Active imagination is in fact a dialogue between the ego and the unconscious, a powerful and efficient method to turn the gaze towards the invisible world of our inner being. It's a central psychological and self-reflective inclination that promotes the use of the symbolic function in the internal encounter with the Other. Given the space and form to the implicit tension in the contrast of divergent positions, active imagination proposes the creation of unified symbols, that in the containment and transcendence of both opposites, can indicate new possibilities and facilitate the process of individuation.
— Chiara Tozzi
Tozzi's framing is precise about the method but conceals a pressure point worth naming: the phrase "unified symbols" carries a gravitational pull toward resolution, and resolution is where the work most easily goes wrong. The individuation process, in Jung's own rendering, does not pacify the tension between opposites — it holds them long enough that something genuinely third emerges, and that third thing is not peace. It is a symbol, which means it is living, unstable, still charged. When the emphasis falls on "transcendence of both opposites," there is a risk that the ego hears permission to leave the conflict behind rather than to deepen its relationship to it.
Active imagination works when the ego stays in contact with what it encounters — stays curious, stays present, does not manage the Other into something tolerable. The inner figures that arrive in this work tend to want recognition more than resolution. They do not come to be unified; they come to be heard. The symbol that eventually forms is not a merger but a third voice that could not have spoken before both the ego and the Other had actually shown up and refused to flinch. That refusal — neither collapsing into the unconscious nor retreating into rational distance — is the discipline the method actually requires.
Chiara Tozzi·Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training·2017