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Copyright 2002 The Imaginal World Introduction In the wilderness, we become open to the presence of spirits; we are – somehow – closer to the imaginal realm where spirits live. I am not about to decide whether these spirits are real, whatever that means. As far as I am concerned, they are real enough. One of the few modern psychological traditions to take the spirits seriously – James Hillman calls them “the Gods” – is that of Carl Jung and his progeny. This psychological approach to encountering the spirits is worth exploring. In December 1913, Jung first experienced what he was later to call active imagination. However, he did not talk about these experiences until twelve years later, when, in May and June 1925, he "spoke for the first time of his inner development" (Jaffé, 1962/1963, p. vii) at two sessions of a series of weekly seminars he was giving in Zurich. The contents of these lectures were not published until 1989 (Jung, 1989); but a partial account of these experiences was given in 1962 by Aniela Jaffé in Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung, 1962/1963, pp. 170-199), which she largely wrote. This account is the foundation myth, the charter, for active imagination. In 1913, according to this account, Jung, profoundly distressed at his break with Freud, began to experiment with different ways to enter into in his own imaginings. As James Hillman describes it, "When there was nothing else to hold to, Jung turned to the personified images of interior vision. He entered into an interior drama, took himself into an imaginative fiction and then, perhaps, began his healing – even if it has been called his breakdown" (Hillman, 1983b, p. 54). In this imaginal world, Jung began to confront and question the figures who appeared to him; and, to Jung's surprise, those imaginal persons replied to him in turn. "Near the steep slope of a rock," Jung says, "I caught sight of two figures, an old man with a white beard and a beautiful young girl. I summoned up my courage and approached them as though they were real people, and listened attentively to what they told me" (Jung, 1962/1997, p. 28). And again: "I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I" (p. 30). One of these imaginal people, a wise pagan whom Jung named Philemon, "seemed to me quite real, as if he were a living personality." Philemon spoke to Jung as follows: "He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air." It was this imaginal Philemon who taught Jung the reality of the psyche – "that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend" (p. 30). References Jaffé, A. (1963). Introduction. In Jung, C. Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Winston, R., & Winston, C., Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1962) Jung, C. (1989). Analytical psychology: Notes of the seminar given in 1925. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jung, C. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Winston, R., & Winston, C., Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1962) Hillman, J. (1983b). Healing fiction. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications. Jung, C. (1997). Confrontation with the unconscious. In Chodorow, J. (Ed.), Jung on active imagination (pp. 21-41). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Excerpt from Jung, C. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Winston, R., & Winston, C., Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon Books. (Original work published 1962) < Previous Next > | |||
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