Creative imagination

Creative imagination names the cognitive-ontological power by which the psyche encounters and generates images that are neither mere fantasy nor abstract concept but belong to an intermediate order of reality — what Corbin, following the Iranian Sufi masters, called the mundus imaginalis, the ʿālam al-mithāl. To understand what depth psychology means by creative imagination, you have to follow the lineage: Jung discovers the method, Corbin supplies the metaphysics, Hillman psychologizes the whole into a therapeutic practice.

Jung's starting point was empirical. Reflecting on his own active imagination — the sustained waking encounter with autonomous psychic figures that produced Liber Novus — he wrote:

My most fundamental views and ideas derive from these experiences. First I made the observations and only then did I hammer out my views. And so it is with the hand that guides the crayon or brush, the foot that executes the dance-step, with the eye and the ear, with the word and the thought: a dark impulse is the ultimate arbiter of the pattern, an unconscious 'a priori' precipitates itself into plastic form.

The phrase "dark impulse" is precise: creative imagination is not willed production. It is the psyche's own image-making capacity operating through the ego rather than being directed by it. Jung distinguished this sharply from passive fantasy — daydreaming, drift, wish-fulfillment — by insisting on the ego's alert, ethical presence in the encounter. The imagination is active because the ego chooses to attend, to question, to respond; it is creative because what arises is genuinely new, not a rearrangement of conscious contents.

Joan Chodorow, gathering Jung's own formulations, draws the distinction cleanly: creative imagination is turned toward the creation of cultural forms — religion, art, philosophy, society — while active imagination is turned toward the re-creation of the personality. The underlying process is the same; the intent differs. Both involve what Jung called the transcendent function: the tension of opposites held until a reconciling symbol precipitates, a symbol that is neither the ego's position nor the unconscious compensation but something genuinely third.

Corbin's contribution was to give this process an ontological address. The mundus imaginalis is not a metaphor for the unconscious; it is a distinct plane of being, situated between sense perception and pure intellection, where theophanies occur and visionary forms subsist. Corbin's reading of Ibn ʿArabī locates the generative act within this plane:

Creation is an act of the divine imaginative power: this divine creative imagination is essentially a theophanic Imagination.

The human faculty that operates within this plane is himma — the heart's concentrated creative power, which does not invent forms from nothing but precipitates into appearance what already subsists in a higher Presence. Imagination, on this account, is not a lesser faculty subordinate to reason; it is the organ of cognition proper to the intermediate world, as legitimate as sense or intellect in its own domain.

Hillman received this from Corbin directly, at Eranos, and the transmission was decisive. He described Corbin's cosmology as one that "refuses any chasm between psyche and world," and he took from it the insistence that images are not representations of something else — not symbols to be decoded, not signs pointing toward a concept — but primary realities to be inhabited. As Russell records Hillman's formulation: Jungian dialogues in active imagination are "a form of prayer. In other words, it's realizing that the figures you engage with are numinous, not only pieces of your complexes." The imaginal world is where matter and spirit meet and make their claim on the soul in the images that mediate their messages.

Yet Hillman and Corbin diverge here in a way that matters. Corbin's theophanic imagination is ultimately oriented toward divine unity, toward the Angel who is both source and goal of the soul's journey. Hillman pathologizes downward: the via regia into the imaginal runs through the macabre, the miserable, the absurd — precisely the images Corbin would have excluded as secularized distortions. Hillman's resolution is to practice Jung's technique with Corbin's vision: active imagination not for the sake of the practitioner's actions in the literal world, but for the sake of the images themselves and where they can take the soul.

What this lineage establishes is that creative imagination is not a psychological technique among others. It is the mode of cognition by which the soul inhabits its proper intermediate domain — neither the literal world of sense nor the abstract world of pure intellect, but the imaginal world where depth work actually occurs. The pneumatic temptation — to use imagination as a ladder toward transcendence, toward unity, toward the higher self — is precisely what both Hillman and the Corbin-Jung axis resist. Creative imagination descends into image; it does not ascend out of it.

  • mundus imaginalis — the ontologically real intermediate order where theophanies occur and imaginal forms subsist
  • active imagination — Jung's method of sustained waking encounter with autonomous psychic figures
  • Henry Corbin — French scholar of Islamic mysticism whose recovery of the mundus imaginalis shaped archetypal psychology
  • James Hillman — founder of archetypal psychology and the primary transmitter of Corbin's imaginal vision into depth practice

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 2009, The Red Book: Liber Novus
  • Corbin, Henry, 1969, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi
  • Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
  • Hillman, James, 1989, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman
  • Hillman, James, 2007, Mythic Figures
  • Chodorow, Joan, 1997, Jung on Active Imagination
  • Russell, Dick, 2023, Life and Ideas of James Hillman
  • Papadopoulos, Renos K., 2006, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology