Is Jung's Active Imagination Effective?

C. G. Jung promoted active imagination as the main technique of Analytical psychology to integrate the anima or the collective unconscious. His followers also did so. Nevertheless, there is little to no evidence, over the past century, that this technique might be effective in the individuation process. All we have is anecdotal evidence. When a scientific hypothesis is not proven effective during such a long time, one shall be aware of its questionable effectiveness.

Jung’s emphasis on the efficiency if his technique should be analyzed. He linked his two transcendent experiences to active imagination. This is the fundamental concept to his essay The Transcendent Function written in 1916 but only published in 1958. As is well known, active imagination is the process of identifying a feeling, letting it personify in imagination and interacting with it in an imaginary conversation. The Red Book, published in 2009, is primarily constituted with Jung’s active imaginations that he achieved from the late 1913. He wrote them down and he illuminated the text with his illustrations from 1915. 

To understand Jung's misconception, we need to state a few things. Carl Jung was an INTJ. His dominant function Introverted Intuition shows continually in his written work where extroverted Thinking has the second place. Feeling and Sensation cognitive functions almost never occur.

Therefore, Jung’s cognitive functions were: 

•  Dominant Introverted Intuition 
•  Auxiliary Extroverted Thinking 
•  Tertiary Introverted Feeling 
•  Inferior Extroverted Sensing

We also know from Jung himself and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), that humans generally develop only two functions: the dominant and the auxiliary functions. The latter being usually less developed than the dominant function.

Jung’s misinterpretation can be explained using cognitive functions. Although he thought that active imagination and the integration of the unconscious were the effective factors in his mystical experiences, what was really functioning was not the integration of the unconscious but the development of the cognitive functions that were undifferentiated. In doing active imagination, he was identifying, night after night, feelings and emotions in order to interact with them in imagination. By doing that, he was in fact working on his introverted Feeling function and bringing it to consciousness. We remember that Feeling was his tertiary function, a function that is usually undifferentiated. It is the development of his tertiary cognitive function that triggered his first transcendent experience.

His second mystical experience was not linked to the integration of the anima or the collective unconscious but to the elaboration of The Red Book. When in 1915, he started to write down his texts with gothic calligraphy and illuminate his Red Book with meticulous illustrations, he was, in fact, working on his inferior Sensation function. The manual task around that book is, without a doubt, a Sensation process. Without knowing it, Jung developed his undifferentiated cognitive functions. He seems to never have realized that it was the development of the four functions of orientation of consciousness that were the active and operational factors in his two mystical experiences. 

Transcendent experiences have been known for a very long time. Mystics of all origins generally link them to a divine intervention but atheists also have those experiences. According to Jungian psychology, mystical experiences are signposts of the integration of the personal and collective unconscious during individuation. This is the main reason of his alchemical studies. That hypothesis does not explain why Christian mystics have those experiences without integrating unconscious contents. What is most probable is that those mystics have developed their third and fourth cogntive functions to access transcendent experiences. 

The monastic rule ask for the sacrifice of all belongings both material and spiritual. When mystics follow scrupulously that rule, they sacrifice their cognitive identity or their ego cognitive functions. The sacrifice of the auxiliary function automatically trigger the development of its opposite. For example, if one sacrifice his Feeling auxiliary cognitive function, that provokes a deficiency in the judgment capacity. One will perceive with his Perception Intuition or Sensation dominant cognitive function but will refuse to use his judgment Feeling function. The natural process of consciousness of perceiving and judging will automatically cause the rise of the opposite judgment function: Thinking. When the tertiary cognitive function has reached the level if development of the auxiliary one, a numinous symbol of conjunction of opposites is produced by the psyche. This is what has been called a mystical experience.

As we have said ealier, the integration of the unconscious with active imagination has very little effect, if any, on individuation. Only ISTJs and INTJs could expect results because their tertiary function is introverted Feeling. Contrary to the general Jungian opinion, it is the development of cognitive functions that has the most effect on individuation. Integrating the unconscious has little effect on consciousness but adding cognitive functions is the most important step in the process to wholeness.

