The Imaginal Is Not the Imaginary

The single most consequential distinction Corbin made for depth psychology: the imaginal is not the imaginary. The imaginary, in Western philosophical usage, names the fictive, the unreal, the merely mental. The imaginal — ʿālam al-mithāl, rendered by Corbin as mundus-imaginalis — names an ontologically real order of being.

Corbin insisted on the Latin neologism precisely because no existing English or French word carried the weight. To call the imaginal “imaginary” is to collapse a metaphysical order into a mental fiction. The image in the imaginal sense is encountered, not invented. hurqalya has geography. The man-of-light is met, not imagined. Theophany, in Corbin’s Ibn ʿArabī, is the manifestation of the Necessary Being in a form belonging to the “Imaginative Presence,” through a power “put into effect by Prayer” (Corbin, Alone with the Alone 1969).

This distinction is what archetypal-psychology-charter inherited and what allows the Lineage to speak of the archetypal image as ontologically real without lapsing into literalism. Hillman’s therapeutic aim — “the restoration of the patient to imaginal realities… the development of a sense of soul, the middle ground of psychic realities” (Hillman, Archetypal Psychology 1983) — is comprehensible only if the imaginal is granted its own ontology. Otherwise the middle ground collapses into either the sensory or the conceptual, and depth psychology loses its native country.

Sources

• henry-corbin: the imaginal is the country of theophany, with its own organ of perception (Alone with the Alone 1969).
• james-hillman: the imaginal is the “middle ground of psychic realities” toward which therapy restores the patient (Archetypal Psychology 1983).
• Tom Cheetham (cited in Russell 2023): Corbin’s project was “to loosen the grip of dogmatic monotheism on Western consciousness by disclosing the polytheistic faces of Divinity.”