I would like to concentrate on a few points that make up the specific character of Jung’s active imagination in contrast to the many other imagination techniques that are cropping up everywhere these days. Today we encounter a great number of people who have practiced some imagination technique or other before undertaking their Jungian analysis; and in my experience, in such cases it is very difficult to get people to move on to real active imagination. The latter can best be divided into four parts or phases.
1. As we know, first one must empty one’s own ego consciousness, free onseself from the thought flow of the ego. This is already quite difficult for many people, who cannot stop the “mad mind,” as the Zen Buddhists call it. It is easier in the case of painting and easier still in sandplay. However, the latter provides consciousness with already existing figures. Although it is true that this seems to make it possible to skip over the “barrenness,” or absence of any ideas (which is frequently the first thing that occurs), it is apt to lead to difficulties later when the analysand has to go on to real active imagination. Most Eastern meditation techniques, such as Zen, certain yoga exercises, and Taoist meditation, bring us face to face with this first phase. In Zen meditation, one has to cut off not only all ego thinking, but also any fantasies that might well up from the unconscious. One either has to fend these off by means of a koan or let them pass by unheeded. The only objective of the physical sitting posture is the symbolic stopping of all the activity.
2. At this point one must let a fantasy image arising from the unconscious flow into the field of inner perception. In contrast to the Eastern techniques mentioned above, here we welcome the image rather than chasing it away or ignoring it. On the contrary, we concentrate on it. Having reached this point, we have to be on guard against two mistakes: either concentrating too hard on the image that has arisen and literally “fixating” it, making it freeze, or not concentrating hard enough, with the result that the inner images begin to change too fast and a speedy “inner movie” begins to run. In my experience, it is primarily intuitive types who fall prey to the latter mistake. They write endless fantasy tales that have no focal point, or they do not enter into any personal relationship with the inner events. This is the level of passive imagination, of imaginatio fantastica in contrast to imaginatio vera, as the alchemists would call it. This strongly reminds us of H. Leuner’s katathyme Bilderleben (catathymic image life). Leuner admitted to being inspired by Jung’s active imagination but decided to simplify it—with, in my opinion, not very good results. I find it very difficult to help analysands who have done this form of imagination practice to change over to real active imagination. W L. Furrer’s Objectivierung des Unbewussten (objectification of the unconscious) also suffers from the same deficiencies, as does the older technique of le rêve éveillé (awakened dreaming) of René Desoille. These techniques also allow the presence and intervention of the analyst—a great mistake that I will discuss later.
3. Now comes the third phase. It consists of giving the innerly perceived fantasy image a form by writing it down, painting it, sculpting it, writing it as music, or dancing it (in which case the movements of the dance must be noted down). In dancing the body gets to participate, which is sometimes essential, primarily when certain emotions and the inferior function are so unconscious that it is as though they were buried in the body.1 Often it also seems helpful to invent a little concrete ritual, for example, lighting a candle or walking around in a circle. This brings in the participation of inorganic matter. Jung once told me that this is more effective than the ordinary way of doing active imagination, but he could not tell me why this was the case.
In my view this also casts light on a question that is much discussed these days—the role of the body in analysis. In fact the alchemical opus, according to Jung, is nothing other than an active imagination carried out with chemical substances, that is, by mixing them, heating them, and so on. The Eastern alchemists, especially the Chinese Taoists, did this for the most part by seeking to work with the materials in their own bodies, more rarely with those in their laboratory retorts. The Western alchemists worked with matter mostly outside the body, in the retort, affirming that “our soul imagines great things outside the body.” Paracelsus and his pupil Gerhard Dorn, however, also undertook to work with the so-called inner firmament within the body, on which they hoped to bring external magical influences to bear. These they thought to have a synchronistic relationship per analogiam with the matter of the body. In this form, active imagination is essentially linked with the body via the symbolic meaning of its chemical components. I myself have frequently experienced strong positive and negative physical reactions to rightly or wrongly executed active imaginations. One analysand even suffered a serious psychogenic heart attack when he acted against his feelings in an active imagination. Strong affects and emotions are sometimes an obstacle to practicing active imagination. Jung himself, as he reports in his memoirs, sometimes had to resort to yoga exercises to gain control of his emotions before he was able to draw an image from them that he could relate to in an active imagination.
A certain kind of active imagination can be carried out as a conversation with inwardly envisaged parts of one’s body, in which one also listens to what they say (as Odysseus sometimes did in the Odyssey with his heart or his “phrenes”). This technique is sometimes favorable in the case of a psychogenic physical symptom. Whenever matter comes into play, whether inside or outside the body, synchronistic phenomena can be expected, which shows that this form of active imagination is especially “energy-charged.” In its negative aspect it borders on magic and its dangers, which I will come back to later.
In this third phase, two types of mistakes tend to occur, which Jung describes in his essay “The Transcendent Function.”2 One kind of mistake consists in placing too much emphasis on the esthetic elaboration of the fantasy content and making it too much into a work of art, with the result that one neglects its “message” or meaning. In my experience this happens most with painting and writing. Too much form kills the content, just as the art of certain historical periods “buried the gods in gold and marble.” (Nowadays we often get more pleasure out of looking at a primitive fetish or the crude art of the Early Christians than at the decadent art of Rome.) The functions of sensation and feeling are the first to lead us astray here. We forget that what we are depicting or describing is only the likeness of an inner reality and that the objective is to come in contact with the reality not the likeness.
The other kind of mistake consists in doing the opposite. One does a haphazard job of sketching the content and immediately goes into the question of meaning. Intuitive and thinking types especially often fall into this error. This shows a lack of love and devotion. One can see it at once when a patient brings in a sloppy sketch or a negligently written description, already knowing “what it means.” This third phase, in which one provides the unconscious with a means of expressing itself, often brings great relief, but it is not yet real active imagination.
4. The fourth phase is the key one, the one that is missing in most imagination techniques—moral confrontation with the material one has already produced. At this point Jung warns us of a mistake that is frequently made that jeopardizes the whole process. This is the mistake of entering into the inner events with a fictive ego rather than one’s real ego.
I would like to illustrate this through an example. An analysand dreamed that he found a horse’s hoof in the desert. It was somehow very dangerous and began to chase him. It was a kind of demon connected with the god Wotan. He tried to continue to fantasize this dream in an active imagination. He was now fleeing on horseback, but the demon was getting bigger and bigger and closer and closer. The analysand turned around and somehow managed to trample the demon into the ground. When he recounted this to me, I was struck by an odd discrepancy between the way he looked and the outcome of the story. He himself looked frightened and tormented. So I told him that somehow I did not believe in the happy ending but did not know why. A week later he confessed to me that when the horse-hoof demon reached him, he split in two. Only a part of his ego conquered the demon; the other stepped out of the action and just watched it from the outside. Thus he achieved his victory only with a fictive hero-ego; his real ego absconded, secretly thinking to itself: “After all, this is only a fantasy.”
When an analysand’s currently observable state fails in this way to harmonize with what happened in an active imagination, we can assume that this fictive-ego error has occurred. It is difficult to keep this out. Another analysand, in an active imagination, had a long romantic love affair with an anima figure. He never told her that he was recently married. When I asked him about this, he said that he would never do this in reality (conceal his marriage). Thus his ego in the active imagination was not the same as his everyday ego! The whole thing was clearly not entirely real for him; it was more like writing a novel than doing active imagination. This point is of enormous importance, because the entire effectiveness of active imagination depends on it. People with very fragmented characters or with latent psychoses cannot do active imagination at all, or they do it just with this fictive ego. For this reason Jung warned us against having borderline cases do active imagination. In point of fact, the analysand in my second example was not a sick person but an intellectual. The intellect is the greatest trickster; it misleads us into overlooking the moral aspect of the events and succumbing to the doubt that after all the whole thing is only fantasy and wishful thinking. A certain naivetê is required for active imagination.
Jung once remarked that the psychiatry of today has discovered this process up through the third step, but does not yet understand the fourth. Most of the current imagination techniques stop short of this point. There is another aspect that has not yet been understood. Most of the current creative or imagic techniques permit a certain participation on the part of the analyst or even require his intervention. He either proposes the theme (as in Happich’s technique or in J. H. Schultz’s advanced autogenic training) or intervenes when the analysand is stuck and makes suggestions. Jung himself, on the other hand, used to let his patients stay stuck in whatever hole they were in until they found a way out themselves. He recounted to us that he once had a female patient who in life was always falling into certain “traps.” He recommended active imagination to her. She promptly saw herself in her imagination going across a field and coming to a wall. She knew she had to get to the other side, but how? Jung just said, “What would you do in reality?” She simply could not come up with anything. Finally, after a long time, she thought of walking along the wall to see if it came to an end somewhere. It did not. Then she looked for a door or an opening. Again she did not get anywhere, and Jung did not offer any help. At last she thought of going for a hammer and chisel and pounding a hole in the wall. This was the solution.
The fact that this woman took so long to find such a solution was a reflection of her inept behavior in outer reality. It is for this reason that it is so essential that we do not step in with a helping hand; if we do, the patient learns nothing, but remains just as infantile and passive as ever. When, on the other hand, he painfully learns his lessons in active imagination, then he also learns something for his outer life. Jung did not help a patient even if he remained hung up for weeks, but insisted that he continue trying to find a solution on his own.
With the controlled use of drugs, the fourth step is missing once again. The person supervising bears the entire responsibility rather than the person doing the imagination. I came across an interesting book by two brothers, Terence and Dennis McKenna, called The Invisible Landscape.3 These two courageous young men went to Mexico and experimented on themselves with a hallucinogenic plant newly found there. According to their own account, they suffered from schizophrenic states of mind which led to a “broadening of their spiritual horizons.” Unfortunately, they do not give a precise description of their experiences, only hints about going to other planets and receiving the support of an invisible helper who often appeared as a gigantic insect. The second part of the book gives us the insights arising from their “broadened spiritual horizons,” and that is where the disappointment comes. They are in no way different from other highly intuitive modern speculations about mind, matter, synchronicity, and so on. They give us nothing creative and new, but only things that the well-read authors could just as easily have thought up consciously. The most important point comes at the end, when the book closes with the idea that all life on earth will be destroyed and for that reason we will either have to escape to another planet or escape inwardly, into the realm of cosmic mind.
I would like to compare this with a dream. It is the dream of a student, not in danger of psychosis, who is currently undergoing a Jungian analysis. I am grateful to him for his permission to recount his dream. Since I delivered this lecture, Edward Edinger has presented the same dream and given a very good interpretation of it.4 The dream (in slightly shortened form) is as follows:
I am walking along what are called the Palisades, from which one can look out over New York City. I am walking with an anima figure who is unknown to me; we are both being led by a man who is our guide. New York has been reduced to rubble—the whole world as we know it has been destroyed. Fires are burning everywhere; thousands of fleeing people are running aimlessly in all directions. The Hudson River has flooded large parts of the city. It is twilight. Fireballs in the sky whistle earthward. It is the end of the world.
The cause of this was that a race of giants had come from outer space. I saw two of them sitting in the midst of the rubble, nonchalantly scooping up one handful of people after the other, eating them as one would eat grapes. It was a horrible sight. . . . Our guide explained to us that these giants came from different planets where they lived in peace together. They had landed in flying saucers (those were the fireballs). The earth we knew had actually been devised by these giants. They had “cultivated” our civilization the way one raises vegetables in a greenhouse. Now they had come for the harvest. There was a special reason for this, which I only learned later.
I had been saved because I had slightly high blood pressure. If it had been normal or too high, I would have been eaten. Thus I was chosen to go through this ordeal by fire and, if I came through it successfully, to be permitted to save other souls as well. Then I saw before me a gigantic golden throne, radiant like the sun. On it sat the king and queen of the giants. They were the perpetrators of the destruction of our planet.
