In the chapter Intentionality and Non-Intentionality in Jung’s Active Imagination of the book Intentional Transformative Experiences Theorizing Self-Cultivation in Religion and Esotericism (2024), author Karl Baier examines the dynamics in transformative experiences of the self. Using C. G. Jung's creation of the technique of active imagination, Baier describes it as a ritualization of a conversion-like experience which stemmed from Jung's surrender to the unconscious.
To Baier, “intentionality” denotes the realm of everything “deliberate, done on purpose.” It includes voluntary bodily actions as well as mental acts performed of one’s own free will. The term “non-intentionality” refers to a receptive but not necessarily passive openness towards what is ultimately beyond the control of the experiencing self. (P. 246) To him, the genesis of Jung's active imagination technique demonstrate the relation between intentionality and non-intentionality. It is necessary to add some basic observations in order to enrich the lack of perspective in Baier's analysis of Jung's recourse to active imagination.
Dealing with depression¹ from the end of 1912, Jung started a self-analysis of his childhood memories which produced no effective results. It is out of despair that he turned to an activity that he recalled brought him joy as a young boy and started to play with peebles, constructing small houses. That experience was, for him, a sort of a bath into his emotions. This is exactly where he left the intentional path. Following the same thread, he began to identify emotions and moods, let them being personified in order to interact with them in imagination. This is the technique of active imagination Baier refers to in his chapter. Baier writes
The initial, path-opening intuition led to a cascade of further unintended flashes of inspiration, and their conscious, intended repetition and elaboration. He repeated the childhood game that he had initially remembered spontaneously every day for a longer period of time in order to build up his village. Since the spontaneously arising fantasies did not stop, he also returned to the original act of opening up and ritualized the surrender to the unconscious by making an exercise out of it.
The author seems to let the reader believe that Jung "invented" active imagination out of hundreds or thousands of possibilities but it is not the case. The opening of a new path is not magical because there is always an underlying factor that is at play in those situations. What Jung did with the play with peebles and active imagination, was to abandon his auxiliary Thinking cognitive function and start developing his tertiary Feeling cognitive function as a means to exit his depressive state. In other words, when facing the poor results and the dead-end of the psychoanalytic technique which is a Thinking process, Jung had no other choice, apart from doing nothing, than to differentiate his Feeling function. There was not numerous paths in front of him but only one that would give him the opportunity of rebirth, namely reinventing himself with the use and development of the Feeling cognitive function. Like so many others, he could have done nothing and accept to slowly die inside but he chose to stop being himself which always trigger the differentiation of a new cognitive function.
Thinking and Feeling cognitive functions are the two means by which humans can judge an observation or a situation. There are no other choice: you either judge with logic or with emotions. Jung was an INTJ and we see his type in every book he wrote. This indicates that his dominant function was introverted Intuition, his auxiliary, extraverted Thinking, his tertiary, introverted Feeling and his inferior was extraverted Sensation. As people generally develop only the dominant and the auxiliary functions, their consciousness is always one-sided and incomplete. For instance, thinkers always miss the feeling tone, a Sensation type never see the possibilities and relationships between perceived information, etc.
When Jung's Thinking function was of no successful use to exit his depression, his next and only choice was to utilize his Feeling function. This is exactly what he did. Active imagination is not a magical technique to access unconscious contents or to heal a neurosis, it is a technique that mainly aims to develop one's Feeling cognitive function. Imagination is not the operating factor here, the real power lies in the identification of emotions and their particular powers to judge a situation or a perception. Baier's non-intentionality is not without goal: access to rebirth is granted by the development of a new cognitive function. Baier adds
An important aspect of Jung’s experiments with imagination is that by way of their ritualization he turned them into practices that can and should be repeated by others. Thus, active imagination became an integral part of the Jungian psychotherapeutic path culture.
This is a superficial observation on the place of active imagination in the Jungian field. It is linked to the wonderful and magical world of Jungian mystique which repeats the same falsehoods again and again. Active imagination was never scientifically proven as effective and in any case, never to the extent of the expected results Jungians of the first generation promised. The real place of that technique in the field of Analytical psychology is a lot less spectacular than its proponents assume. Although some Jungians do indeed promote active imagination, it seems, when we search for their writings on the results they achieved, that they do not practice it themselves. Apart from the first generation of analysts who repeated Jung's words restlessly, Jeffrey Raff is the only Jungian to have written extensively on the effects and the technical details of active imagination but, as is well known, he has not been recognized and followed by the Jungian communauty. All the others, as much as their writings suggest, have a very limited perception of those effects because active imagination, when practiced seriously, has, most of the time, an homeopathic outcome. If active imagination were to be "the" technique of Analytical psychology, Jungian analysts would have written relentlessly about it but when one search for these writings, he finds an empty field. That technique does not, nowadays, occupy the central position of Analytical psychology and the logical conclusion is that it does not produce the results one should expect. Active imagination is not magical, neither is imagination and its results are mainly related to the developement of the Feeling cognitive function. If that function is already developed and used by the subject, active imagination only brings shallow outcomes.
The Transcendent Function
Baier continues his analysis of active imagination with a reference to Jung's essay The Transcendent Function. He writes:
Seminal to Jung’s understanding of active imagination is the 1916 essay The Transcendent Function, written while he was still in the midst of his intense self-explorations and published only in 1958. In this paper, Jung explains why and how imaginations can become the source of cognition of unconscious contents and their integration into consciousness. (P. 253)
There are two important facts around this essay that people generally miss. First, the fact that Jung did not proceed to its publishing in the months or years following its writing and second, the name he gave to that function. When we put those two observations together, we get to a surprising conclusion.
