Jung On Active Imagination HOT!
These images from the unconscious were symbols that provided vital clues on how a person should live. They could provide important ideas about what was going wrong, and what needed to be attended to. To simply see them as colourful creations of the psyche, with no lasting value, was to miss the point. Therefore, Jung actively laboured with his images. He graphically and painstakingly recreated them. But even then, they would not give up their meanings easily. Therefore, he developed a method called active imagination, where he would spend hours dialoguing with his images, writing about them, and turning them over in his mind. Through working on them, he would seek to extract deeper layers of meaning. This is a process a person can carry out by themselves, outside the therapy room.
Jung on active imagination
Using the imagination as a tool for transformation is what drew me to Jung and, later, to work with active imagination. As a writer, I inherently trust the wisdom of my unconscious mind to lead me to the story inside the story. To show me what I am not looking at, what escapes my awareness but wants to be seen. What a revelation to discover that the nightmares that wake us, shaken and despairing, might indeed be coded messages of a healing source within!
Jung's discovery of active imagination is one of the most important milestones in his personal and professional life. Prompted by the trauma of his break up with Freud, he developed a method of self healing which later formed the basis of his analytic practice and is now regarded as the origin of non-directive psychotherapy and creative arts therapies.Jungian analyst, Joan Chodorow brings together a key selection of Jung's writings. In her introduction to this selection of his writings Joan Chodorow explains clearly Jung's method of focusing the conscious mind on unconscious processes as a means of achieving self-knowledge and individuation.
Active imagination in Carl Jung's analytical method of psychotherapy involves opening oneself to the unconscious and giving free rein to fantasy, while at the same time maintaining an active, attentive, conscious point of view. The process leads to a synthesis that contains both perspectives, but in a new and surprising way.
"The Transcendent Function" (1916b [1958]) is Jung's first paper about the method he later came to call active imagination. It has two parts or stages: Letting the unconscious come up and Coming to terms with the unconscious. He describes its starting points (mainly moods, images, bodily sensations); and some of its many expressive forms (painting, sculpting, drawing, writing, dancing, weaving, dramatic enactment, inner visions, inner dialogues). In this early essay he links his method to work with dreams and the therapeutic relationship. The term "transcendent function" encompasses both the method and its inborn dynamic function that unites opposite position in the psyche.
Jung discovered active imagination out of his own need for self-healing in a certain period of his life. It all began with symbolic play: "I had no choice but to. . .take up that child's life with his childish games" (Jung, 1962/1966, p. 174). He found that as long as he managed to translate his emotions into symbolic images, he was inwardly calmed and reassured. When he opened to the raw material of the unconscious, he did not identify with the affects and images, rather, he turned his curiosity toward the inner world of the imagination. This led to a deep process of renewal, as well as insights that gave him a new orientation. In the years that followed, he recommended it to many of his patients and students. He presents active imagination as an adjunctive technique, but by linking it to his symbolic method of dream interpretation and work with the analytic relationship, Jung laid the groundwork for a comprehensive method of psychotherapy.
Active imagination is a direct extension of Freud's free association (Jung, 1929, p. 47). Other related notions include the transcendent function; the natural healing function of play and imagination; Sandplay; active vs. passive attitudes toward fantasy; reductive and constructive ways to understand the unconscious content; creative formulation vs. understanding; liberation from the analyst (Chodorow, 1997).
Active imagination is perhaps the most radical innovation of Jungian psychology. In contrast to free association, which is a passive process, active imagination is a process in which the ego actively evokes images from the unconscious and actively engages those images. Whereas free association is an interior monologue (a dictation from the unconscious to the ego), active imagination is an interior dialogue (a conversation between the ego and the unconscious).
The creative dialogue between the ego and the unconscious and archetypal is an important factor in the creative process since the affect laden ego mixes with the archetypal unconscious to create the artistic product. By creating art out of their own active imagination, dreams, visions, images, dance, or writings, participants will directly embody the relation between art and psyche and then have an opportunity to share with other participants their uniquely personal experience of the creative process.
When you pay you must also email your current email address and telephone number to the Foundation at cgjungny@aol.com. The Foundation will send you an email message and you must reply to confirm receipt. If you are taking this course for 7.5 CE contact hours for licensed NYS Social Workers, Psychoanalysts and Creative Arts Therapists, please specify which license you hold and give your NYS license number.
When you pay you must also email your current email address and telephone number to the Foundation at cgjungny@aol.com. The Foundation will send you an email message and you must reply to confirm receipt. If you are taking this course for 7.5 CE contact hours for licensed NYS Social Workers, Psychoanalysts and Creative Arts Therapists, please specify which license you hold and give your NYS license number.Class size is limited. Early registration is strongly recommended. Refunds for continuing education courses, less $15 for administrative services, will be made up to seven days before the first session. There will be no refunds issued after classes have begun. No exceptions will be made. Programs are subject to change without notice.
The idea of countertransference has expanded beyond its original meaning of a neurotic reaction to include all reactions of the therapist: affective, bodily, and imaginal. Additionally, Jung's fundamental insight in 'The psychology of the transference' was that a 'third thing' is created in the analysis, but he failed to demonstrate how this third is experienced and utilized in analysis. This 'analytic third', as Ogden names it, is co-created by analyst and analysand in depth work and becomes the object of analysis. Reverie, as developed by Bion and clinically utilized by Ogden, provides a means of access to the unconscious nature of this third. Reverie will be placed on a continuum of contents of mind, ranging from indirect to direct associative forms described as associative dreaming. Active imagination, as developed by Jung, provides the paradigm for a mode of interaction with these contents within the analytic encounter itself. Whether the analyst speaks from or about these contents depends on the capacity of the patient to dream. Classical amplification can be understood as an instance of speaking about inner contents. As the ego of the analyst, the conscious component, relates to unconscious contents emerging from the analytic third, micro-activations of the transcendent function constellate creating an analytic compass. 041b061a72