Harding Applies Active Imagination to the Feminine Predicament

Across the-way-of-all-women, Esther Harding takes the technique Jung named active-imagination in Two Essays and applies it specifically to the woman’s confrontation with the ghostly-lover and the unredeemed animus. The technique is Jung’s; the application is Harding’s, and the application is what made the book possible.

The pivotal passage is Harding’s quotation of Jung directly: “this is the direct opposite of succumbing to a mood, which is so typical of neurosis. It is no weakness, no spineless surrender, but a hard achievement, the essence of which consists in keeping your objectivity despite the temptations of the mood, and in making the mood your object, instead of allowing it to become in you the dominating subject” (Jung, Two Essays, par. 348, in Harding 1970, p. 63). Harding then offers the case material — a woman whose animus projection onto a man has been broken, who undertakes the work of letting her mood speak in fantasy, and whose visionary material (the four knights, the bowl, the central flame) Harding reads as the libido released from projection now activating the primordial images of the unconscious.

The thread matters because it locates Harding precisely in the Lineage. She is not a theorist who innovates around Jung; she is a practitioner who takes Jung’s most demanding technique and shows what it looks like when the patient is a woman and the projection is onto a man. The transformation she describes — Ghostly Lover → spiritual animus → mediator between conscious and unconscious — is the architecture of feminine individuation she would spend her life elaborating.

Sources

• esther-harding: the woman who holds the mood and follows its fantasy releases the libido bound in the Ghostly Lover projection (Harding 1970, p. 63)
• carl-jung: the technique of active imagination, named in Two Essays (cited by Harding)