---
slug: hillman-active-imagination-f4d23bb9
title: "Hillman on Active Imagination"
author: "James Hillman"
work: "Archetypal Psychology"
section: ""
year: "1983"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - active-imagination
fragment: |
  Active imagination at times becomes the method of choice in therapy. There is direct perception of and engagement with an imaginary figure or figures. These figures with whom one converses or performs actions or which one depicts plastically are not conceived to be merely internal projections or only parts of the personality. They are given the respect and dignity due independent beings. They are imagined seriously, though not literally. Rather like Neoplatonic daimones, and like angels in Corbin's sense, their "between" reality is neither physical nor metaphysical, although just "as real as you - as a psychic entity - are real" (CW 14: 753). This development of true imaginative power (the vera imaginatio of Paracelsus; the himma of the heart of Corbin) and the ability to live one's life in the company of ghosts, familiars, ancestors, guides - the populace of the metaxy - are also aims of an archetypal therapy
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Hillman is not describing a technique here so much as a cosmology — or rather, he is insisting that any technique worth the name already assumes one. The figures met in active imagination are not symptoms wearing masks, not the ego's projections come home to roost. They arrive with their own gravity. To treat them as "parts of the personality" is to have already decided, before the encounter begins, that nothing genuinely other can show up in the interior. That is the pneumatic reflex: the self remains sovereign, the figures become material it processes.
  
  What Corbin's *himma* names — and what Paracelsus reached for with *vera imaginatio* — is something closer to receptivity as a cognitive act. The heart that imagines does not project outward and retrieve; it perceives in a register neither literal nor metaphorical, neither purely inner nor cosmologically external. The *metaxy* is that register. When Hillman places the aims of therapy there — living in the company of ghosts, familiars, ancestors, guides — he is proposing that psychic health has something to do with being porous enough to be accompanied. Not healed, not unified, not ascended. Accompanied. The populace is not a means to something beyond itself. It is what there is to inhabit.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The word "company" is doing the real work here — not "management," not "integration," not "understanding," but company, the ordinary word for those you keep. Hillman is proposing something genuinely strange to modern ears: that the goal of therapy is not to dissolve the inner figures into self-knowledge but to become a good neighbor to them, to learn their habits and honor their demands without collapsing them into pathology or projections. Corbin's himma — the heart's creative power to make images real through attention — points in the same direction: imagination here is not decorative but ontological, a faculty by which beings are summoned into genuine relation. The Jungian mainstream would resist this, preferring to treat the figures instrumentally, as messengers from the unconscious to be decoded and assimilated. Hillman refuses that assimilation. The metaxy, Plato's "between," is where we already live, whether we acknowledge it or not.
parent_id: Hillman_1983_Archetypal_Psychology__par0016
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Hillman writes:

> Active imagination at times becomes the method of choice in therapy. There is direct perception of and engagement with an imaginary figure or figures. These figures with whom one converses or performs actions or which one depicts plastically are not conceived to be merely internal projections or only parts of the personality. They are given the respect and dignity due independent beings. They are imagined seriously, though not literally. Rather like Neoplatonic daimones, and like angels in Corbin's sense, their "between" reality is neither physical nor metaphysical, although just "as real as you - as a psychic entity - are real" (CW 14: 753). This development of true imaginative power (the vera imaginatio of Paracelsus; the himma of the heart of Corbin) and the ability to live one's life in the company of ghosts, familiars, ancestors, guides - the populace of the metaxy - are also aims of an archetypal therapy

— James Hillman

Hillman is not describing a technique here so much as a cosmology — or rather, he is insisting that any technique worth the name already assumes one. The figures met in active imagination are not symptoms wearing masks, not the ego's projections come home to roost. They arrive with their own gravity. To treat them as "parts of the personality" is to have already decided, before the encounter begins, that nothing genuinely other can show up in the interior. That is the pneumatic reflex: the self remains sovereign, the figures become material it processes.

What Corbin's *himma* names — and what Paracelsus reached for with *vera imaginatio* — is something closer to receptivity as a cognitive act. The heart that imagines does not project outward and retrieve; it perceives in a register neither literal nor metaphorical, neither purely inner nor cosmologically external. The *metaxy* is that register. When Hillman places the aims of therapy there — living in the company of ghosts, familiars, ancestors, guides — he is proposing that psychic health has something to do with being porous enough to be accompanied. Not healed, not unified, not ascended. Accompanied. The populace is not a means to something beyond itself. It is what there is to inhabit.

---

James Hillman · *Archetypal Psychology* · 1983