Active Imagination Stack

Post 1 of 3 on requested psychoanalytical source text on Active Imagination, Kundalini, Astrology, Alchemy and Kabbalah as symbol systems.

Carl Gustav Jung on Active Imagination: The Technique of Differentiation Between the Ego & the Figures of the Unconscious:

"By 'human' experience I mean that the person of the author should not just be included passively in the vision, but that he should face the figures of the vision actively and reactively, with full consciousness. A real settlement with the unconscious demands a firmly opposed conscious standpoint. I will try to explain what I mean by an example. One of my patients had the following fantasy: He sees his fiancee running down the road towards the river. She runs out on the ice, and then the ice breaks, a dark fissure appears, she jumps into the crack, and he watches her sadly. This fragment clearly shows the attitude of the conscious mind: it perceives and passively endures, the fantasy-image is merely seen and felt, it is two-dimensional, as it were, because the patient is not sufficiently involved. Therefore the fantasy remains a flat image, concrete and agitating perhaps, but unreal, like a dream. This unreality comes from the fact that he himself is not playing an active part. If the fantasy happened in reality, he would not be paralyzed. The fact that he remains passive in the fantasy merely expresses his attitude to the activity of the unconscious in general: he is fascinated and stupefied by it. In reality he suffers from all sorts of depressive ideas and convictions; he thinks he is no good, that he has some hopeless hereditary taint, that his brain is degenerating, etc. These negative feelings are auto-suggestions, fantasies which he accepts without argument. Intellectually, he can understand them perfectly and recognize them as untrue, but nevertheless the feelings persist. They cannot be attacked by the intellect because they have no intellectual or rational basis; they are rooted in an unconscious, irrational fantasy-life which is not amenable to conscious criticism.In these cases the unconscious must be given an opportunity to produce its fantasies."