If the essay was really about active imagination and its amazing effects, why was it only published in 1958 when some students of the C. G. jung Institute found it? One usually does not hide a discovery he thinks is of value for his field. The second question is why did Jung call this function "transcendent" while many other words would have been more suitable to express the movement from one attitude to another?
When both observations are put together, one conclusion appears: the essay was really about transcendent experiences that Jung thought came from the technique of active imagination. "Transcendent" was the right word for this function and Jung thought the essay could be detrimental to his career which explains his decision to not publish. With the availability of The Red Book and The Black Books, we now have the necessary tools to understand what happened during the period 1913-1916.
Jung did have a transcendent experience in December 1913. It is related to the active imagination of Elijah, Salome and the black serpent. At the end of his account, he said that he felt himself taking the form of the god Aion and the posture of Christ on the cross. Becoming one or merged with God, the universe or Nature is a symbol of conjunction of the opposites particle-whole and Jung repeatedly linked conjunction of opposites to mystical experiences. In Mysterium Conjunctionis, he wrote
"Experience shows that the union of antagonistic elements is an irrational occurrence which can fairly be described as ‘mystical,’ provided that one means by this an occurrence that cannot be reduced to anything else or regarded as in some way unauthentic.” (CW 14, ¶ 515)
Jung's experience of becoming at the same time the leontocephalus and Christ was a mystical experience or, in his words, a symbol of conjunction of opposites. That explains his 1916 essay and every sentence he wrote afterward on conjunction of opposites.
Now, if imagination is not the effective factor in the technique of active imagination but rather the development of the third cognitive function, that means that mystical or transcendent experiences are the symbol emitted by the mind to show that two opposites cognitive functions have reached the same level of development. There is no divine intervention in those phenomena, mystical experiences are linked to the normal yet rare development of new cognitive function. Jung was aware of that link and in Psychological Types, he wrote:
This symbol appears to be intimately connected with the opposition between the psychological types and functions, and is obviously an attempt to find a solution in the form of a renewal of the general attitude, which in the language of the unconscious is expressed as a renewal of God. (Par. 325)
This is Jung's second hypothesis about transcendent experiences. In 1916, Jung thought his mystical experience came from his active imagination technique and that was the core of his unpublished essay. In 1921, he proposed a new interpretation: transcendent experiences come from the equal development of two opposites cognitive functions, in his case the extraverted Thinking and the introverted Feeling. This hypothesis is probably right. The genesis of mystical experiences begins when one stop being himself, thus opening the window to a new approach toward life.
Leaving the intentional path
The normal conclusion that one should find when studying the links between intentional and non-intentional path is the modification of consciousness. When people leave intentional paths and therefore stop using their developed cognitive functions, they inevitably begin to develop a new cognitive function which is always the opposite of the one they normally use. If they stop using the Thinking function to judge a situation or an information, as in Jung's case, they will develop the Feeling function and vice versa. If they stop using their Sensation function to get information, they will start to use the Intuition mode of perception and vice versa. And if the process is diligently performed for a long period of time, a symbol of conjunction of opposites will seized consciousness when both functions are equally developed.
Mystical experiences are known to happen more frequently in monastic settings and there is a logical reason for this: the monastic rule ask for the detachment from all possessions both material and spiritual. For certain monks and nuns, that is expressed in the renouncement of their cognitive identity. The Thinker will refrain from thinking and will start to feel and trust emotions. The Intuitive type will stop to perceive by relations and possibilities and concentrate on the perception of his senses. The Sensitive will begin to see opportunities and the Feeling type will dive into logic. When we study transcendent experiences and life changing decisions and experiences, we always find the same process.
Baier's frame of reference is articulated around three major ways:
Within the path cultures I have studied, transformative experiences “that change what it is like for you to live your life, and perhaps even change what it is like to be you, deeply and fundamentally” are thematized in three major ways. I mention them here because all three occur in Jung’s practice of active imagination.
First, as involvement in short and intense disclosure situations, game-changing moments or “peak-experiences” to use Abraham Maslow’s famous term; second, conversions or similar transformative mid-length processes often triggered by the first way; and third, walking the path as a whole with all its lightful heights, frustrating downs, and neutral plains can be conceived of as transformative experience. (P. 244)
What Baier seems to have missed is the consciousness component in transformative experiences. His three ways are not independent stages which could or could not happen but required steps to succeed in the process. First, the decision to perceive (perception functions of consciousness) or judge (judging functions of consciousness) the environment in a completely different way is either done by choice or by obligation. To Carl Jung, it was a choice, to John of the Cross, it was an obligation deriving from his responsibilities at the head of the Carmelite order. In Thomas Merton's case, it was his response to a long hospitalization. Second, the decision must be maintain long enough for the new cognitive function to get to a level of differentiation similar to the old one. Third, the symbol of conjunction of opposites or the transcendent experience is the factor which will completely change the attitude of the subject. It is the renewal of God. In Jung's case, his exit from depression.
The pathless path is not without a path. It is true we don't know where we are going but the path is always linked to the desire of rebirth and rebirth depends on consciousness and becoming someone else. When we stopped being ourselves because it is not possible to continue as before, a path, a narrow path is in front of us. It asks for an openness to interact differently with the world and a will to support long enough the difficult apprenticeship. The result is a transformative experience that change completely the attitude toward life.
B. R.
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¹ His dreams and fantasies of that period all point out to a depressive state. It is also important to express that this was not only a period of "disorientation" as Jungians like to say. It is because of the importance of his depression that Jung took the decision to renounce his Thinking cognitive function and change the orientation of his consciousness.