My ordeal, in addition to the torment of having to experience all this, consisted in having to climb the steps of the throne up to the point where I could look the king and queen in the face. This took place in stages. I began the ascent. It was long, but I knew that I had to do it, that the fate of the world and humanity depended on it. Then I woke up soaked in sweat. I realized afterward as I awoke that the destruction of the earth was a wedding feast for the king and queen.
This dream recalls the invasion of the earth by giants that we find described in the biblical Book of Enoch, which was interpreted by Jung as a “premature invasion [of consciousness] by the collective unconscious.” This led to a generalized inflation. The angels who (according to Enoch) had fathered giants with human females instructed humanity in many new forms of knowledge, and this brought about the inflation. It is clear that the above dream reflects our similar modern situation, and the McKennas’ book shows clearly, among other things, where a premature exploitation of the visions of the collective unconscious leads—that is, to a very precarious state of mind. At the same time, however, this dream very aptly shows the difference between drug hallucinations and an approach by the unconscious that has not been sought out. In the dream the dreamer is set a task: to reach the king and queen. According to the conclusions of the McKennas, on the other hand, all the individual can do is try to get away. It thus seems that a constructive aspect of the unconscious is only constellated when it is face to face with an individual ego as partner. That is the situation we are seeking to reach in active imagination, and this is why taking drugs—even under supervision—or practicing imagination techniques in which the analyst takes the lead, is not right, for then the ego as it is cannot confront itself with the unconscious.
The apocalyptic scenes in the McKennas’ book and in our dream are related to our fear of an atomic war. But instead of fleeing into outer space, the dream sets the dreamer the task of seeing the wedding of the king and queen on a face-to-face level. It represents the union of opposites—father and mother, mind and matter, and so on. I am reminded of how Jung once told us, when we asked him whether a third world war was inevitable, that such a war could only be avoided if a sufficient number of individuals could hold the opposites together within themselves. Here also the entire collective burden rests on the shoulders of just one dreamer. The unconscious can only show us a way out of crisis if we as individuals remain conscious of the opposites.
An important motif in the dream is the guide, who instructs the dreamer. Such a figure only appears if the analyst does not take its place. Hermes, the soul guide of the alchemists, called himself “the friend of every solitary” (cuiusque segregati—each one who is separated from the herd). The most important result of active imagination according to Jung is getting the analysand to become independent of his analyst. For that reason, we ought not to interfere in it (with the exception of making corrections in the method). When an analysand reads me an active imagination, I often silently think: “I would never have done or said that!” This shows in what an individual way the reactions of the ego arise in relation to the unconscious in active imagination—and this is what determines what course the inner events will take.
A new (or rather age-old) approach to active imagination is described in the books of Carlos Castaneda. This is the method of the sorcerer and medicine man Don Juan, which he calls “dreaming.” Behind this are the ancient traditions of the Mexican Indian medicine men. Rumor has it that a great deal of what is in these books was invented by Castaneda, though using genuine material of the medicine men. “Dreaming” is certainly part of this genuine material. It is exquisitely Indian and could never have been invented by a white man. “Dreaming” is achieved with the help of outer phenomena of nature. The teacher Don Juan takes Castaneda out into the solitary wilds of nature. In the half light of evening, Castaneda thinks he sees the dark shape of a dying animal. Frightened to death, he wants to run away, but then he looks more closely and sees that it is only a dead branch. Afterward, Don Juan says: “What you’ve done is no triumph. . . . You’ve wasted a beautiful power, a power that blew life into that dry twig. . . . That branch was a real animal and it was alive at the moment the power touched it. Since what kept it alive was power, the trick was, as in dreaming, to sustain the sight of it.”5
What Don Juan calls power here is mana, mulungu, etc., in other words, the energy aspect of the collective unconscious. In devaluing his fantasy by looking at it rationally, Castaneda drove the power away and lost a chance to “stop the world.” (That is Don Juan’s expression for bringing ego thinking to a halt.) Don Juan also calls this dreaming “controlled insanity,” which recalls Jung’s remark that active imagination is a “voluntary psychosis.”
