Active Imagination may seem too simple or naive to be taken seriously as a psychological technique: It consists in going to the images that rise up in one's imagination and making a dialogue with them. It involves an encounter with the images. The conscious ego-mind actually enters into the imagination and takes part in it. This often means a spoken conversation with the figures who present themselves, but it also involves entering into the action, the adventure or conflict that is spinning its story out in one's imagination. It is this awareness, this conscious participation in the imaginal event, that transforms it from mere passive fantasy to Active Imagination. The coming together of conscious mind and unconscious mind on the common ground of the imaginal plane gives us an opportunity to break down some of the barriers that separate the ego from the unconscious, to set up a genuine flow of communication between the two levels of the psyche, to resolve some of our neurotic conflicts with the unconscious, and thus to learn more about who we are as individuals. Because of the popular notion that imagination is fictitious, many people react automatically by thinking that such an experience in the imagination would be meaningless. They think, "I would just be talking to myself." But if we work with Active Imagination we soon confirm that we dialogue with genuine interior parts of our own selves. We confront the powerful personalities who live inside us at the unconscious level and who are so often in conflict with our conscious ideas and behavior. We actually enter into the dynamics of the unconscious: We travel into a region where the conscious mind had not known how to go. This experience, to be sure, is symbolic. The images with whom we interact are symbols, and we encounter them on a symbolic plane of existence. But a magical principle is at work: When we experience the images, we also directly experience the inner parts of ourselves that are clothed in the images. This is the power of symbolic experience in the human psyche when it is entered into consciously: Its intensity and its effect on us is often as concrete as a physical experience would be. Its power to realign our attitudes, teach us and change us at deep levels, is much greater than that of external events that we may pass through without noticing. When we experience the symbol, we simultaneously experience the complex, the archetype, the inner psychic entity that is represented by the symbol. When the image speaks, it is with one of our own inner voices. When we answer back, it is the unseen inner part of our own self that listens and registers. It stands before us in the form of the imaginal image. In Active Imagination I am not so much "talking to myself" as talking to one of my selves. It is in that exchange between the ego and the various characters who rise up from the unconscious and appear in my imagination that I begin to bind the fragmented pieces of myself into a unity. I begin to know, and learn from, the parts of myself I had never known before.
— Robert A. Johnson
Johnson is arguing against dismissal — the "just talking to myself" objection — and he wins that argument easily. The images that appear in active imagination are not inventions of the ego; they have their own weight, their own resistance, their own refusals. Anyone who has tried the practice discovers quickly that the figures do not cooperate, do not flatter, do not simply agree. That autonomy is the evidence.
But listen to where Johnson's account tends: toward unity, toward binding the fragmented pieces into a whole. The imaginal encounter, as he frames it, moves the soul toward integration, toward learning who we are as individuals. This is the pneumatic undertow — not Johnson's error exactly, but the inherited current inside which the whole tradition of active imagination tends to float. Spirit promises that the encounter will cohere, will resolve, will teach. And sometimes it does. The question the images rarely get asked is whether they *want* to be integrated, whether the figure who lives below the threshold has any interest in becoming a managed piece of your individuation project.
What active imagination actually delivers, when practiced without the integrative teleology, is something stranger: contact with an interiority that does not share your agenda. The image speaks. It is not necessarily speaking in the service of your wholeness.
Robert A. Johnson·Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth·1986