Active Imagination

Sometimes it is easier to encounter something inside us when we give it a form.

Jung called one version of this active imagination. Rather than interpreting an image, feeling, dream figure, or fantasy from the outside, we enter into relationship with it.

A figure can speak.

A feeling can become an image.

A dream can continue.

A conflict can become a dialogue.

We do not direct the image. We enter it, engage with it, and discover where it leads. For Jung, this created a meeting place between consciousness and the unconscious, allowing something previously unknown to take form.

And active imagination does not have to happen only in the mind.

Jung drew, painted, wrote, sculpted, and worked extensively with symbolic images. Later Jungian traditions developed other ways of giving inner experience form. In Authentic Movement, the body moves without choreography, following impulses as they emerge. In sandplay, figures and objects create an external landscape for the inner world. Drawing, painting, clay, spontaneous writing, movement, and dialogue can all become ways of allowing something implicit to express itself.

We find a similar movement in IFS. A part may appear as an image, a voice, an age, a bodily presence, or a character with whom we can develop a relationship.

The point is not to make art.

It is to give the inner world a form through which we can encounter it.

Something implicit becomes visible.

Something formless acquires a shape.

Something we were inside of becomes something we can meet.