Jung and some of his interpreters promoted the idea that the alchemists were doing active imagination in front of their chemical experiments but this is a bending of alchemy to justify Analytical psychology’s main technique. Two reasons could be invoked to support the assertion that alchemist never did active imagination. First, the real alchemists never did the experiments that were in their grimoires. Their recipes were way too strange to be real chemical experiments. 

Second, the words meditatio and imaginatio used by the alchemists have nothing to do with the fantastic imagination at work in active imagination. Alchemy demands true imagination, not fantastic imagination. Jung quotes the Rosarium in Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12): 

«And take care that thy door be well and firmly closed, so that he who is within cannot escape, and—God willing—thou wilt reach the goal. Nature performeth her operations gradually; and indeed, I would have thee do the same: let thy imagination be guided wholly by nature. And observe according to nature, through whom the substances regenerate themselves in the bowels of the earth. And imagine this with true and not with fantastic imagination. » (par. 218)

The problem raised by this quote is that active imagination is fantastic imagination. It is the wandering of imagination in the realm of fantastic images. In contrast, true imagination is a meticulous exploration of all possibilities regarding a situation. It is what we would call, in today’s words, brainstorming. This is the kind of imagination that must be used in the alchemical process of developing cognitive functions.

For more,

https://jungianpsychologyexplained.blogspot.com/2025/02/mystical-experiences-in-alchemy.html

https://jungianpsychologyexplained.blogspot.com/2025/02/jungs-understanding-of-philosophers.html

https://www.academia.edu/119327280/Carl_Jungs_Second_Mystical_Experience_2024c_

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James Hillman and the Philosopher's Stone

Jungian interpreters are often seized by the magical world of the alchemical lore. They use its terminology to talk about psychology without knowing the reason Jung used them in the first place. James Hillman is one of them and he has influenced a generation of Jungian analysts.

In the book Alchemical Psychology, Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman. Volume 5, we find one of the source of the lamentable state of Jungian psychology. Although, Hillman has certainly studied alchemy in order to write his talks, he missed the essential goal of alchemy and the reason Jung used it so much.

In chapter 8, Hillman wrote

Our theme – the ideas and images of the alchemical goal – cannot be better introduced than by this statement from C. G. Jung: “The goal is important only as an idea; the essential thing is the opus which leads to the goal: that is the goal of a Iifetime.” “The goal is important only as an idea” de-literalizes goals right at the beginning. We may not take alchemy’s images of the hermaphrodite, the gold, or the red stone as actualized events. Nor may we even consider these images, and the many others, to be symbolic representations of psychological accomplishments. Not the goal; the idea of goal; goal as idea. (p. 139)

This quote shows Hillman's and his followers' (Stanton Marlan, among others) incapacity to find a simple logical explanation for alchemy. They seem unable to decipher the reason of Jung's interest in alchemy. To Hillman, the hermaphrodite, the gold and the stone are not actualized events nor psychological accomplishments. If so, one is authorized to ask: why did alchemists write so much about them? Were they really writing about the making of gold from lead? Hillman answers no. This seems to be an important contradiction unless you believe alchemy is just an imaginary outcome.

There is an easy way to find out if a Jungian interpreter is right about alchemy: the logical verification of their understanding of the goal of alchemy.

Let's see Hillman's understanding of the goal of alchemy. About the pearl of great price, he wrote:

The pearl as goal expresses the idea that the materia prima, the worthless gritty bit we call a symptom or problem, when worked on constantly, slowly becomes coated. An organic process turns the bit of grit into a coagulated jewel. The work goes on in the depths of the sea, where light does not reach, inside the hermetically closed oyster. (P. 140)

 To Hillman, the goal of alchemy is the process of taking a problem or a symptom and transforming it in something of great value. But there is a important problem with this interpretation that Hillman did not take into account. In alchemy, the prima materia is the origin and the end-product of the alchemical process. An information that Hillman ignored. In Hillman' s view, that would means that alchemy is about taking a problem and creating a bigger problem! He added:

