Active imagination

Active imagination refers to a process or technique of engaging with the ideas or imaginings of one's mind.
It is used as a mental strategy to communicate with the subconscious mind. In Jungian psychology, it is a
method for bridging the conscious and unconscious minds. Instead of being linked to the Jungian process,
the word "active imagination" in modern psychology is most frequently used to describe a propensity to
have a very creative and present imagination. It is thought to be a crucial aid in the process of individuation.

European tradition
The theosophy of post-Renaissance Europe embraced imaginal cognition. From Jakob Böhme to
Swedenborg, active imagination played a large role in theosophical works. In this tradition, the active
imagination serves as an "organ of the soul, thanks to which humanity can establish a cognitive and
visionary relationship with an intermediate world".[1]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, an English philosopher, made a distinction between imagination expressing
realities of an imaginal realm above our mundane personal existence and "fancy", or fantasy, which
represents the creativity of the artistic soul. For him, "imagination is the condition for cognitive (conscious?)
participation in a sacramental universe".[2]

Carl Gustav Jung

As developed by Carl Jung between 1913 and 1916,[3] active imagination is a meditation technique
wherein the contents of one's unconscious are translated into images, narratives, or personified as separate
entities. It can serve as a bridge between the conscious "ego" and the unconscious. This often includes
working with dreams and the creative self via imagination or fantasy. Jung linked active imagination with
the processes of alchemy. Both strive for oneness and inter-relatedness from a set of fragmented and
dissociated parts. This process found expression for Jung in his Red Book.

The key to active imagination is restraining the conscious waking mind from exerting influence on internal
images as they unfold. For example, if a person were recording a spoken visualization of a scene or object
from a dream, Jung's approach would ask the practitioner to observe the scene, watch for changes, and
report them, rather than consciously filling the stage with one's desired changes. One would then respond
genuinely to these changes and report any further changes in the scene. This approach ensures that the
unconscious contents express themselves without undue influence from the conscious mind. At the same
time, however, Jung was insistent that some form of active participation in active imagination was essential:
"You yourself must enter into the process with your personal reactions: ... as if the drama being enacted
before your eyes were real".[4]

Of the origin of active imagination, Jung wrote:

It was during Advent of the year 1913 – December 12, to be exact – I resolved upon the
decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself
drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged
into the dark depths.[5]
Further describing his early personal experience with an active imagination, Jung describes how desires and
fantasies of the unconscious mind naturally rise to become conscious. Once they are recognized-realized by
the individual, dreams may become "weaker and less frequent," whereas they may have been quite vivid
and recurring beforehand.[6]

Jung's use of active imagination was one of several techniques defining his distinctive contribution to the
practice of psychotherapy in the period 1912–1960. An active imagination is a method for visualizing
unconscious issues by letting them act themselves out. Active imagination can be done by visualization
(which is how Jung himself did it), which can be considered similar in technique to shamanic journeying.
Active imagination can also be done by automatic writing or by artistic activities such as dance, music,
painting, sculpting, ceramics, crafts, etc. Jung considered how, "The patient can make himself creatively
independent through this method ... by painting himself he gives shape to himself".[7] Doing active
imagination permits the thoughtforms of the unconscious, or inner "self", and of the totality of the psyche,
to act out whatever messages they are trying to communicate to the conscious mind.

For Jung, however, this technique had the potential to allow communication between the conscious and
unconscious aspects of the personal psyche with its various components and inter-dynamics and between
the personal and "collective" unconscious; and therefore was to be embarked upon with due care and
attentiveness. Indeed, he warned with respect to " 'active imagination' ... The method is not entirely without
danger, because it may carry the patient too far away from reality".[8] The post-Jungian Michael Fordham
was to go further, suggesting that "active imagination, as a transitional phenomenon ... can be, and often is,
both in adults and children put to nefarious purposes and promotes psychopathology. This probably takes
place when the mother's impingements have distorted the 'cultural' elements in maturation, and therefore it
becomes necessary to analyze childhood and infancy if the distortion is to be shown up."[9]

In partial answer to this critique, James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani discuss at length the dangers of
viewing active imagination solely as an expression of personal content. They propose the technique is easily
misunderstood and misdirected when applied to the strictly biographical and should never be used to bridge
the personal with the dead. Instead, they suggest, active imagination in Jung's usage was an exposition of
the unvoiced influences of the collective unconscious, shedding the terminology of psychology to work
directly through mythic images:

