Phenomenology Of Image

The phenomenology of image occupies a contested but fertile crossroads within the depth-psychology corpus, where the question is not merely what images are but how they present themselves — their mode of appearance, their claim on consciousness, and their resistance to reduction. James Hillman insists that images must be received on their own terms, as autonomous psychic realities rather than signs pointing elsewhere: the image contains everything it needs, and psychological work consists in ‘sticking to the image’ rather than translating it into concept. Patricia Berry refines this into a doctrine of imagistic virginity — the image’s inherent resistance to penetration and allegorization. Robert Bosnak pushes further into the body, arguing that from the standpoint of dreaming, an image is an environment, a quasi-physical presence that reorganizes bodily states. Gaston Bachelard’s material phenomenology of elemental imagination stands in the background, as does Henry Corbin’s account of the mundus imaginalis as an ontologically intermediate realm disclosed through imaginative vision. Against these imagocentric positions, Wolfgang Giegerich mounts a rigorous critique: the imaginal approach, however sophisticated, remains bound to pictorial thinking and cannot grasp that one thing can be in itself the opposite of itself. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of perception and body image provides the cognitive-scientific horizon against which depth-psychological claims about image must be evaluated. The tension between welcoming the image as soul-presence and sublating it into thought defines the central polarity of this literature.

In the library 17 passages

Resistance is necessary for the virginal integrity of the body of the image. Image is a body—a psychic body that holds tension and supports being. Though we foolishly interpret, simplistically allegorize, reduce meanings to symbols and signs, the image remains—never changing, never yielding.

Berry argues that the image is an autonomous psychic body whose phenomenal integrity resists all reductive interpretation, constituting its own irreducible mode of presence.

Berry, Patricia, Echo’s Subtle Body: Contributions to an Archetypal Psychology, 1982thesis

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From the point of view of dreaming perception, an image is a place, an environment in which we find ourselves… the image is of a quasi-physical nature, presenting itself as if it were physical. This quasi-physical environment creates strong responses in the body, embodied states.

Bosnak proposes a somatic phenomenology of the image in which images are experienced not as mental pictures but as quasi-physical environments that alter the body’s state.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007thesis

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This is a point where the limitations of the imaginal approach become obvious. Because modern man… is more or less completely under the spell of imagination, perception and pictorial thinking, he has to split what belongs together.

Giegerich critiques the phenomenology of image as inherently limited by its bondage to pictorial thinking, which prevents comprehension of self-contradictory logical structures in the soul.

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

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psyche becomes aware by means of an imaginal method: the ostentation of images, a parade of fantasies as imagination bodies forth its

Hillman defines the imaginal method as the soul’s own mode of self-knowledge through the display of images, positioning the phenomenology of image as the ground of psychological epistemology.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis

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Rather than interrogating images and trying to decipher ‘what they mean,’ I suggest welcoming them and simply reflecting on their expressive qualities, saying something about what we see and how we feel in their presence.

McNiff articulates a receptive phenomenological stance toward images that foregrounds their expressive presence rather than their symbolic content.

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

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as thought in visible form… contains everything it needs… ‘Image is soul’… we must stick to the image

Giegerich’s index condenses the core axioms of depth-psychological image phenomenology — image as soul, image as self-sufficient thought — while signalling his own move to sublate them.

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

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The closer we get to an image-presence, the more it becomes an environment in which we find ourselves. We are pulled into the presence and participate in its medium. This is the literal meaning of the word ekstasis, a movement outside of our selves.

Bosnak phenomenologically describes the image as an intensifying field of presence that dissolves the boundary between subject and environment through ekstatic participation.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007supporting

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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 proposes that images are perceived instinctually rather than cognitively, framing the phenomenology of image in terms of an embodied, animal mode of apprehension.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting

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The thought of the heart is physiognomic. To perceive, it must imagine. It must see shapes, forms, faces — angels, demons, creatures of every sort in things of any kind; thereby the heart’s thought personifies, ensouls, and animates the world.

Hillman advances a physiognomic phenomenology in which perception is always already imaginal, seeing soul-figures in the faces of things.

Hillman, James, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, 1992supporting

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The mode of presence conferred by the imaginative power (hudûr khayalî) is by no means an inferior mode or an illusion; it signifies to see directly what cannot be seen by the senses, to be a truthful witness.

Corbin grounds a positive phenomenology of image in the Sufi concept of imaginative presence, asserting that imaginal vision is a superior mode of direct witness rather than a deficient substitute for sensory perception.

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

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there is an attempt to respect each image, stay with it, and give it the opportunity to reveal itself over time. My intention while sitting with a picture is to suspend judgment

McNiff applies a bracketing procedure analogous to phenomenological epoché to the clinical encounter with art images, suspending interpretive judgment to allow the image to disclose itself.

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

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Whatever I perceive from without or within is a representation or image, a psychic entity caused, as I rightly or wrongly assume, by a corresponding ‘real’ object. But I have to admit that my subjective image is only grosso modo identical with the object.

Jung, as cited by Edinger, formulates the epistemological premise underlying depth psychology’s phenomenology of image: all perception is mediated by psychic image, which approximates but never coincides with its object.

Edinger, Edward F., The New God-Image: A Study of Jung’s Key Letters Concerning the Evolution of the Western God-Image, 1996supporting

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When the term body image was first used, it was thought that nothing more was being introduced than a convenient name for a great many associations of images… Yet in the use made of it by psychologists, it is clear that the body image does not fit into this associationist definition.

Merleau-Ponty critiques the reduction of body image to associative mental pictures, establishing the phenomenological ground for understanding image as a pre-reflective structural schema rather than a representational content.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962supporting

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Soul as tertium, the perspective between others and from which others may be viewed… as the position of the mundus imaginalis by Corbin

Hillman locates the phenomenology of image within a Neoplatonic ontology in which the imaginal realm constitutes a tertium between matter and spirit, grounded in Corbin’s concept of the mundus imaginalis.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting

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the possibility for revisioning and enhancing who we are lies within the events of each case history, if we learn to read it as a fiction and its events as images of Memoria

Hillman extends imaginal phenomenology to narrative, arguing that case histories become psychologically alive when their events are received as images rather than factual reports.

Hillman, James, Healing Fiction, 1983aside

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Static phenomenology analyzes the formal structures of consciousness, whereby consciousness is able to constitute (disclose or bring to awareness) its objects… Genetic phenomenology is concerned with how these intentional structures and objects emerge through time.

Thompson’s exposition of Husserlian static and genetic phenomenology provides the philosophical scaffolding against which depth-psychological claims about image phenomenology can be evaluated methodologically.

Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007aside

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the form of every theophany is correlative to the form of the consciousness to which it discloses itself

Corbin’s account of theophanic correlation — that image-form corresponds to the form of the perceiving consciousness — underpins the depth-psychological claim that image phenomenology is irreducibly perspectival and personal.

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

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