This kind of active imagination with outer things in nature recalls the art of the alchemists, who carried out their active imagination with metals, plants, and stones, but with one difference: the alchemists always had a vessel. This vessel was their imaginatio vera et non fantastica or their theoria. With this they did not lose themselves but had a “grasp” on events in the literal sense, a kind of religious philosophy. Don Juan also has such a grasp, but he cannot convey it to Castaneda and therefore always has to assume leadership himself.
As we have already mentioned, rituals accompanying active imagination are particularly effective but also dangerous. This frequently constellates a great number of synchronistic events, which can easily be interpreted as magic. People who are in danger of becoming psychotic also often misinterpret such events in a very dangerous way. I remember the case of a man who at the beginning of a schizophrenic interval physically attacked his wife. She called both the village policeman and a psychiatrist for help. As these two, along with herself and the disturbed man, were standing in the hallway of the house, the single lightbulb illuminating the scene exploded into a thousand pieces, and they were left standing in the dark, covered with bits of broken glass. The disturbed man immediately thought that since the sun and moon had hidden their light at Christ’s crucifixion, this event was a sign that he, the savior of the world, was being unjustly arrested. But, quite to the contrary, the synchronistic event was bringing a sane message—it was warning him against having a mental blackout (for an electric lightbulb signifies ego consciousness, in contrast to the sun, which is the Godhead). Here we are moving on dangerous ground. Although this event did not occur in connection with an active imagination, similar events often do occur during active imagination. This example shows us how we can go astray in this “voluntary psychosis.” Thus the alchemist Zosimos rightly warns against demons who may throw the alchemical work into confusion. Here we touch upon the distinction between active imagination and magic, particularly black magic. As we know, Jung advises against doing active imagination involving living people. It can affect them magically, and all magic, including “white” magic, has a boomerang effect on the person performing it. Therefore, in the long run it is self-destructive. All the same, I recall a case in which Jung advised me to use it. I had an older female analysand who was totally possessed by her animus; she was no longer accessible and on the verge of a psychotic interval. Jung advised me to speak to her animus in an active imagination. This would help her but harm me; nonetheless I should try it as a last resort. And in fact it did have a beneficial effect, and Jung helped me afterward against the boomerang effect. However, I have never again dared to repeat this experiment.
The boundary between active imagination and magic is a subtle one. In the case of magic, there is always some wish or desire in play, in connection with either a good or a destructive intention. I have also observed that strong animus or anima possession prevents people from doing active imagination. It makes the required inner openness impossible. One should only practice active imagination in order to get at the truth about oneself and for this purpose alone. But in practice, often an ulterior desire sneaks in, and then one falls into imaginatio fantastica. I have observed a similar danger in connection with casting the I Ching oracle. If one fails to give up all desire for a specific result beforehand, one frequently misinterprets the oracle. There is also the opposite case of seeing or hearing “the right thing” in active imagination but then doubting that it is genuine. One is often freed from this by the active imagination suddenly taking so surprising a turn that one feels: “I couldn’t possibly have invented that myself!”
Finally there is still the concluding phase—applying in daily life what one has learned in active imagination. I remember a man who in an active imagination promised his anima that he would devote ten minutes a day to her. He bungled this and got into a neurotic ill humor that lasted until he realized that he had failed to keep his promise. But of course this goes for all realizations in analysis. This is the “opening of the retort” in alchemy, something that is naturally produced when one comes to an understanding of the previous step. When someone fails to do this, it is simply a sign that he or she has not really accomplished the fourth step of moral confrontation.
NOTES
1. Cf. R. F. C. Hull, “Bibliographical Notes on Active Imagination,” in Spring (1971); E. Humbert, “L’Imagination active d’aprés C. G. Jung,” in Cahiers de Psychologie Junghienne (Paris, 1977); C. G. Jung, “The Transcendent Function,” CW 8.
2. C. G. Jung, “The Transcendent Function,” CW 8.
3. Terence and Dennis McKenna, The Invisible Landscape (New York: Seabury Press, 197).
4. See Edward F. Edinger, “The Myth of Meaning,” Quadrant 10 (1977): 34ff
5. Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), pp. 132–33.