SS: ... In reflecting on himself, he does not come across at rock bottom his own personal
biography, but it's an attempt to uncover the quintessentially human. These dialogues are not
dialogues with his past, as you're indicating [...] But with the weight of human history. [...] And
this task of discrimination is what he spent the rest of his life engaged in. Yes, in some sense
what happened to him was wholly particular but, in the other sense, it was universally human
and that generates his project of the comparative study of the individuation process.[10]

Active imagination removes or highlights traits and characteristics that are often present in the dream.
Without a broader perspective, the person working with active imagination may start to see them as their
traits.[11] Thus in this continuing effort to stress the importance of what Maslow would come to call the
transpersonal, much of Jung's later work was conceived as a comparative historical study of the active
imagination and the individuation process in various cultures and epochs, conceived as a normative pattern
of human development and the basis of general scientific psychology.

Rudolf Steiner
Rudolf Steiner suggested cultivating imaginative consciousness through meditative contemplation of texts,
objects, or images. The resulting imaginal cognition he believed to be an initial step on a path leading from
rational consciousness toward ever-deeper spiritual experience.[12]: 302–311

The steps following Imagination he termed Inspiration and Intuition. In Inspiration, a meditant clears away
all personal content, including even the consciously chosen content of a symbolic form, while maintaining
the activity of imagination itself, thus becoming able to perceive the imaginal realm from which this activity
stems. In the next step, Intuition, the meditant leverages the connection to the imaginal or angelic realm
established via the cognitive imagination while releasing the images mediated via this connection. By
ceasing the activity of imaginative consciousness while allowing one's awareness to remain in contact with
the archetypal realm, the possibility opens up for an awareness deeper than the imaginal to be conveyed to
the open soul by the mediating agents of this realm.[13]

Islamic tradition
Islamic philosophy is the imaginal realm known as Alam al-Mithal, the imaginal world. According to
Avicenna, the imagination mediated between, and thus unified, human reason and divine being. This
mediating quality manifested in two directions: on the one hand, reason, rising above itself, could attain to
the level of active imagination, an activity shared with the lower divine beings. On the other hand, to
manifest the concrete forms of the world, divinity created a range of intermediate beings, the angelic co-
creators of the universe.[14]: 11 According to philosophers of this tradition, the trained imagination can
access a "nonspatial fabric" which mediates between the empirical/sensory and the cognitional/spiritual
realms.[15]

Through Averroes, mainstream Islamic philosophy lost its relationship to the active imagination. The Sufi
movement, as exemplified by Ibn Arabi, continued to explore contemplative approaches to the imaginal
realm.[14]

Henry Corbin
Henry Corbin considered imaginal cognition to be a "purely spiritual faculty independent of the physical
organism and thus surviving it".[16] Islamic philosophy in general, and Avicenna and Corbin in particular,
distinguish sharply between the true imaginations that stem from the imaginal realm, and personal fantasies,
which have a fictional character and are "imaginary" in the common sense of this word. Corbin termed the
imagination, which transcended fantasy imaginatio vera.

Corbin suggested that by developing our imaginal perception, we can go beyond mere symbolic
representations of archetypes to the point where "new senses perceive directly the order of [supersensible]
reality".[17]: 81 To accomplish this passage from symbol to reality requires a "transmutation of the being and
the spirit"[18] Corbin describes the imaginal realm as "a precise order of reality, corresponding to a precise
mode of perception", the "cognitive Imagination" (p. 1).[19] He considered the imaginal realm to be
identical with the realm of angels described in many religions, which manifests not only through
imaginations but also in people's vocation and destiny.[17]: 96

Corbin (1964) suggests that it is by developing this faculty of cognitive imagination that we can overcome
the "divorce between thinking and being" [19]: 4

The imaginal concept was further developed in the Communication Sciences domain. Samuel Mateus
(2013) suggested a close link between the imaginary, society, and publicity. The "public imaginal" was
named after the dynamic, symbolic, and complex set of diverse and heterogeneous imaginaries that
permeate societies.[20]

Role in scientific and mathematical discovery

Hadamard (1954)[21] and Châtelet (1991)[22] suggest that imagination and conceptual experiment play
central roles in mathematical creativity. Important scientific discoveries have been made through imaginative
cognition, such as Kekulé's famous discovery of the carbon ring structure of benzene through a dream of a
snake eating its tail. Other examples include Archimedes, in his bathtub, imagining that his body is nothing
but a gourd of water and Einstein imagining himself to be a photon on a horizon of velocities. An example
rarely spoken of is Descartes' three dreams, which led to his ideas of mathematics and philosophy, which
influenced much of modern thinking.

