Mundus Imaginalis
Mundus Imaginalis: or the imaginary and the imaginal by Henry Corbin (out of print) has had an immense influence on Jungian psychoanalysis and depth psychology. His understanding of the visionary experience is critical to understanding Carl Jung, active imagination, and how we become aware of Psyche’s play around and within us. In psychoanalysis we hold space for stepping out of the ego’s predicament with rational thinking, and embrace the atrophied right brain, symbolic function that gives way to the imaginal world within which we marry our inner and outer worlds in greater wholeness. To ignore this passage through the psychoidal realms, is to remain stuck in one’s false self or child ego that is desperate for control. As put forth by Mary Watkins in, Invisible Guests: Development of Imaginal Dialogues, if we remain stuck in this complex, dependent on an illusory control by way of the “rational” (or so it thinks...) intellectualizing ego we inevitably stomp out Life, and kill the soul and it’s symbolic way. As Corbin often writes in his work, the imaginal function does have one foot into the cognitive powers. Imaginative perception and imaginative consciousness are of deep noetic value within their own realm which when married with the active principle result in a mercurial transcendence within immanence, the healing function.
Henry Corbin writes, “Active imagination is the mirror par excellence, the epiphanic place for the Images of the archetypal world. This is why the theory of Mundus Imaginalis is closely bound up with a theory of imaginative cognition and the imaginative function, which is a truly central, mediating function, owing both to the median and mediating position of the imaginal. (We can experiment in this psychic space, and symbolize between spaces, activating insight and ultimately our meaning-making—soul-making.) The cognitive function of imagination provides the foundation for a rigorous analogical knowledge permitting us to evade the dilemma of current rationalism, which gives us the choice between the two banal dualistic terms of either “matter” or “mind.”
Books mentioned:
Mundus Imaginalus : or the Imaginary and the Imaginal by Henry Corbin