And since these goals – diamond and pearl, rubedo and lapis, elixir of immortality – are imaginal and mythical, they are beyond time, dissolving the literalism of the laboratory and its measures of time into images, rather than temporal steps, images of drying and moistening, distilling and condensing, therewith moving the method of alchemy itself into myth. (P. 145)

We have here Hillman's core interpretation of alchemy as an imaginary construct composed of mythical works about solving problems and symptoms. Now, if that were to be true, we should ask ourselves important logical questions. Why would the finest intellectuals of their time invest time, money and efforts in writing books about such a stupid goal. Why did they not write directly and simply about their methods to solve problems? Why would they hide the meaning of their recipes to solve problems under multiple layers of symbols thus rendering their books almost undecipherable? It seems to Hillman and his followers that the alchemical authors were deficient intellectuals that needed to write mythical books about solving problems.  This is not logical.

There is a logical explanation to alchemy and it is not about the psychological process of solving problems or symptoms, nor about the therapeutic process. The alchemists wrote about something that needed to be hidden from the Church and the Inquisition. That information was something so important to them that they would write only to those who knew what they were talking about. That means that only those who knew what alchemy was all about were able to understand the grimoires. Those intellectuals, the finest of their time as we have already said, share their personal methods to reach mystical experiences, a subject that would have triggered a terrible anger and fury from the Church. To those intellectuals, mystical experiences were not divine interventions but psychological occurences that could be consciously induced.

That is exactly what Carl Jung found in alchemy. He knew that conjunctions of opposites are the symbols appearing in mystical experiences. He knew that the pearl, the rebis, the hermaphrodite, the union of the king and the queen, the magnet, the homonculus, the philosopher's stone were symbols of a mystical experience, an extremely numinous symbol of conjunction of opposites entering consciousness for a short moment. Jung's lifelong study was about mystical experiences that, he thought, were signposts of a consciously performed individuation process. He began with the study of Gnosticism and their mentions of the magnet (conjunction of opposites poles) and eventually found out that alchemy was also about those phenomena. The main goal of his investigations, from 1944 until the end of his life, was about the psychological processes leading to those experiences and how they were linked to the individuation process.

Hillman has produced an almost irreparable wrong to Jungian psychology by misleading a generation of analysts. We should recognize that Jung always sticked to the scientific analysis of psychological processes and events, even if some are extremely rare such as mystical experiences. In his talks about alchemy, Hillman has shown his incapacity to find the core meaning of Jung's analytical psychology.

To an outsider, Jungian psychology seems to have been hacked by the New Agers from the beginning. It is almost certain that Jung would not have approved that orientation. When the Jungian interpreters leave the psychotherapeutic process to enter into Jung's analysis of the goal of human life, they always show their incapacity to read Jung correctly. Then, they write about tarot, astrology, yi king, visions, alchemy, the occult, archetypes, the Magical Other, and all the sujects of the magical world of Jungian mystique. They invent meanings to Jung's writings that do not stand the test of logic.  And unfortunately, those are the same people who peer-review articles and books on Analytical psychology, thus maintaining Jung's psychology in a laughable condition.

We could only hope that one day, a few Jungians will have the courage to lead the way into a logical interpretation of Jung'a writing.

For more

https://www.academia.edu/124757302/Carl_Jungs_Answer_to_Job_the_Birth_of_the_Self_in_Transcendent_Experiences_2024e_

https://www.academia.edu/126270799/Carl_Jungs_Transcendent_Function_his_Insight_into_Mystical_Experiences_2024f_

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The Origin of Jung's Interest in Gnosticism

 

Carl Jung had his first mystical experience in December 1913. Those experiences are always symbols of conjunction of opposites that are extremely numinous. His experience was his becoming the god AION or leontocephalus as well as the crucified Christ. The conjunction of the symbols me-god is a regular occurence. In his book AION, Jung links those symbols to Jethro and Zipporah, the first being the father and the second, the daughter. As such, the symbols parent-child, wiseman-pupil, God-m dee always represents the opposites whole-particle. To Jung, that experience is an encounter with the Self.

Jung started his study of Gnosticism soon after his first mystical exprience but it was only in 1951 with his book AION, studies into the phenomenology of the Self that he shared his knowledge.

