How to do active imagination?

Active imagination is Jung's most distinctive clinical method — not a visualization exercise, not guided meditation, not passive daydream, but a disciplined encounter between the waking ego and the autonomous figures of the unconscious. The method has a specific structure, and the structure matters.

The Starting Point

You begin with something already alive in you: a dream image that stayed with you, a mood you cannot shake, a fantasy that keeps returning, a bodily sensation that carries emotional weight. This is the raw material — what Chodorow (1997) calls "the emotionally toned complex," the unconscious counterposition that has already formed in response to some one-sidedness in conscious life. You do not invent a starting point; you find one that is already pressing.

Jung's instruction to Count Keyserling, written in 1931, remains the clearest practical account of how to begin:

Switch off your noisy consciousness and listen quietly inwards and look at the images that appear before your inner eye, or hearken to the words which the muscles of your speech apparatus are trying to form. Write down what then comes without criticism. Images should be drawn or painted assiduously no matter whether you can do it or not.

The instruction is precise: silence the editorial function, attend to what arises, and give it form immediately — in writing, drawing, paint, clay, movement, whatever medium the material calls for.

The Critical Distinction: Active vs. Passive

The single most important thing to understand is what makes this imagination active. Passive fantasy — worry, daydream, the "internal cinema" that runs in the background — also presents images from the unconscious, but the ego does not enter. It watches. Nothing is resolved; the same fantasies repeat themselves until they exhaust the person who hosts them.

Active imagination requires the ego to go in. Johnson (1986) puts it plainly:

The essence of Active Imagination is your conscious participation in the imaginative experience. This kind of imagination is active because the ego actually goes into the inner world, walks and talks, confronts and argues, makes friends with or fights with the persons it finds there.

Von Franz illustrates the difference with a clinical vignette: an analysand described an imagination in which a lion approached her and then "turned into a ship." Jung interrupted — "Nonsense. When a lion comes toward you, you have a reaction. You don't just wait around and watch until the lion turns into a ship!" The woman had no reaction because she was still holding the whole thing at arm's length, thinking in some corner of her mind that it was "only fantasy." That distance is precisely what active imagination refuses (von Franz, 1993).

The Forms

Jung recognized early that different psychological types engage the method through different sensory channels. Visual types concentrate until an inner image appears. Audio-verbal types listen for inner words or fragments of sentences. Those whose hands carry unconscious knowledge work in clay, stone, or construction. Feeling types — particularly those for whom feeling is the inferior function — sometimes find that the body itself must take the active part: dance, movement, rhythm (von Franz, 1993). Tina Keller, an early analysand of Jung's, described dancing an inner experience of being trapped inside stone until she stood "liberated" — and found it "much more potent than the hours in which we only talked" (Chodorow, 1997).

The form is not arbitrary. Von Franz observes that the choice of medium tends to reveal the inferior function: the intuitive type reaches for clay to make the invisible tangible; the thinking type may find that only movement can carry what thinking cannot hold. The medium is itself diagnostic.

The Dialogue

Once the image or figure is present and the ego has entered the field, the work becomes dialogical. You speak to the figure. You ask it what it wants, why it is here, what it is afraid of. You take a position — you do not simply comply with whatever the figure demands, nor do you dismiss it. The ego must remain present as a conscious ethical agent. This is what separates active imagination from possession: the "I" stays in the room.

The dialogue is not verbal only. It is a genuine exchange — of viewpoints, of resistance, of negotiation. What emerges from sustained engagement is what Jung called the transcendent function: the capacity of the psyche to move from a state of inner conflict toward a new symbolic position that neither the ego nor the unconscious figure could have reached alone. Tozzi (2017) describes this as "the construction of a bridge between ego-consciousness and the unconscious" — a bridge that rises above the abyss between the two sides of the psyche without collapsing either into the other.

The Obligation Afterward

Active imagination does not end when the session ends. Johnson (1986) insists that what is discovered must be honored by translation into concrete life — some small, actual act that acknowledges what the inner figure asked for. Without this, the work remains merely aesthetic. The Japanese artist figure in one of his clinical examples demanded ceramics, flowers, time with physical materials; the woman had to actually begin a ceramics class. The imagination had made a claim, and the claim required a response in the world.

What to Watch For

Two dangers attend the practice. The first is identification: being swept into the image so completely that the ego dissolves and the figure takes over. This is inflation — the characteristic feature of pathological engagement, where the ego is possessed rather than in dialogue (Papadopoulos, 2006). The second is the opposite: maintaining such careful distance that nothing actually happens, the "just fantasy" attitude that von Franz's lion story names precisely. The practice lives in the narrow channel between these two failures — full presence without merger.

Von Franz (1975) names the ethical dimension that holds this channel open:

Active imagination 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.

The method is not safe in the sense of being comfortable. It is safe in the sense that the ego, held in ethical seriousness, can sustain what arises without being destroyed by it — and can begin to grow from the encounter.

  • active imagination — the full conceptual entry on the method, its history, and its place in individuation
  • the transcendent function — the psychic function active imagination is designed to activate
  • James Hillman — his critique of active imagination's institutionalization and the archetypal alternative
  • Marie-Louise von Franz — her clinical account of the method and its relation to the inferior function

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1973, Letters Volume 1: 1906–1950
  • Chodorow, Joan, 1997, Jung on Active Imagination
  • Johnson, Robert A., 1986, Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1975, C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1993, Psychotherapy
  • Tozzi, Chiara, 2017, Active Imagination in Theory, Practice and Training
  • Papadopoulos, Renos K., 2006, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology