C.G. Jung’s Active Imagination by Leon Schlamm
C.G. Jung’s development of the dissociative technique of active imagination, the visionary practice of ‘‘dreaming with open eyes,’’ arose out of his early experimentation with paranormal phenomena, especially mediumship, itself a dissociative technique of contacting the dead which traces its provenance to shamanism.
His discovery of active imagination led him to associate psychological and spiritual transformation with the autonomous creation and manipulation of images.
In December 1913, believing himself to be threatened by a psychosis, Jung overcame his violent resistance to experiencing a series of waking fantasies, which would provide the raw material for the subsequent development of analytical psychology.
In these waking visions, triggered by the suspension of his rational critical faculties enabling conscious receptivity to unconscious psychic contents, Jung descended to the Land of the Dead (which he subsequently equated with the unconscious) where he encountered a number of significant others in the objective psyche, subjects independent of his consciousness.
He learned to treat the numinous figures of his inner life, Elijah, Salome, the Serpent and Philemon, an Egypto-Hellenistic Gnostic who later
functioned as his inner guru, as objective real others and to engage in dialog with them as equals (first verbally and later through writing, painting, and drawing).
He thereby discovered a meditative technique for psychological healing and spiritual transformation in marked contrast to the meditative practices of stilling the mind and transcending all images associated with yoga.
The function of this visionary practice, triggering a dynamic, confrontational exchange between consciousness and the unconscious in which each is totally engaged with the other and activating a stream of powerful, unconscious emotions and impulses, Jung discovered, was to access numinous unconscious images concealed by these emotions and impulses.
By consciously dialoging with the flow of images produced by active imagination, Jung learned to transform and control these powerful emotions and impulses, thereby discovering the transcendent function, the union of the opposites of consciousness and the unconscious which he identified with the individuation process, as well as healing himself.
However, it is important to remember that, for Jung, it is through the affect that the subject of active imagination becomes involved and so comes to feel the whole weight of reality.
Numinous images encountered during active imagination are based on an emotional foundation which is unassailable by reason.
Indeed, the whole procedure is a kind of enrichment and clarification of the affect, whereby the affect and its contents are brought nearer to consciousness, becoming at the same time more impressive and more understandable.
Jung was well aware that the practitioner of active imagination unable to maintain a differentiated, self-reflective conscious point of view in the face of unconscious visionary material would be vulnerable to mental illness.
This could occur either in the form of psychosis where consciousness is overwhelmed by unconscious visionary materials, or in the form of conscious identification with numinous unconscious contents leading to possession by them.
However, he insisted that his visionary practice, if approached responsibly by an individual endowed with a well developed consciousness, could bring considerable rewards.
In addition to the strengthening and widening of consciousness itself, dreaming with open eyes could enable the practitioner to realize that unconscious contents that appear to be dead are really alive, and desire to be known by, and enter into dialog with, consciousness.
If one rests one’s conscious attention on unconscious contents without interfering with them, employing the Taoist practice of wu wei, just letting things happen, it is as if something were emanating from one’s spiritual eye that activates the object of one’s vision.
Unconscious contents begin to spontaneously change or move, begin to become dynamic or energetic, to come alive.
Jung characterizes this process by the German term betrachten: to make pregnant by giving an object your undivided attention, a psychological process anticipated by his 1912 dream of a lane of sarcophagi which sprung to life as he examined them.
These experiences which Jung characterizes as numinous, however, require a vigorous, active, self-reflective conscious response endowing them with meaning, and thereby changing them.
Here lies the significance of Jung’s claim that the dead seek wisdom from the living in his pseudonymously produced Gnostic poem of 1916, Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, itself the product of active imagination, rather than, as in mediumistic practices, the living seeking the wisdom of the dead.
The dead, numinous, unconscious contents, need the living, consciousness, as much as the living need the dead.
This process of continuous dynamic interaction and collaboration between consciousness and the unconscious is expressed by the German term auseinandersetzung – coming to terms with, or having it out with or confronting unconscious psychic contents – and is mirrored in Jung’s religious narrative calling for divine-human collaboration.
This is underlined by his heretical observation that whoever knows God has an effect on Him in Answer to Job, another product of active imagination.
Jung himself alleged the use of active imagination in Gnosticism and alchemy on which he drew heavily in his later work, and was clearly gratified by Corbin’s research on active imagination in theosophical Sufism.
However, as Merkur’s recent scholarship tracing the history of active imagination in the West has confirmed, the incidence of this visualization technique in mystical traditions is more widespread.
It can be found, for example, in Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Sufism, alchemy and more recent European esotericism, as well as shamanism.
This provides considerable support for Jung’s claim that his post-Christian, psychological practice of dreaming with open eyes is analogous to, and can be understood as a detraditionalised form of spiritual practice fostered by many Western religious traditions during the last two millennia.
Merkur also distinguishes between what he calls intense ‘‘reverie’’ states, including Jung’s active imagination, and trance states.
Whereas the latter involve the increasing repression or restriction of ego functions (or consciousness), the former would seem to involve their increasing relaxation and freedom.
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