Imagination occupies a position of singular theoretical weight across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a psychological faculty, an ontological category, and a therapeutic instrument. The tradition refuses the commonplace reduction of imagination to mere fancy or subjective confabulation: Corbin's reading of Ibn Arabi insists that the Imaginative Presence constitutes an intermediary world between the sensible and the intelligible, a 'pillar of true knowledge' without which gnosis collapses into empty rationalism. Hillman radicalizes this position by relocating imagination from the interior of the skull into the cosmos itself, following the Romantics in treating it as the very ground of psychic reality, inseparable from image and soul. Johnson, working in a more clinical register, argues that imagination is the second great channel of communication from the unconscious, a coherent symbolic language rivaling the dream. McNiff inherits the Romantic lineage directly — invoking Jean Paul Richter's designation of imagination as the 'faculty of faculties,' the conductor of creative transformation — and deploys it therapeutically in the service of healing. Against these affirmative positions, Giegerich mounts a sustained critique, arguing that the imaginal approach is structurally unable to move beyond phenomenological 'features' to the logical status of soul, and that its 'as-if' hedge prevents genuine psychological confrontation. Aristotle anchors the genealogy: imagination is distinct from both perception and thought, neither always true nor fully rational, yet a necessary mediator between sensation and supposition. The tension between imagination as cosmic-ontological power and imagination as psychic faculty requiring critical discipline defines the central polarity of this entry.
In the library
22 substantive 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' of true knowledge, the knowledge that is gnosis
Corbin, reading Ibn Arabi, establishes imagination as an ontological intermediary between sense and intellect, indispensable to genuine gnosis rather than merely decorative or subjective.
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, or of all action as such, but especially of creative action... this Imaginatio must not be confused with fantasy.
Corbin distinguishes the creative Imaginatio — a cosmogenic, soul-animating potency — from mere fantasy, following Paracelsus's warning that fantasy is 'the madman's cornerstone.'
Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
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... The Imagination as a creative magical potency which, giving birth to the sensible world, produces the Spirit in forms and colors
Corbin articulates imagination as a cosmogenic force that materializes the soul's thought and will into the sensible world, grounding it in a lineage running from Paracelsus through Novalis.
Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
I do not consider imagination to be a mental faculty only. Here, I follow the Romantics, who took the power of imagination right out of the head and into the cosmos.
Hillman explicitly relocates imagination from interiority to a cosmic dimension, aligning with Romantic ontology against any merely mentalist account of the imaginal.
Hillman, James, The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life, 1999thesis
The imagination is the intelligence that integrates and guides the creative transformation... imagination is not the flower, but the flower-goddess, who arranges the flower calyxes with their mingling pollens for new hybrids.
McNiff, via Jean Paul Richter, presents imagination as the supreme integrating intelligence of creative life — the 'faculty of faculties' — orchestrating diverse forces toward novel synthesis.
McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis
imagination, an animal mundi and an anima mundi, both diaphanous and passionate, unerring in its patterns and in all ways necessary, the necessary angel that makes brute necessity angelic
Hillman figures imagination as both world-soul and world-animal, a necessary cosmological principle that transforms instinctual compulsion into psychic meaning.
Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
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 expands the science of imagination into a speculative theosophy of mirrors and theophanies, in which imaginal forms manifest the spiritual without being contained by material surfaces.
Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis
it baffles many people at first to hear that the imagination is an organ of coherent communication, that it employs a highly refined, complex language of symbols to express the contents of the unconscious.
Johnson positions imagination as a structured semiotic organ — not a chaos of fancy — through which the unconscious transmits its contents with precision and coherence.
Johnson, Robert A., Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, 1986thesis
being and power and reality are invested in images. They are numinous because they are animated, soul-charged, whether shaped into external icons or imagined and spoken with in soul.
Hillman argues that numinosity is a property of animated images rather than of abstract transcendence, locating imaginal encounter at the center of psychological and religious experience.
imagination continually deforms and transforms our experience; that imagination plays a central role in perception, no matter how objective we think we are.
