The ‘instinct of imagination’ occupies a charged conceptual space at the intersection of evolutionary biology, depth psychology, and psychotherapeutic theory. Its most systematic contemporary treatment appears in Alcaro and Carta’s 2019 neuro-ethological monograph, which argues that imagination constitutes a genuine instinctual endowment of the reflective mind rather than a secondary cultural overlay. This position finds deep roots in Jung, who arranged instinct and image along a single psychic spectrum — the infrared pole of somatic drive meeting the ultraviolet pole of fantasy — such that the two are not opposites but continuous expressions of one energic process. Hillman radicalizes this Jungian continuum: images are instincts perceived from within, and the collapse of governing images entails a literal disorientation of instinctual behavior. The archetype, for Jung, functions precisely as the instinct’s own self-perception — the primordial image being the cognitive form that ‘triggers off’ instinctual action, as the yucca moth passage illustrates with memorable precision. A productive tension runs through the corpus between neurobiological accounts that naturalize imagination as adaptive mechanism and archetypal accounts that insist on the irreducible autonomy of the image. Psychotherapeutic implications are consistently drawn: where imagination is impaired or severed from its instinctual ground, pathology follows, and healing requires the restoration of that imaginal-instinctual continuity.
A Neuro-Ethological Approach to the Evolution of the Reflective Mind and Its Application to Psychotherapy
Alcaro and Carta’s review article constitutes the most direct and comprehensive treatment of imagination as a genuine instinct, situating the concept within neuro-ethological evolutionary theory and extending it to clinical psychotherapy.
the fantasies of the neurotic, even though pathologically altered and perhaps perverted by the regression of energy, contain a core of normal instinct, the hallmark of which is adaptedness. A neurotic illness always implies an unadapted alteration and distortion of normal dynamisms and of the ‘imagination’ proper to them.
Jung argues that each instinct carries its own proper imagination, such that neurotic distortion is always simultaneously a distortion of instinct and of the imaginative form belonging to that instinct.
, The Undiscovered Self: With Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams, 1957thesis
the ‘intuition’ which brings the instinct into play, in other words the apprehension by means of the archetype, must be something incredibly precise. Thus the yucca moth must carry within it an image, as it were, of the situation that ‘triggers off’ its instinct.
Jung demonstrates through the yucca moth that instinctual action presupposes an inner imaginal template — the archetype — making imagination constitutive of, not separate from, instinctual behavior.
, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1960thesis
the ‘primordial image might suitably be described as the instinct’s perception of itself’
Hogenson, citing Jung directly, identifies the primordial image as instinct’s self-perception, establishing imagination as the reflexive, cognitive face of instinctual process.
, The Baldwin Effect: A Neglected Influence on C. G. Jungs Evolutionary Thinking, 2001thesis
If we accept the hypothesis of a creative instinct, then this instinct, too, must be subject to psychization. Like other drives, it can be modified by the psyche and be subject to interrelation and contamination with sexuality, say, or activity.
Hillman extrapolates from Jung’s taxonomy of five instincts to argue that creativity — including imagination — is a genuine biological drive subject to psychic modification, contamination, and development.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972thesis
Jung places images and instinct on a psychological continuum, like a spectrum… ranging from an infrared end, the bodily action of instinctual desire, to the ultraviolet blue end of fantasy images. These fantasy images, according to Jung’s model, are the pattern and form of desire.
Hillman expounds Jung’s spectral model in which fantasy images are not sublimations of instinct but its inherent patterning force, collapsing the Freudian hierarchy of body over mind.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
images as instincts, perceived instinctually; the image, a subtle animal; the imagination, a great beast, a subtle body, with ourselves inseparably lodged in its belly
Hillman renders the instinct-imagination identity in vivid ontological terms, proposing that imagination is not a human faculty but a living animal reality within which consciousness is embedded.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
If you don’t have those governing bodies of imagination, if you don’t have an eternal, archetypal sense in the midst of the Now, then you don’t have any sense of where you are going… Jung said that instinct and images are the same thing. When you lose that sense of the essential images, then instinct is off.
Hillman draws the clinical and ethical consequences of the instinct-image identity: the loss of governing imaginal forms produces literal instinctual dysregulation, including aesthetic and moral disorientation.
, Senex & Puer, 2015supporting
To the extent that the archetypes intervene in the shaping of conscious contents by regulating, modifying, and motivating them, they act like the instincts. It is therefore very natural to suppose that these factors are connected with the instincts and to inquire whether the typical situational patterns which these collective form-principles apparently represent are not in the end identical with the instinctual patterns.
Chodorow documents Jung’s own tentative identification of archetypal patterns with instinctual patterns of behavior, supporting the theoretical unity of imagination and instinct.
, Jung on Active Imagination, 1997supporting
The primordial image is an inherited organization of psychic energy, an ingrained system, which not only gives expression to the energic process but facilitates its operation… It is thus the necessary counterpart of instinct
Jung’s Psychological Types establishes the primordial image as the indispensable cognitive complement to instinct, without which instinctual action lacks orientation and meaning.
, Psychological Types, 1921supporting
I had often observed patients whose dreams pointed to a rich store of fantasy-material… I therefore took up a dream-image or an association of the patient’s… The result of this technique was a vast number of complicated designs whose diversity puzzled me for years, until I was able to recognize that in this method I was witnessing the spontaneous manifestation of
Jung describes the clinical discovery of active imagination as the methodological access point to the instinctual image, treating fantasy elaboration as a spontaneous manifestation of instinctual patterning.
, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, 1955supporting
image(s): in active fantasy, 112; archetypal, 123; represents meaning of instinct, 111; symbolical, 100
The index entry for ‘image’ in Jung and Pauli explicitly codes the archetypal image as representing the meaning of instinct, confirming the systematic linkage throughout the text.
, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, 1955supporting
Jung states some basic thoughts concerning the relation of psychology to biology. He sets out ‘to establish clearly what seems to me to be the relation between instincts and the psyche.’
Hillman contextualizes Jung’s Harvard 1936 paper as the foundational text for the instinct-psyche relationship, situating the creative instinct within a broader biological framework.
, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972supporting
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 frames imagination as a primary channel of unconscious communication, implicitly granting it the functional status of an instinctual organ rather than a voluntary mental activity.
, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth, 1986supporting
The imagination is the intelligence that integrates and guides the creative transformation… Jean Paul Richter described the imagination as the ‘faculty of faculties,’ likening it to the process of pollination
McNiff situates imagination as the master-integrating intelligence of creative life, drawing on Romantic-era formulations that prefigure depth-psychological accounts of imagination as an autonomous, quasi-instinctual force.
, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting
Instinct is a difficult thing to define, for its configurations are invisible, and though we sense they have been part of human nature since the beginning of time, no one know
Estés acknowledges the definitional difficulty of instinct as an invisible configuration, gesturing toward the same imaginal-instinctual territory without fully theorizing the connection.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017aside
As the human loses personal connection with personified nature and personified instinct, the image of Pan and the image of the Devil merge
Hillman illustrates the pathological consequence of severing imaginal from instinctual life: when personified nature loses its archetypal image, instinct becomes demonized.
, Pan and the Nightmare, 1972aside