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In his 2021 paper¹ about Marie Louise von Franz's lectures on Alchemical Active Imgination, Thomas Willard writes:
By active imagination she (Marie Louise von Franz) meant the opposite of passive daydreaming; she meant an activity that engaged the conscious mind in dialogue with the unconscious. She had learned the technique from Jung himself, some three decades earlier, and considered it “the most powerful tool in Jungian psychology for achieving wholeness—far more efficient than dream interpretation alone” (von Franz, 1981, p. 3). C. G. Jung (1875–1961) had rediscovered the age-old technique of shamans in dream dialogues during what he called his “Confrontation with the Unconscious” following his break with Freud in 1913 (Jung, 1961, pp. 190–199). It led to the introspective dialogues in his recently published The Red Book (Jung, 2009).
Active imagination has been tagged as the Holy Grail of Jungian psychology for the best part of a century. Yet, there is no proof that this technique leads to wholeness as Jungian analysts like to repeat. Very few Jungians have written substantially about the technique apart from Jeffrey Raff who seems to be the exception with his Ally work.
To my knowledge, none of the hundreds if not thousands of Jungian analysts, who are supposed to have put this technique in the center of their life, have written about their journey and the results they obtained in regard to wholeness. If active imagination were the super technique to achieve wholeness, its benefits are extremely confidential. One might rightfully suspect that active imagination does not produce the results the Jungians promote.
Willard continues
To understand the relationship between von Franz and Jung on the one hand, and Dorn and Paracelsus on the other, one can hardly do better than to consider the key word in the title of her lectures: imagination. Jung quotes approvingly the famous Paracelsian definition of imagination as “the star in man” (Jung, 1967, p. 127)². He suggests that this inner light of Paracelsus may be closer to the imago dei or “god within” than scholars have realized. In his own definition of the “image,” he asserts that “it is just in the imagination that a man’s highest value may lie” (Jung, 1971, p. 63)³.
The problem lies here. Jung began active imagination to exit the depressive state he suffered from 1912. After a rigorous analysis of his childhood memories that provided no sufficient results, he turned to processes that were less related to his Thinking auxiliary function. He began to play with peebles and constructing small houses. Then one night, he let himself fall in his imagination in order to find an answer to his health problem. This is the beginning of active imagination.
What was really happening for Jung, during the following years, was the development of his tertiary Feeling function. Active imagination demands to identify feelings and states of mind, let them personify and interact with these characters in imagination. In reality, each time Jung was doing active imagination, he was working on his Feeling function, taking it out of its undifferentiated state. It was not active imagination the secret to wholeness but the developement of a third cognitive function.
Emotions were Jung's Achille's heel as it normally is to everyone who has Feeling in the tertiary or inferior position of the MBTI types. That function is repressed because it is the complete opposite of the highly esteemed Thinking cognitive function. By adding a third performing cognitive function to his conaciousness, Jung overcame his depression. He became more conscious with this second judgment function of orientation of consciousness and it allowed him to have a more complete view of reality.
It is not certain Jung really understood what was going on at that moment. In his 1925 seminar on Analytical Psychology, he seemed to have noticed that active imagination was about the development of cognitive functions. But he could not pass over the integration of the shadow and the anima. He began to say that active imagination was THE technique of his psychology and his followers repeated that ad nauseam. In fact, active imagination worked for him, because Feeling was his tertiary cognitive function. The results for any other cognitive function in the third place are therefore homeopathic.
Active imagination is not the imagination that the alchemists were referring to. Jung and his interpreters promoted the idea that the alchemists were doing active imagination in front of their chemical experiments but this is a bending of alchemy to justify analytical psychology’s main technique. Two reasons could be invoked to support the assertion that alchemist never did active imagination. First, the real alchemists never did the experiments that were in their grimoires. Their recipes were way too strange to be real chemical experiments.
Second, the words meditatio and imaginatio used by the alchemists have nothing to do with the fantastic imagination at work in active imagination. Alchemy demands true imagination, not fantastic imagination. Jung quoted the Rosarium in Psychology and Alchemy (CW 12):
The problem, here, is that active imagination is fantastic imagination. It is the wandering of imagination in the realm of fantastic images. In contrast, true imagination is the meticulous exploration of all possibilities regarding a situation. It is what we would call, in today’s words, brainstorming. This is the kind of imagination that was used in the alchemical process.« And take care that thy door be well and firmly closed, so that he who is within cannot escape, and—God willing—thou wilt reach the goal. Nature performeth her operations gradually; and indeed, I would have thee do the same: let thy imagination be guided wholly by nature. And observe according to nature, through whom the substances regenerate themselves in the bowels of the earth. And imagine this with true and not with fantastic imagination. » (par. 218)
Imagination as the star in man means that the faculty of imagining other ways or means to overcome a problem is the highest form of consciousness. It is exactly what Jung did when he decided to turn away from his auxiliary Thinking to dig from the unconscious his undifferentiated Feeling function. He searched a new path to end his suffering and brainstormed to find something new. This is how science evolve. It is not the technique of active imagination that is the Grail but the developement of a new cognitive function.
Always search the logic before resorting to magic.
¹ Thomas Willard (2021) The Star in Man: C. G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz on the Alchemical Philosophy of Gerard Dorn, Psychological Perspectives, 64:1, 9-36,
² Jung, C. G. (1967). Paracelsus as a spiritual phenomenon. In Alchemical studies (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., pp. 109–189). Princeton University Press.
³ Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological types (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton University Press.