Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung

Name: Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung
Author: Barbara Hannah

Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung is a work by Barbara Hannah (1981).

Core claims

Hannah’s book demonstrates that active imagination is not a visualization technique but a disciplined ethical encounter requiring the ego to hold its ground against autonomous psychic contents — a distinction most subsequent popularizations have entirely collapsed.
By presenting extended case examples (Edward, Anna Marjula, and the literary analyses of figures like the Brontës), Hannah reveals that active imagination functions as a form of mythopoetic participation rather than introspection, placing it closer to Jung’s Red Book experiments than to any therapeutic “method.”
The book’s most radical claim — largely overlooked — is that active imagination can fail catastrophically when the ego either inflates into identification with archetypal contents or deflates into passive spectatorship, making it a practice defined as much by its dangers as by its therapeutic potential.

How does Hannah’s insistence on ego-strength as a prerequisite for active imagination challenge Hillman’s call in Re-Visioning Psychology to dissolve ego-centrism in favor of soul-making through archetypal multiplicity?
In what ways does Hannah’s analysis of the Brontës as cases of failed active imagination anticipate Marion Woodman’s account in Addiction to Perfection of creative women destroyed by unlived archetypal energies, and where do the two frameworks diverge?
How does Hannah’s description of the ego’s ethical confrontation with autonomous psychic figures compare to Edinger’s structural model of the ego-Self axis in Ego and Archetype, particularly regarding the phenomenology of inflation and alienation?