Mary Watkins, Waking Dreams; Active imagination: C. G. Jung
It was primarily through his own experience of the unconscious that Jung came to formulate his ideas concerning active imagination and the imaginal realm.
After his split with Freud, Jung decided he would try to adopt an open attitude towards the unconscious, unencumbered pre-thought theory, in an attempt to discover more about it.
Jung pledged, “Since I know nothing at all I shall do whatever occurs to me” (1961:133). From 1912-1917 he acknowledged his promise by allowing the unconscious to reveal itself, working earnestly to record all that had happened.
He found himself engaged in spontaneous activities building sand castles, hewing stone, painting mandalas and pictures, seeing visual images and holding dialogues with unconscious figures.
These activities offered him a “rite d’entree” to the unconscious, as had automatic writing and crystal ball gazing to mediums and to Janet’s patients. He found, as had Flournoy, that the unconscious is always in a· sense dreaming, mythmaking. Because our attention is outwardly directed we fail to notice the mythic dreams being constantly spun.
In order for the imaginal world to come into our awareness, Jung found that we must look for and at its images in a particular way.
. . . looking, psychologically, brings about the activation of the object; it is as if something is emanating from one’s spiritual eye that evokes or activates the object of one’s vision. The English verb, to look at, does not convey this meaning, but the German betrachten, which is an equivalent, means also to make pregnant, but it is used only for animals …. So to look or concentrate upon a thing, betrachten, gives the quality of being pregnant to the object. And if it is pregnant, then something is due to come out of it; it is alive, it produces, it multiplies.
That is the case with any fantasy image; one concentrates upon it, and then finds that one has great difficulty keeping the thing quiet, it gets restless, it shifts, something is added, or it multiplies itself; one fills it with living power and it becomes pregnant. Jung, 1967:100-1
This way of “looking,” Jung showed in his researches, has an ancient and rich history. 1
In antiquity when a man had to direct a prayer to the statue of the god, he stepped upon a stone that was erected at its side to enable people to shout their prayer into the ar, so that the god would hear them; and then he stared at the image until the god nodded his head or opened or shut his eyes or answered in some way.
You see this was an abbreviated method of active imagination, concentrating upon the image until it moved; and in that moment the god gave a hint, his assent or his denial or any other indication, and that is the numinosum. 2 Jung, 1937:2
Interpretations of the images that attempted to resolve them into memory complexes, referring back to actual events and people, and underlying instinctual components (Freud’s objective method of dream interpretation) no longer seemed to fit.
Jung heard another life going on within, which had heretofore been disregarded by Freud.
It could be heard only if the unconscious was approached with the possibility that it was purposive, not only repressive; only if the form· of questioning about it preceded in the form of “what is it trying?”, not “what is it hiding?” (Progoff, 1963:71).
Rather than being just a “reactive mirror reflection” Qung, 1953: 185) of conscious activities the unconscious seemed to have an objective existence of its own, with its own values and ways of knowing-no less significant than the conscious
personality.
The image was able to express that “as yet unknown” by the conscious personality. Jung observed, as had Flournoy, that the unconscious performed some extraordinary tasks.
It seemed at times to serve in a compensatory fashion to ego-consciousness – as if it sought to maintain a dynamic psychic equilibrium by concerning itself (in dreams and fantasies) with those underdeveloped and missing parts of the conscious personality. It anticipated “in its symbols future conscious processes,” recognized consciously overlooked personal motives and meanings in daily situations, drew undrawn conclusions, admitted unadmitted criticisms and affects (z’bz’d., 177-8).
In Jung’s subjective method of analysis one seeks to see the symbolic contents not as references solely to memory and real things in the external world but to different elements or parts of the person himself.
The images or people in an active imagination or dream are understood as possibly referring to a real person or object in the outside world (the objective level of interpretation); but more importantly the image is believed to appear because it represents an unrecognized or undervalued part or attitude of the person dreaming or imagining.
For instance if one experienced the image of a critical woman who seeks to undervalue what the person is doing, this might indeed be related to the subject’s mother or another woman in their life.
But, Jung claimed, the critical voice has become a part of the person himself.
Once this happens it gets into one’s life situations as well as one’s dreams and fantasies.
The myth seeks to express itself. Realizing that the mother embodies this attitude is good, but one must now (in the present) deal with that attitude within (and without, when projected).
The external referent may disappear, the mother may die, but the introjected attitude remains with the person as before.
The image moves one not only back into the conscious world but draws one into its land-the “archetypal,” the “collective unconscious.”
The attitude that the image may represent belongs also to an archetypal dimension, which is more than the individual situation.
It cannot be reduced to the subjective or objective. It amplifies itself, when given the opportunity, allowing one access to the world of the image.
The symbol can never be grasped in terms of what we already know. The very nature of it is to take us beyond.
Jung found that patients “spontaneously reported dreams and fantasies. [He] would merely ask ‘What occurs to you in connection with that?’ or ‘How do you mean that, where does that come from, what do you think about it?’
The interpretations seemed to follow of their own accord from the patient’s replies and associations.” Soon he “realized that it is right to take the dreams in this way as the basis of interpretation, for that is how dreams are intended. They are the facts from which we must proceed” Jung, 1961:170-1).
Unlike Freud who saw the latent content of the dream as the meaningful portion, Jung gave attention to the manifest content-to the images in and of themselves.
This connection between the image and the meaning was central to Jung’s psychology.
. . . interpretation must guard against making use of any other viewpoints than those manifestly given by the content itself. If someone dreams of a lion, the correct interpretation can lie only in the direction of the lion; in other words, it will be essentially an amplification of this image. Anything else would be an inadequate and incorrect interpretation, since the image “lion” is a quite unmistakable and sufficiently positive presentation. Jung, 1954:par. 162
Once the image relates to the conscious mind of the individual its
meaning, the unconscious position towards something, the individual must do something about its “moral” connotation. That is, one must not just seek out the other side, one must bring it into a relation with his living. Jung understood this as “a moral necessity.”
It is not easy to give up parts of our life, the way it is now, in order to accommodate other aspects of our being. In fact the difficulty of this is too often minimized.
Even if one is unconscious of something, however, that something still lives in the person and through him in the world. Jung envisioned the process of growing into consciousness, as a progression towards becoming responsible for one’s self, for what comes to be through one’s living.
Jung’s notions of the purposive and creative aspects of the unconscious (not unlike those of the Romantics) as well
as its objective status, required a different attitude toward and way of working with the unconscious than previously had been created by modem psychology. An attitude was needed through which the unconscious and conscious could work together; an attitude that was a “combined function of conscious and unconscious elements, or, as in mathematics, a common function of real and imaginary quantities” Jung, 1971, par. 184).
I have called this process in its totality the transcendent function, “function” being here understood not as a basic function but as a complex function made up of other functions, and “transcendent” not as denoting a metaphysical quality but merely the fact that this function facilitates a transition from one attitude to another. The rawmaterial shaped by thesis and antithesis, and in the shaping of which the opposites are united, is the living symbol. Its profundity of meaning is inherent in the raw material itself, the very stuff of the psyche, transcending time and dissolution; and its configuration by the opposites ensures its sovereign power over all the psychic functions. Ibid., par. 828 ~Mary Watkins, Waking Dreams, Page 42-46
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