Johnson describes active imagination as a technique that narrows the gap, brings warring parts together, moves the soul toward wholeness and totality. That vocabulary — wholeness, totality, the inner self — is doing more than technical work. It is already inside a specific promise: communicate deeply enough with what is inside you, and the suffering that comes from fragmentation will resolve. The path is toward something. The inner self is oriented upward.

This is not a criticism of the practice. Active imagination is genuinely strange and powerful work; Jung developed it partly through his own confrontation with figures that resisted his ego's authority, that refused to be dissolved into interpretation. The method has teeth. But the frame Johnson places around it inherits a very old grammar — the grammar that says interiority, practiced correctly, leads somewhere better. Peace. Cooperation. Wholeness. The soul, in this framing, is a conflict waiting to be resolved, a gap waiting to close.

What the practice may actually teach, and what Johnson's description does not quite say, is that the inner figures do not cooperate. They have their own agendas. The ego does not achieve peace with them so much as it stops pretending to be in charge. That is a different destination than wholeness — less tidy, less consoling, and more accurate to what people actually encounter when they sit down and let the images speak.