In The AION Lectures (1996), Edward Edinger quoted a letter from Jung to Margaret Ostrowski-Sachs: 

Before my illness [in 1944] I had often asked myself if I were permitted to publish or even speak of my secret knowledge. I later set it all down in AION. I realized it was my duty to communicate these thoughts, yet I doubted whether I was allowed to give expression to them. During my illness I received confirmation and I now knew that everything had meaning and that everything was perfect. (1996, p. 13) 

It was in AION that Jung explained thoroughly the experience of encounter with the Self and he proposed his model based on precise symbols. The first part of his book is devoted to prove his thesis, supported at length with numerous examples that the Self is a complexio oppositorum, e.g., a combination of opposites. 

Every chapter makes the demonstration of that hypothesis under a different angle. That is why, for example, the symbol of the fish is double in astrology and that the symbol of Christ is counterbalanced by the symbol of the Antichrist. Since the fish and Christ are symbols of the Self, they necessarily consisted of two opposites. In the same way, Jung uses the symbol of the magnet which, as we know, contains a positive and a negative pole that are opposites. Let’s dive in his explanations. 

In paragraph 243 of AION, Jung introduces the symbol of the magnet and gives an abundance of synonyms and Latin expressions that state its qualities. Then, in paragraph 250, he lets us know that the magnet is a symbol of the Self. Referring to the Elenchos of Hippolytus (Refutation of the Gnostics by the early Christians), Jung mentions that the magnet appears three times in Gnostic writings: 

(1) In the doctrine of the Naassenes, the four rivers of paradise correspond to the four openings of the head: the eye, the ear, the nose and the mouth. The mouth is the opening where the food enters and from which the prayer comes out. It is from the mouth that the water of teaching (aqua doctrinae) comes. The latter is an alchemical term that corresponds more or less to the Self and therefore to the magnet. 

(2) In the theory of the Perates, no one can be saved without the Son. And they say that this Son (Christ) is the serpent. For the Perates, the serpent attracts iron (it is therefore a magnet and the Self). 

(3) Finally, for the Sethian doctrine, the magnetic attraction (magnet) comes from the spark, the ray of light, that is to say from the Logos (reason, thought, word and discrimination). 

In paragraph 293, Jung concludes on the three forms of the magnet or magnetic agent: 

• It is a passive substance: water. It is drawn from the bottom of the source. 
• It is an animated being: the snake or the serpent. It arises spontaneously or is discovered by surprise. It represents Christ.
• It is the Logos, an abstraction of the son of God (from the prologue of the gospel of John) and the power of thought or of speech. 

It is in paragraph 295 that Jung explains what is probably the most important sentence of AION: 

“All three symbols are phenomena of assimilation that are in themselves of a numinous nature and therefore have a certain degree of autonomy.” 

Knowing that autonomous phenomena are irruptions of unconscious contents into consciousness and that the archetype of the Self (identified here as the three forms of the magnet) appears in consciousness with a numinous glow like every other archetype, Jung is telling us, in that paragraph, that the water, the serpent and the Logos are three experiences of the Self or mystical experiences in Gnosticism. 

Jung used the term phenomena (or phenomenon) of assimilation only eleven times in his Collected Works and he defines it as “the reaction of the psychic matrix, e.g., the unconscious, which becomes agitated and responds with archetypal images” (CW Addenda, § 1828). The study if those phenomena, according to him, began with Gnosticism and continued through the Middle Ages (alchemy) and are still observed in modern times (addenda, § 1830). Mystical experiences are phenomena of assimilation because, for Jung, mystical experiences are irruptions of the archetype of the Self in consciousness.

Later in the book, Jung is more precise (§ 303) and specifies that the image of God, the imago dei (the Self) is not a discovery, but a lived experience that occurs to man spontaneously. It is this spontaneous experience, the mystical experience, that is the core subject of AION as the phenomenology of the Self.

Jung's interest in Gnosticism was directly related to his mystical experience of December 1913. It was much later, in 1928, that he found out that alchemy was the direct descendent of Gnosticism. That fact would be life changing for Jung and it completely redirected his psychological research for the rest of his life.

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