Jung on Active Imagination

Name: Jung on Active Imagination
Author: Joan Chodorow

Jung on Active Imagination is a work by Joan Chodorow (1997).

Core claims

Chodorow’s anthology reveals that active imagination is not a technique Jung invented but a name he gave to the psyche’s own integrative function — and this distinction, buried across forty years of scattered papers, becomes visible only when the texts are finally assembled in sequence.
The book demonstrates that Jung’s two-stage model of active imagination (letting the unconscious come up, then coming to terms with it) maps directly onto the tension between aesthetic formulation and scientific understanding — making the method itself a lived enactment of the transcendent function rather than a mere preparation for it.
By recovering Tina Keller’s testimony of dancing active imagination under Toni Wolff’s witness, Chodorow restores embodied expression to the center of Jungian method and retroactively legitimizes the entire field of dance/movement psychotherapy as indigenous to analytical psychology rather than a later graft.

How does Chodorow’s distinction between the transcendent function as inborn process and active imagination as method compare to Edinger’s account of the ego-Self axis in Ego and Archetype — and does active imagination presuppose a particular developmental stage of that axis?
In what ways does Hillman’s critique of ego-centered psychology in Re-Visioning Psychology challenge Chodorow’s presentation of the ethical second stage of active imagination, where the ego must “come to terms with” unconscious contents rather than simply witness them?
How does Winnicott’s concept of transitional space in Playing and Reality deepen or complicate Jung’s claim — as presented by Chodorow — that symbolic play is the dynamic principle underlying all creative and therapeutic imagination?