Robert Bosnak

Robert Bosnak is a Dutch Jungian psychoanalyst whose work centers on dream as the paradigm case of creative-imagination and on the clinical extension of active-imagination into somatic registers. Trained in Zurich, in private practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts for twenty-five years, and later in Sydney, Australia, Bosnak names his method embodied-imagination — a practice derived from Jung’s active imagination but reconceived around the dream image’s physicality rather than its semantic content.

His intellectual lineage is explicit. In Embodiment (2007), Bosnak credits private conversations with henry-corbin along the banks of the Lago Maggiore in the early 1970s as the formative encounter. Corbin’s lament about “the metaphysical tragedy involved … in the disappearance of the world of … substantive Images, whose organ of knowledge was the active Imagination” became, over decades, Bosnak’s clinical thesis: the “self-organizing multiplicity of selves” of the dream can be re-entered in a hypnagogic state and engaged as a field of embodied presences (Bosnak 2007).

Bosnak sits in the post-Jungian archetypal lineage without membership in james-hillman‘s school. Where Hillman resists interpretation in the name of the image, Bosnak resists interpretation in the name of the body. The practice is closer to a phenomenology of dream-embodiment than to a hermeneutic of dream-meaning. The result is a method teachable to clinicians outside analytic training — clinical psychologists, artists, bodyworkers — that nonetheless holds fast to the autonomy of the image and the reality of the mundus-imaginalis.

Key concepts

• embodied-imagination
• active-imagination
• creative-imagination
• mundus-imaginalis
• dream

Major works

• bosnak-embodiment
• A Little Course in Dreams