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Copyright 2002 The Imaginal World The ontology of imagination Immediately we face the question of the nature and ontological status of these encountered persons: are they dissociated material (Singer, 1994, p. 288)? primordial images (Casey, 2000, pp. 214-215)? subpersonalities (Cwik, 1995, p. 141)? angels (see Chittick, 1994, pp. 83-95)? shamanic spirits (Noel, 1997, pp. 209-211)? gods (Hillman, 1975, p. 35)? However described, what is important about these imaginal people is that they are autonomous and real. Their autonomy is a matter of experience. "The images," Jung says, "have a life of their own, and the symbolic events develop according to their own logic" (Jung, 1935/1997, ¶ 397, p. 145); "[i]t is exactly as if a dialogue were taking place between two humans with equal rights" (Jung, 1958/1997, ¶ 186, p. 58). And Hillman adds, "When an image is realized – fully imagined as a living being other than myself – then it becomes a psychopompos, a guide with a soul having its own inherent limitation and necessity" (Hillman, 1983b, p. 62). When we actively confront these imaginal persons, respond to them with our own objections, awe, and arguments, then, as the Ulanovs put it, "we may come to the breath-stopping realization of just how independent of our conscious control such images are. They have a life of their own. They push at us. They talk back" (Ulanov & Ulanov, 1999, p. 41). Imaginal persons are "as they present themselves,… valid psychological subjects with wills and feelings like ours but not reducible to ours" (Hillman, 1975, p. 2; emphasis in original). Their ontological status is more problematic. Jung insists that these imaginal people are – in some sense – real. "You have the idea that you have just made it up, that it is merely your own invention. But you must overcome that doubt, because it is not true" (Jung, 1935/1997, ¶ 398, p. 145). There are two possible approaches to this question. Jung takes one: he insists on equal ontological rights for the unconscious. "Something works behind the veil of fantastic images," he says, "whether we give this something a good name or a bad. It is something real, and for this reason its manifestations must be taken seriously" (¶ 353, p. 65). The two opposing realities, the world of the conscious and the world of the unconscious, "do not struggle for supremacy, but each makes the other relative" (¶ 354, p. 65). When the patient, in imagination, leaps up to rescue his fiancée who is, in imagination, leaping into a dark fissure in the ice, "he is assigning absolute reality value to the unconscious," asserting the "validity of the irrational standpoint of the unconscious" (¶ 350, p. 64). Both realities are "psychic semblances painted on an inscrutably dark back-cloth. To the critical intelligence, nothing is left of absolute reality" (¶ 354, p. 65; emphasis in original). James Hillman takes the other approach. He does not hypostasize the imaginary so much as he relativizes reality. He calls this soul-making. "Soul-making," he says, "can be most succinctly defined as the individuation of imaginal reality" (Hillman, 1983a, p. 36). More specifically, the act of soul-making is imagining, the crafting of images (Hillman, 1983a, p. 36). Soul-making is also described as imaging, that is, seeing or hearing by means of an imagining which sees through an event to its image. Imaging means releasing events from their literal understanding into a mythical appreciation. Soul-making, in this sense, is equated with deliteralizing – that psychological attitude which suspiciously disallows the naïve and given level of events in order to search out their shadowy, metaphorical significances for soul (Hillman, 1983a, p. 36). The human adventure, he says, "is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul" (Hillman, 1975, p. xv). "Soul is imagination," he says, "a cavernous treasury … a confusion and richness, both . . . The cooking vessel of the soul takes in everything, everything can become soul; and by taking into its imagination any and all events, psychic space grows" (Hillman, 1990, pp. 122-123; emphasis in original). And soul is "the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, and fantasy – that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical" (Hillman, 1975, p. xvi; emphasis in original). "The question of soul-making is 'what does this event, this thing, this moment move in my soul?" (Hillman, 1983a, p. 37). Where Jung makes the imaginal real, Hillman makes reality imaginal. Hillman calls this "seeing through" – the ability of the imagination's eye to see through the literal to the metaphorical (Hillman, 1975, p. 136). Re-visioning is deliteralizing or metaphorizing reality. The purpose of analysis is not to make the unconscious conscious, or to make id into ego, or to make ego into self; the purpose is to make the literal metaphorical, to make the real imaginal. The objective is to enable the realization that reality is imagination – that what appears most real is in fact an image with potentially profound metaphorical implications (Adams, 1997, pp. 104-105). Thus, says Hillman, soul is "the imaginative possibility in our natures … the mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical," (Hillman, 1975, p. xvi). "By means of the archetypal image, natural phenomena present faces that speak to the imagining soul rather than only conceal hidden laws and probabilities and manifest their objectification" (Hillman, 1983a, p. 19). Indeed, for Hillman, consistent with this view, there are no archetypes as such; there are only images – or, as we have seen, phenomena in the world – that may be archetypal (Adams, 1997, p. 103). Any image can be considered archetypal; the word archetypal points to a value. Any image can gain this archetypal sense according to the value it reveals: the term archetypal, Hillman says, "refers to a move one makes rather than a thing that is" (Hillman, 1977, pp. 82-83, quoted in Hillman, 1983a, pp. 21-22). This use of the term is clearly related to the notion of soul-making. Emphasizing the valuative function of the adjective archetypal "restores to images their primordial place as that which gives psychic value to the world. Any image termed 'archetypal' is immediately valued as universal, trans-historical, basically profound, generative, highly intentional, and necessary" (Hillman, 1983a, p. 22). References Adams, M. (1997). The archetypal school. In Young-Eisendrath, P., & Dawson, T. (Eds.), The Cambridge companion to Jung (pp. 101-118). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Casey, E. (2000). Imagining: A phenomenological study (2d ed.). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Chittick, W. (1994). Imaginal worlds: Ibn al-'Arabi and the problem of religious diversity. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Cwik, G. (1995). Active imagination: Synthesis in analysis. In Stein, M. (Ed.), Jungian analysis (2d ed., pp. 137-169). Chicago, IL: Open Court Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. New York, NY: Harper Perennial. Hillman, J. (1977). An inquiry into image. Spring, 62-88. Hillman, J. (1983a). Archetypal psychology: A brief account. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications. Hillman, J. (1983b). Healing fiction. Woodstock, CT: Spring Publications. Jung, C. (1997). The Tavistock lectures. In Chodorow, J. (Ed.), Jung on active imagination (pp. 143-153). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Excerpt from Jung, C. (1953-1977). The symbolic life. In Read, H., Fordham, M., & Adler, G. (Eds.). Collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 18) (Hull, R., Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1935) Jung, C. (1997). The transcendent function. In Chodorow, J. (Ed.), Jung on active imagination (pp. 42-60). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Excerpt from Jung, C. (1953-1977). The structure and dynamics of the psyche. In Read, H., Fordham, M., & Adler, G. (Eds.). Collected works of C. G. Jung (Vol. 8) (Hull, R., Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1958) Noel, D. (1997). The soul of shamanism: Western fantasies, imaginal realities. New York, NY: Continuum. Singer, J. (1994). Boundaries of the soul: The practice of Jung's psychology (Rev. ed.). New York, NY: Anchor Books. Ulanov, A., & Ulanov, B. (1999). The healing imagination: The meeting of psyche and soul. Einsiedlen, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag. | |||
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