
the Imaginary, which approximates to psychological reality, inner world processes (such as fantasy, projection, introjection), attitudes and images derived from, but not the equivalent of, external life.
Samuels explicates Lacan’s Imaginary as the order of inner-world processing — fantasy, projection, introjection — and aligns it with Jung’s personal unconscious, establishing the primary structural definition operative in the depth-psychology literature.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985thesis
Lacan’s concept of the Imaginary suggests that what we call the self is always a sedimentation of images from elsewhere. These images are worn like armor, and what is within this armor is certainly less than we often believe.
Frank applies Lacan’s Imaginary to the body-self, arguing that identity is constituted by alien images worn as defensive armor, and that entry into the Symbolic is required to transcend this specular entrapment.
, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics, 1995thesis
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 founding distinction of the imaginal tradition: the creative Imaginatio that participates in divine theophany must be rigorously separated from mere imaginary fantasy, which lacks ontological grounding.
, 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, or of all action as such, but especially of creative action
Corbin elaborates the Imagination as a cosmogonic and magical power through which the divine self-reveals, positing the image as a body incarnating the thought and will of the soul.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
by its very form, it does primarily posit beings, persons, animals and so on as positively existing. It thus constantly reaffirms the ‘natural’ ontological prejudice, supports our habitual sense of positivity
Giegerich identifies the constitutive duplicity of the imaginal: despite its explicit anti-literalism, the imagination’s formal genre continuously re-posits beings as positively existing, thereby perpetuating the very ontological prejudice it claims to dissolve.
, 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 the structural self-contradiction of imaginal psychology: its genre form simultaneously presents contents as literal beings and immunizes itself from this positing through an internalized subjective disclaimer.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020thesis
this privilege of the counterpart which goes so far in certain species as to reveal itself for us in its organogenic effects. I will not return to this old example around which I oriented for you my exploration of the imaginary
Lacan traces the imaginary register through its organogenic and identificatory effects in animal biology, illustrating how the fascination with the mirror-image of the counterpart structures development at a pre-symbolic level.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
what remains, what survives of the object after this libidinal effect, this destructive Trieb, after the properly thanatogenic effect which is thus implied, is precisely what eternalises the object under the aspect of a form
Lacan links the field of the imaginary to the survival and eternalization of the object as form following the destructive drive’s work, connecting imaginary identification to the thanatogenic structuring of the libidinal object.
, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VIII: Transference, 2015supporting
The imaginal can of course be taken as metaphysical reality, in which case it is a mystification and would have been reified and positivized… if the imaginal is not taken as metaphysical reality, then it requires a constant conscious effort of deliterali
Giegerich argues that the imaginal inevitably oscillates between mystifying reification and an unstable, effortful anti-literalism, neither of which achieves the negative-logical standing required for genuine psychological thinking.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
between the Platonic ideas and the coarse material world lies an intermediary imaginal psychoid realm… a kind of creative imagination, as described principally by the mystic Ibn ‘Arabi
Von Franz situates the imaginal as a psychoid intermediary realm between Platonic archetypes and material reality, linking Corbinian imaginal theology to Jung’s archetypal theory and the tradition of creative imagination in alchemy and Islamic mysticism.
, Psyche and Matter, 2014supporting
Jung’s psychological Anschauung, which puts such stress on imaginal consciousness—dream, vision, fantasy—and on a life-style (the symbolic life) in which the ego lives and behaves primarily in terms of this imaginal consciousness.
Hillman identifies imaginal consciousness — encompassing dream, vision, and fantasy — as the defining orientation of Jung’s psychology, in tension with the nineteenth-century developmental model that pits a reality-coping ego against an irrational imaginal world.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
Archetypal psychology was sensitive to the fundamental shortcoming of the conventional use of ‘the unconscious’ and, following Henri Corbin, more or less replaced the term ‘the unconscious’ with the term ‘the imaginal.’
Giegerich traces the genealogy of the imaginal as a strategic replacement for ‘the unconscious’ in Hillmanian archetypal psychology, acknowledging its Corbinian provenance while ultimately contesting its adequacy as a depth-psychological category.
, 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 his foundational debt to Corbin’s concept of the imaginal while marking his deliberate departure: against Corbin’s exclusion of the monstrous and horrible, Hillman insists on the pathologized dimension as constitutive of the imaginal.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
because this form is Imagination, it announces something other, which is more than itself; it is more than appearance, it is apparition. And that is why a ta’wil is possible, because there is symbol and transparency.
Corbin argues that Imagination as theophanic form is more than appearance — it is apparition pointing beyond itself — making possible the hermeneutic of ta’wil that carries the image back to its divine source.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
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 the science of the Imagination as fundamentally a science of mirroring and specular manifestation, in which spiritual forms appear in mirrors without being contained by them — establishing the epistemological basis of imaginal cognition.
, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting
The imagination could never imagine ‘matter.’ This is far too abstract, far too amorphous a concept. ‘Matter’ is not an empirical, visible fact. It is already a thought, an abstraction.
Giegerich establishes a fundamental limit of imagination: it is confined to formed, empirically visible things and cannot grasp abstract or chemical-level categories, demonstrating why alchemy’s advance required moving beyond the imaginal plane.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
the imagination is condemned to take the soul and soulfulness literally… it is not aware of the difference or gap between ‘(phenomenological) features’ and ‘element’ (‘logical status’) in which these features appear
Giegerich argues that imaginal psychology’s confinement to describable features and phenomenological parallels prevents it from grasping the logical status that determines meaning, leaving it blind to the fundamental difference between ancient myth and modernity.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
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 introduces Corbin’s mundus imaginalis and its corresponding organ of imaginative consciousness as a clinical resource, positing an intermediate state between waking and sleeping where analyst and patient may access a central imaginative function.
, The Therapeutic Relationship: Transference, Countertransference, and the Making of Meaning, 2009supporting
The problem of the imaginal stance is that it has to objectify, reify, personify what actually wants
Giegerich identifies the structural compulsion within imaginal psychology to objectify, reify, and personify contents that the soul’s logic requires to be held in negativity and dialectical movement.
, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
the imaginary limb is often found to retain the position in which the real arm was at the moment of injury: a man wounded in battle can still feel in his phantom arm the shell splinters that lacerated his real one.
Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the phantom limb deploys ‘imaginary’ in its phenomenological-somatic sense to argue that body-image is irreducible to either peripheral or purely central neurological explanation, requiring psychic and existential determinants.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962aside
I can indeed look upon an object with desire and cultivate that desire, watching it, feeling it, letting its imaginary possibilities run away with my mind, entertaining its delight, without acting it out.
Hillman uses ‘imaginary’ in its pre-technical sense to argue for the therapeutic value of containing fantasy within the inner realm rather than acting it out, illustrating the early Jungian rationale for imagination as a protected interior space.
, Insearch: Psychology and Religion, 1967aside