How to do active imagination step by step?

Active imagination is not a technique in the ordinary sense — Jung himself insisted he was "not propounding methods of treatment" but describing something that actually happens in the psyche (Jung 1947, par. 402). What the steps below describe is how to create the conditions in which a natural psychic process can unfold, and how to meet it with the right quality of attention when it does.

Step One: Empty the mind and invite the unconscious

Von Franz, who gave the most systematic account of the stages, calls the first phase letting things happen — a deliberate emptying of the ego's habitual chatter, what Jung borrowed from Taoism as wu wei, doing-by-not-doing.

Phase 1 of active imagination can be defined as letting things happen. A deliberate emptying of one's mind, which Jung defined as doing-by-not-doing, a receptive abandonment, an inclination to opening up to images characterized by unselfconsciousness, and devoid of conscious controls, corrections, and denials.

Set aside twenty to thirty minutes in a private space. Begin with a dream image, a mood, a bodily sensation, or a figure that has been recurring — anything that carries psychic charge. Hold it in attention without forcing it anywhere. The ego's job at this stage is receptivity, not direction.

Step Two: Let the image move and follow it

Once an image surfaces, allow it to develop autonomously. This is the critical distinction between active imagination and passive fantasy: you are present as a conscious witness, not a spectator who drifts. Johnson describes the shift precisely — the moment a person stops watching the fantasy from outside and begins to participate in it as an independent ego-force is the moment active imagination begins (Johnson 1986). If a figure appears, ask who it is, what it wants. If it moves, follow. Write everything down as it happens; the physical act of writing anchors consciousness and prevents the ego from dissolving into the stream.

Step Three: Record the encounter

Von Franz's third phase is the careful documentation of the images as they transform — through writing, drawing, painting, sculpture, movement, or music. Jung himself used pen and ink; Tina Keller danced her inner experience with Toni Wolff as witness; Jung speculated late in life that Bach's Art of Fugue might be active imagination in musical form (Jung 1955, par. 754). The form matters less than the commitment to give the encounter tangible shape. Recording is not merely practical — it is the act by which the unconscious content is received into consciousness rather than simply passing through it.

Step Four: The ethical confrontation

This is what distinguishes active imagination from meditation, from lucid dreaming, from any other practice that opens toward the unconscious. Von Franz is unambiguous:

An alert, wakeful confrontation with the contents of the unconscious is the very essence of active imagination. This calls for an ethical commitment in relation to the manifestations from within, otherwise one falls prey to the power principle and the exercise in imagination is destructive both to others and to the subject.

You do not simply receive what the unconscious offers — you respond to it from your own standpoint, with your own values. If an inner figure proposes something that violates your ethical sense, say so. The dialogue is between equals: the ego does not capitulate, and it does not dominate. Tozzi names this the moment when "the opposing psychic levels of consciousness and the unconscious will dialogue and interact with one another within a framework that concerns both of them and contributes to a mutual solution" (Tozzi 2017). This is the activation of what Jung called the transcendent function — the living symbol that emerges from the tension between the two positions.

Step Five: Live it

Von Franz added a fifth stage that Chodorow rightly emphasizes: apply it to ordinary life (Chodorow 1997). Whatever the active imagination disclosed carries an ethical obligation. If a figure revealed a vocation, a wound, a demand — the ego is responsible for integrating that into actual choices and behavior. Without this step, the work remains aesthetically interesting but psychologically inert.

A practical caution. Active imagination should not be attempted by someone in acute psychological crisis or with a poorly consolidated ego — the danger of identification with the archetypal figures is real, and what Jung called "inflation" (being possessed by the content rather than in dialogue with it) is not a metaphor but a clinical risk. For most people, beginning in the context of analysis is the wisest approach.

Sources Cited

  • Von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1975, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time
  • Tozzi, Chiara, 2017, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training
  • Chodorow, Joan, 1997, Jung on Active Imagination
  • Johnson, Robert A., 1986, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth
  • Jung, Carl Gustav, 2009, The Red Book: Liber Novus