It is a most amazing series of images and really shows what active imagination can do.
At the end of the year I am going to publish a selection from his first four hundred dreams, where I show the development of one motif only, the central motif of these archetypal images.
There will be an English translation later, and then you will have the opportunity to see how the method works in a case absolutely untouched by myself, or by any other outside suggestion.
It is a most amazing series of images and really shows what active imagination can do.
You understand, in this case it was only partially a method for objectifying the images in plastic form, because many of the symbols appeared directly in the dreams; but all the same it shows the kind of atmosphere which active imagination can produce.
I have patients who, evening after evening, work at these images, painting and shaping their observations and experiences.
The work has a fascination for them; it is the fascination which the archetypes always exert upon consciousness.
But by objectifying them, the danger of their inundating consciousness is averted and their positive effect is made accessible.
It is almost impossible to define this effect in rational terms; it is a sort of “magical” effect, that is, a suggestive influence which goes out from the images to the individual, and in this way his unconscious is extended and is changed. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, The Symbolic Life, Page 175-176, Para 406
