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William Blake
Poet, painter, and visionary · 1757–1827
William Blake was the English poet, painter, and visionary whose work insists that imagination is not fantasy but the primary organ of perception. His Marriage of Heaven and Hell declares that contraries are necessary for progression — a principle Jung would later formalize as the union of opposites. Blake's visionary method, in which he conversed with spiritual figures and recorded what they said, directly parallels Jung's active imagination.
Key Works
- The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
- Songs of Innocence and Experience
- Jerusalem
What Does Blake Mean by “Without Contraries Is No Progression”?
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, composed around 1790, overturns every moral dualism that Christianity had established. Blake does not argue that evil is good or that Hell is preferable to Heaven. He argues that the division itself is the error — that “Energy” and “Reason,” body and soul, desire and restraint are not enemies but contraries whose interaction generates all creative life. “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.”
Jung recognized this principle as the psychological law of enantiodromia — the tendency of any extreme to generate its opposite — and as the precondition for the coniunctio, the union of opposites that constitutes wholeness (Jung, CW 6). In Psychological Types, Jung positioned Blake among the visionary intuitives who grasped the structure of the psyche through image rather than concept (Jung, CW 6). Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” — “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” “Exuberance is beauty” — are not moral prescriptions but phenomenological observations about how psychic energy actually moves.
Was Blake Practicing Active Imagination Before Jung Named It?
Blake claimed to see and converse with spiritual figures throughout his life. He dictated poems from visionary encounters, painted what he saw in states of inspired perception, and insisted that imagination was more real than the sensory world. This is not psychosis. It is precisely what Jung would later call active imagination — the deliberate engagement with autonomous figures of the unconscious, treated as real interlocutors rather than projections to be dismissed (Jung, CW 9i).
Hillman considered Blake a psychologist before psychology existed (Hillman, 1975). In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman argued that Blake’s fourfold vision — seeing through the literal to the imaginal — is the essential move of archetypal psychology. Blake’s work demonstrates that the imaginal is not a retreat from reality but a deeper engagement with it, a capacity that convergence psychology recognizes as central to the therapeutic encounter.
Sources Cited
- Jung, C.G. (1921). Psychological Types (CW 6). Princeton University Press.
- Jung, C.G. (1969). The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (CW 9i). Princeton University Press.
- Hillman, James (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper & Row.