Jung on Active Imagination

Active Imagination Is Not a Technique but the Psyche’s Own Metabolism Made Conscious

Joan Chodorow’s Jung on Active Imagination (1997) accomplishes something deceptively simple: it gathers Jung’s own writings on active imagination — scattered across the Collected Works, seminars, memoirs, and unpublished papers — into a single chronological sequence, framed by an introduction that constitutes one of the finest pieces of secondary Jungian scholarship on the subject. The deception lies in how much interpretive force the mere act of sequencing generates. When read consecutively, Jung’s papers reveal a startling evolution: what begins in 1916 as an “adjunctive technique” called “the transcendent function” becomes, by Mysterium Coniunctionis, nothing less than “the essential, inner-directed symbolic attitude that is at the core of psychological development.” Chodorow makes this trajectory explicit. Active imagination is not something you do; it is something the psyche does, which you can learn to participate in consciously. This reframing cuts against the procedural reductions of Robert Johnson’s four-step model and Marie-Louise von Franz’s schematic stages — both of which Chodorow respectfully cites before quietly subverting. She notes that Janet Dallett herself admitted “it is unlikely that anyone ever actually does active imagination in such an orderly fashion.” The real architecture of the method is dialectical, not sequential. It mirrors what Murray Stein, following Jung, calls the Auseinandersetzung — a confrontation that is simultaneously a dialogue, where neither ego nor unconscious achieves supremacy. This is the same structural principle Edward Edinger identifies in the ego-Self axis: a relationship of mutual dependency where consciousness and the archetypal ground meet without merger or domination.

The Transcendent Function and Active Imagination Are Not Synonyms — and the Difference Matters

Chodorow draws a distinction most commentators collapse: the transcendent function is both an inborn psychic process and a method, while active imagination refers to the method alone. This is not pedantry. The transcendent function names the psyche’s inherent capacity to unite opposites into a living symbol — what Jung called “a movement out of the suspension between opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of being.” Active imagination is the deliberate, conscious participation in that process. Barbara Hannah, as Chodorow notes, understood the transcendent function as one of Jung’s early formulations later subsumed into his concept of the Self. The implication is profound: active imagination is not a clinical tool aimed at symptom relief but the ego’s way of cooperating with the Self’s teleological drive toward wholeness. This places active imagination in direct lineage with what James Hillman would later call “soul-making” — though Hillman’s archetypal psychology would resist the teleological framing. Where Hillman privileges the image as autonomous and irreducible, Jung (as Chodorow presents him) insists on the ethical obligation to live what the image reveals. The second stage of active imagination — coming to terms with the unconscious — demands moral engagement, not aesthetic contemplation. Chodorow captures this tension between beauty and understanding as two regulating principles: “If the first tendency predominates, a person may lose the goal of psychological development and instead get fascinated with the artistic elaboration of a theme. If the second tendency predominates, there is the danger of so much analysis and interpretation that the transformative power of the symbol is lost.” This dual warning applies equally to Hillman’s imaginal purism and to reductive psychoanalytic interpretation.

The Body Was There from the Beginning

Perhaps Chodorow’s most consequential contribution is the recovery of Tina Keller’s 1972 memoir describing how she danced her active imagination in the presence of Toni Wolff during the 1910s-1920s. Keller felt “oppression” as a body sensation, saw herself trapped inside a stone, and moved her way to liberation — “much more potent than the hours in which we only talked.” This is not a footnote. It resets the historical origin of embodied psychotherapy. Chodorow, herself a registered dance therapist and former president of the American Dance Therapy Association, does not belabor the point polemically; she lets the primary source speak. But the implication is unmistakable: bodily movement as active imagination is not a twentieth-century innovation grafted onto Jungian theory by somatic practitioners. It is indigenous to the method’s earliest practice. Jung himself told von Franz that “symbolic enactment with the body is more efficient than ‘ordinary active imagination’ but he could not say why.” Chodorow’s anthology provides the documentary evidence that makes this remark intelligible. The body’s expressive movement, Sandplay, clay work, painting — these are not secondary translations of an essentially mental process. They are the process itself in different modalities. The narrative by Mahlendorf, in which dance led to clay which led back to dance in a “non-verbal dialectic,” illustrates how the transcendent function operates through material engagement, not despite it. This resonates with Donald Winnicott’s understanding of transitional phenomena — the creative space where inner and outer reality overlap — which Chodorow explicitly links to Jung’s theory of play and imagination.

Why This Book Remains Structurally Irreplaceable

For anyone encountering depth psychology today — particularly in a clinical landscape dominated by manualized treatments and neuroscientific reductionism — Chodorow’s anthology offers something no other single volume does: the primary texts of Jung’s most radical therapeutic contribution, arranged to reveal their internal logic, with an introduction that is itself a masterclass in how to hold aesthetic sensitivity and scholarly rigor in productive tension. Chiara Tozzi’s later two-volume collection (2017) extends the conversation into neuroscience, film, and interdisciplinary applications, but it presupposes the textual foundation Chodorow built. This is the book that makes Jung’s scattered reflections on active imagination legible as a coherent, evolving theory of psychic transformation — not a bag of tricks for accessing the unconscious, but a description of how the psyche heals itself when consciousness agrees to participate.