Bosnak challenges naïve objectivism by insisting that imagination actively shapes all perception, not merely artistic or therapeutic experience, making it foundational to any psychology of the real.
Bosnak, Robert, A Little Course in Dreams, 1986supporting
By recognizing the primacy of the image, archetypal thought frees both psyche and logos to an Eros that is imaginal.
Archetypal psychology's foundational axiom — the primacy of the image — is here shown to liberate both soul and reason into an erotic, imaginal mode of relation.
Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
By recognizing the primacy of the image, archetypal thought frees both psyche and logos to an Eros that is imaginal.
A restatement of the image-primacy axiom in Hillman's archetypal psychology, confirming its structural role as the condition for psyche's liberation from literalism.
imagination is a different thing from both perceiving and thinking. Imagination cannot occur without perception, nor supposition without imagination.
Aristotle establishes imagination as a distinct mediating faculty between perception and thought, neither reducible to sensory input nor to rational supposition, supplying the genealogical baseline for the depth-psychological tradition.
the imagination is condemned to take the soul and soulfulness literally... it is not able to see beyond the category of 'features.'
Giegerich mounts a structural critique of imaginal psychology, arguing that imagination's literalism prevents it from grasping the logical or dialectical status of soul.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
with the help of the 'as-if' you can play the one truth of this kind of the imagination against its other truth... the 'as-if' is the partition wall that keeps objective positing safely apart from the subjective retraction of it.
Giegerich diagnoses the imaginal method's evasiveness: its 'as-if' structure allows it to oscillate between realism and subjectivism without ever committing to the rigorous movement of soul.
Giegerich, Wolfgang, The Soul’s Logical Life Towards a Rigorous Notion of, 2020supporting
psyche becomes aware by means of an imaginal method: the ostentation of images, a parade of fantasies as imagination bodies forth its
Hillman proposes that self-knowledge for the soul proceeds not through introspection or logical analysis but through the imaginal display — the exhibition of images in their rhetorical particularity.
Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
The part that active imagination plays in psychological development is to offer an avenue for crossing the divide between ego-consciousness and ego-identity on the one side and the instinctual and archetypal forces of the unconscious on the other.
Stein, in Tozzi's volume, situates active imagination as the therapeutic bridge between conscious ego and unconscious archetypal forces, central to the individuation process Jung established.
Tozzi, Chiara, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training, 2017supporting
In its simplest form, you look at the fantasies that have been going through your mind today and you choose an image, an inner person, or a situation... thereby convert this passive fantasy into genuine Active Imagination.
Johnson offers the practical protocol for converting passive fantasy into active imagination, underscoring the volitional and dialogic character that distinguishes the latter from mere reverie.
Johnson, Robert A., Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, 1986supporting
Evidence for this is to be seen, on the one side, in Jung's emphasis on the primacy of the mental image, and, on the other, in Zen's use of the koan.
Clarke draws a structural parallel between Jung's image-primacy and Zen's koan practice, both treated as means of surpassing rational conceptualization toward direct transformative experience.
Clarke, J. J., Jung and Eastern Thought: A Dialogue with the Orient, 1994supporting
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 classical analytical psychology suppresses the imaginal dimension of the ego, which must be restored if archetypal reality is to be adequately engaged.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
imagery tasks in modalities such as visual and auditory usually evoke brain activity patterns that overlap to a considerable extent with the patterns observed during actual perception
Damasio contributes a neuroscientific perspective in which imagining and perceiving share overlapping brain substrates, providing empirical grounding for theories of imagination's quasi-perceptual reality.
Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010aside
Image-Based Psychology... revealing the hidden soul values in the shocking phenomena of sado-masochism.
Berry's reference to an image-based psychology indicates the Hillmanian method's application to extreme psychological phenomena, illustrating imagination's scope as a hermeneutic instrument.
Berry, Patricia, Echo's Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982aside