Active Imagination as the Cross-Traditional Axis

Active imagination is the single practice by which the Western tradition of taking the soul seriously names one operation across twenty-five centuries. The vocabulary shifts; the operation does not. In Plato’s Phaedrus the soul’s winged beholding of the intelligible is phantasia as cognitive organ. In the Corpus Hermeticum it is nous as imaginal perception. In the alchemists’ Latin it is imaginatio-vera — the vera imaginatio et non phantastica that the Tavistock Lectures invoke by name (Jung, CW 18). In Ibn ‘Arabi and suhrawardi it is the creative-imagination of the heart, apprehending the mundus-imaginalis through himma-as-creative-imagination. In Jung it is active-imagination, the method of Liber Novus and the Tavistock Lectures. In james-hillman it is sticking with the image — image-as-psyche refusing interpretive consummation. In robert-bosnak it is embodied-imagination, the dream re-entered as physical environment.

What differs is the posture of the ego within the operation. Jung’s active imagination serves the transcendent-function and the ego-Self axis; the image is met so that a uniting symbol may be born. Hillman’s imaginal work serves the image itself; the image is met so that soul may be deepened, not so that meaning may be captured. Corbin’s creative imagination serves the theophanic apparition; the image is met because it is the mode in which the divine is seen. Bosnak’s embodied imagination serves the dream body’s reintegration; the image is met because it has a body of its own.

What remains constant is what Jung, at the decisive moment with philemon, named psychic objectivity — “there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life” (Jung, MDR, pp. 182–83, cited in Johnson 1986). The autonomy of the image is the tradition’s single recurring discovery, and active imagination is the name under which the modern Jungian register contributes its recovery of it.

Sources

• carl-jung: active imagination as the recovered imaginatio vera of the alchemists; the Tavistock Lectures’ direct citation
• henry-corbin: active Imagination as the organ of the mundus imaginalis; Suhrawardi and Ibn ‘Arabi as primary ground
• james-hillman: image as psyche; the refusal of interpretive translation; soul-making through imagistic fidelity
• marie-louise-von-franz: the four phases; the warning about the fictive ego
• robert-bosnak: embodied imagination dedicated in memory of Corbin
• robert-a-johnson: active imagination as continuation of the dream; the four-step practitioner manual