Imaginal

What Does “Imaginal” Mean?

The term imaginal enters depth psychology through the Islamic philosopher and theologian Henry Corbin, who coined mundus imaginalis to name a realm of reality that Western philosophy had effectively abolished. Corbin argued that between the empirical world of sense perception and the abstract world of intellect there exists a third order — an “imaginal world” populated by autonomous forms, angelic presences, and visionary geographies that possess their own ontological density (Corbin, 1972). This was not metaphor. Corbin insisted that the mundus imaginalis is as real as the material world, accessible through a cognitive faculty he called the imaginatio vera — the organ of true imagination. The distinction between the imaginal and the imaginary is therefore foundational: the imaginary is made up, dismissed as mere fantasy; the imaginal is encountered, received, and carries the weight of revelation.

How Did Hillman Bring the Imaginal Into Psychology?

James Hillman adopted Corbin’s framework and placed it at the center of archetypal psychology. In Re-Visioning Psychology, Hillman declared that the soul “images” continuously — its primary mode of activity is not logical argument or emotional reaction but the spontaneous production of images (Hillman, 1975). To engage the imaginal is therefore to engage the psyche on its own terms, attending to dreams, fantasies, symptoms, and metaphors not as problems to be solved but as presences to be witnessed. Hillman’s move was polemical: he was challenging the literalism of both behavioral psychology and the medical model, insisting that psychological life cannot be reduced to neurochemistry or behavioral modification without destroying its essential character. Jung had laid the groundwork decades earlier, observing that the image is “a condensed expression of the psychic situation as a whole” and that the psyche’s autonomous image-making activity constitutes a form of intelligence irreducible to intellectual operations (Jung, CW 8, para. 745).

Why Does the Imaginal Matter Clinically?

The clinical relevance of the imaginal lies in its capacity to restore dimensionality to psychological experience. Cheetham, elaborating on Corbin’s legacy, argues that without access to the imaginal, consciousness collapses into a two-dimensional oscillation between brute fact and abstract concept — leaving no room for meaning, symbol, or soul (Cheetham, 2012). In therapeutic practice, engaging the imaginal means treating a client’s images, dreams, and symptomatic expressions as communications from an autonomous psychic intelligence rather than as diagnostic data to be decoded. Jung’s method of active imagination exemplifies this orientation: the conscious ego enters into dialogue with the images that arise from the unconscious, neither dismissing them as pathology nor inflating them into literal truth (Jung, CW 8, para. 400). The imaginal, in this sense, is the medium through which the work of soul-making proceeds.

Sources Cited

1. Corbin, Henry (1972). Mundus Imaginalis, or the Imaginary and the Imaginal. Spring.
2. Hillman, James (1975). Re-Visioning Psychology. Harper & Row.
3. Jung, C.G. (1960). The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (CW 8). Princeton University Press.
4. Cheetham, Tom (2012). All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings. North Atlantic Books.