Meditation for CG Jung – The Active Imagination

Learn about the active imagination technique, used in CG Jung’s Analytical Psychology therapy.

Hello friends!

CG Jung was the creator of Analytical Psychology. Graduated in medicine and specialized in psychiatry, he initially had a career linked to Experimental Studies and then joined the newly created psychoanalytic movement, becoming the 1st President of the International Psychoanalytic Association.

Due to theoretical and personal disagreements with Freud (who was a generation older and at one point considered that Jung would be “the crown prince”), Jung leaves psychoanalysis and creates his own approach to psychology.

In 1916, he created a technique that would replace – or complement – ​​the Freudian technique of free association. His new technique is called Active Imagination. As very few know the technique and as even scholars end up not studying his last book Mysterium Coniuncitionis, I think it will be interesting to share some excerpts so that we can better understand what Jung really said.

This last work by Jung is about Psychology and Alchemy. (Jung began to study alchemy because he found in alchemical symbolism visions and imaginations about the process of individuation of each alchemist, that is, his process of psychic development was expressed through the texts and images of his productions).

Jung and Meditation

“Meditation and contemplation in general have a bad reputation in the West. They are seen as especially reprehensible forms of idleness or as unhealthy ways of mirroring oneself. One has no time for self-knowledge, nor does one believe that it can serve any sensible purpose. It is also absolutely not worth it, as you already know beforehand, to know yourself, because in the verity if you think it’s easy to know who we are. One believes exclusively in action, and does not ask about the subject of action. The latter will only be judged after certain collectively evaluated successes. That there is an unconscious psyche, the general public knows more than the authorities, but nevertheless, conclusions have not yet been drawn from the fact that Western man is a stranger to himself, and that self-knowledge is one of the most difficult arts. and more demanding” (JUNG, Mysterium Coniunctionis II, p. 253).

Well, and in that sense we have to ask ourselves what kind of “meditation” Jung recommended. After all, there is a whole huge Eastern tradition that we can lean on to study meditation. In addition, we also find meditative techniques in Church history, albeit on a smaller scale.

The technique that Jung recommended in his psychotherapeutic treatments is called Active Imagination.

In the Mysterium Coniunctionis he says:

🇧🇷 imagination active. The latter represents, as it were, a method spontaneously used by nature itself or taught to the patient by the physician’s instruction. As a rule, it appears and is indicated when the process of “dissolution” (analysis!) has constellated the opposites to such an extent that the union or composition (synthesis!) of the personality becomes an imperative necessity.

Such a situation necessarily arises when, through the analysis of psychic contents, attitudes, and especially dreams, the motives and images of the unconscious – which are complementary or respectively compensatory, and often even directly opposite – have been changed into conscious ones, and consciousness reaches to such an extent that the seemingly insoluble conflict between the conscious and unconscious personality becomes manifest, and thus also critical (JUNG, 1990, p. 249).

He continues:

“a dream or any other fantasy image is suitably chosen and the person concentrates on it, simply retaining and contemplating it (…) As a rule it (the image) changes, acquiring life by the simple fact of observation (…)

From there, a chain of fantasy images develops, which little by little takes on a dramatic aspect, that is, from the simple process comes action. This is for the time being represented by projected figures, and the images are seen as scenes on the stage. In other words, you dream with your eyes open (…)

This confrontation with “the other” in us is rewarding, because in this way we get to know aspects of our being that we would not allow others to show us and would never admit to ourselves. It is not only useful, but important and entirely opportune to write down the whole process at the moment it originates, since everyone will need written proofs in order to have, in a given case, with which to efficiently oppose the tendency always ready to deceive itself. yourself. (JUNG, 1990, p. 251).

This is how active imagination takes place as an internal dialogue with the images of the unconscious, similar to a dream, a dream that happens while we are awake, because just as in a dream we dialogue and come into contact with “parts” of ourselves. ourselves, in active imagination we approach contents and representations that we tend to leave outside our horizon of conscious perspective.

It is also easy to see that active imagination comes close to art therapy. In the text that inaugurates the technique (called “The transcendent function”) and that we find in volume 8, part 2, of his Collected Works, The Nature of the Psyche, Jung mentions that we can carry out active imagination by writing as if we were writing a letter, or as if we were writing a dialogue from a theater scene or a movie script.

An example of Active Imagination

An example will make the technique clearer. At the Red Book – which is Jung’s own active imagination – he comes into contact with a character from his unconscious who is a one-eyed, somewhat repulsive guy, a bum, a prisoner.

As in his daily life Jung was married to the second richest woman in Switzerland, in addition to being a doctor, he excluded from his conscience not only the experience of being as a prisoner, but also how to be a socially rejected subject – “one of the degraded”.

By having the courage to dialogue with this aspect of himself that was excluded from his awareness, he can broaden it. Jung later writes about the experience of having contact with this degraded:

“He makes life easy and simple. It leads to the depth, to the foundation, where I see the altitude. Without the depth, I have no altitude” (JUNG, 2013, p. 212).

Conclusion

In a way, we can understand that what happens in active imagination happens in dreams and daydreams (when our mind flows into a fantasy when we daydream). However, the difference is that the active imagination technique – recommended with the help of a psychologist with an analytical psychology approach – makes the process more conscious.

We can understand that the process takes place and will continue to take place in the depths of our consciousness, in what we call the unconscious, the unknown within us. That’s why Jung could say: “What we do not face in ourselves, we will end up finding as destiny”.

This phrase must be understood in the sense that when we don’t know what these “parts of us” want, we become the pawns of their wills and attribute our fate to fate.

Most people prefer it that way, they prefer to blame others or the stars… and after all, we have to agree with Jung when he says that people don’t have time for self-knowledge and that self-knowledge is one of the rarest and most difficult arts.

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