See also
Anthroposophy
Autosuggestion
Dream interpretation
Lucid dream
Thoughtforms

References
1. Fairvre, quoted in Hanegraaff, W. J. (1998). New Age religion and Western culture:
Esotericism in the mirror of secular thought. State University of New York Press.,pp. 398-9
2. Gregory, A. P. R. (2003). Coleridge and the conservative imagination. Mercer University
Press. p. 59
3. Hoerni, Ulrich; Fischer, Thomas; Kaufmann, Bettina, eds. (2019). The Art of C.G. Jung. W. W.
Norton & Company. p. 260. ISBN 978-0-393-25487-7.
4. Jung, quoted in Anthony Stevens, Jung (Oxford 1994) p. 109
5. Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) Random House ISBN 0-87773-554-9
6. DAVIDSON, D. (1966), Transference as a Form of Active Imagination (http://onlinelibrary.wile
y.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1966.00135.x/abstract?globalMessage=0). Journal of
Analytical Psychology, 11: 135–146. doi:10.1111/j.1465-5922.1966.00135.x (https://doi.org/1
0.1111%2Fj.1465-5922.1966.00135.x)
7. Jung, quoted in Stevens, Jung p. 109
8. C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (London 1996) p. 49
9. Michael Fordham, Jungian psychotherapy (Avon 1978) p. 149
10. Hillman, James and Shamdasani, Sonu. Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung's Red
Book. (2013) W. W. Norton & Company ISBN 978-0-393-08894-6 (p.18)
11. "Active Imagination" (https://web.archive.org/web/20040907030936/http://www.jung.org/pag
e-18186). The Washington Society for Jungian Psychology. Archived from the original (http://
www.jung.org/page-18186) on September 7, 2004. Retrieved 2017-05-10.
12. Steiner, R. (1972). An outline of occult science. Anthroposophic Press.
13. Steiner, R. (2001). The human form and cosmic activity. In Guardian angels: connecting with
our spiritual guides and helpers (pp. 25–42). Rudolf Steiner Press. pp. 29–30
14. Corbin, H. (1981). Creative imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi. Princeton Univ Pr.
15. Inayat Khan, Z. (1994). Preface, The man of light in Iranian Sufism. Omega Publications., p.
iii.
16. Corbin, H. (1989). Towards a chart of the imaginal. In Spiritual body and celestial Earth:
From Mazdean Iran to Shi'ite Iran (5th ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press.
17. Corbin, H. (1994). The man of light in Iranian Sufism. Omega Publications.
18. Najm Kobra, quoted in Corbin (1994), p. 80.
19. Corbin, H. (1964). "Mundus Imaginalis or, the imaginary and the imaginal" (https://www.amis
corbin.com/en/bibliography/mundus-imaginalis-or-the-imaginary-and-the-imaginal/), Cahiers
internationaux de symbolisme Vol. 6, pp. 3-26
20. Mateus, Samuel (2013), “The Public Imaginal - prolegomena to a communicational approach
of imaginary”, Comunicação, Mídia e Consumo, Vol.10, nº29, pp.31-50;
https://www.academia.edu/5864487/The_Public_Imaginal_-
_prolegomena_to_a_communicational_approach_to_Imaginary
21. Jacques Hadamard (1954), The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field
22. Gilles Châtelet (1991), Figuring Space: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics

Further reading
Hannah, Barbara. Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C.G. Jung.
Santa Monica: Sigo, 1981.
Johnson, Robert A. Inner Work (1986) Harper & Row
Jung, Carl. Jung on Active Imagination (1997) Princeton U. ISBN 0-691-01576-7
Miranda, Punita (2013) (https://www.academia.edu/10761999/C.G._Jungs_Active_Imaginati
on_Alternative_Personalities_and_Altered_States_of_Consciousness) 'C.G. Jung's Active
Imagination: Alternative Personalities and Altered States of Consciousness’, Jaarboek C.G.
Jung Vereniging Nederland. Nr. 29 (2013), 36–58.

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