JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY

ACTIVE IMAGINATION & THE

HEALING IMAGE

VOLUME 1
C.G. JUNG &
GUIDED IMAGERY IN
PSYCHOTHERAPY
BY BRIAN DAMIEN DIETRICH
BRIAN DAMIEN DIETRICH
© 2018 Brian Damien Dietrich

Brian Damien Dietrich

1531 Purdue Avenue, #102 Los Angeles, CA 90025
Briandietrich@mac.com
Brian Damien Dietrich 3
Prologue 7
Introduction 8
About the Author 12
Literature reviews 14
Early psychological studies 18
Experimental psychology 20
Behaviorism 21
An Unbroken Chain: Incubation, Magnetism,
Hypnotism, and Psychoanalysis 23
Franz Anton Mesmer 24
James Esdaile & James Braid 26
Spiritualism 27
Frederick Myers & Theodore Flournoy 28
Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, Hippolyte Bernheim,
and Jean-Martin Charcot 29
Pierre Janet 30
Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud 34
Carl Gustav Jung 39
European Studies 43
Ancient European Influences 44
Hippocrates 46
European Studies of Imagery: Gaston Bachélard. 48
European Schools of Guided Imagery 51
Carl Happich 52
Eugene Caslant 54
Robert Desoille 57
Hanscarl Leuner 67
Roger Frétigny and Andre Virel. 75
Recent Applications: Roberto Assagioli and
Psychosynthesis 81
Psychosynthesis imagery techniques 90
Psychosynthetic visualization: The enveloping ego
and its legatees. 94
Martha Crampton and Mary Watkins: Rapprochement
98
Martha Crampton’s dialogical imagery method 99
Mary Watkins’s waking dream method 104
Contemporary Guided Imagery 108
Jungian and Archetypal Psychology 111
C. G. Jung 111
Henry Corbin 129
James Hillman 135
PROLOGUE
This volume situates contemporary guided imagery
practices within the tradition of Jungian depth psychology; It
offers practitioners of guided imagery with 1) an imaginal
ontology supporting phenomenological exploration of the
inner world and 2) an empirically based epistemological
foundation valorizing Inner Guide techniques, and it 3) offers
Jungian depth psychology a more clearly articulated structure
for accessing, exploring, and integrating imaginal experiences
in a relational context.
1 INTRODUCTION

Guided imagery integrates a variety of techniques,

including basic visualization, evocative recall, and hypnotic
suggestion. It employs mental imagery, fantasy, metaphor,
and storytelling to access the unconscious mind's healing
potentials. Relational Guided Imagery (RGI) is a facilitated
technique in which participants interact with inner wisdom
figures.
This volume brings the contemporary field of guided
imagery into conversation with Jungian depth psychology,
the theophanic spiritual philosophy of Henry Corbin, and
Hillman's synthesis of their work in his archetypal psychology.
I explore two historical lines of development: 1) guided
imagery, and 2) Jungian and archetypal psychology.
The first category, which is the subject of this volume,
traces guided imagery's antecedent influences from ancient
Greek sources to 18th-century magnetism and hypnotism
from which dynamic psychiatry and the depth psychologies of
the unconscious emerged. Guided imagery's intellectual
ancestry includes a pastiche of cross-disciplinary influences,
including science, experimental psychology, behaviorism,
philosophy, and depth psychology. Regarding contemporary
practices of nondirected and interactive forms of RGI,
perhaps the most significant influences are the various
philosophically informed therapeutic applications of mental
imagery that proliferated in late 19th-and early 20th--century
Europe. Unencumbered by the methodological constraints of
behaviorism, philosophically-informed guided imagery
practices in Europe flourished in 19th-century romanticism
(described in detail in Volume 2), which inspired intense
curiosity about the unconscious and the nature of human
imagination. Identified in this section are key figures from the
history of hypnosis whose research in aggregate supports
RGI's efficacy as a healing modality. Important contemporary
figures in the field of RGI are also acknowledged. I categorize
the many theorists whose work informed the development of
relational forms of guided imagery into two categories, 1)
Authoritative and Directive, on the one hand, and 2)
Permissive and Nondirective on the other.
Those Directive approaches characterized by
predetermined imagery scenes; preformulated themes and
exercises; provider authority, intrusiveness, and control
include the European Practitioners (1) Carl Happich and his
method "meditation," (2) Eugene Caslant's "method for
developing supernormal faculties," (3) Robert Desoille's
"directed waking dream (4) Hanscarl Leuner's "Guided
Affective Imagery," and (5) Roberto Assagioli methods of
"psychosynthetic visualization." While these theorists stress
varying degrees of provider authority and directivity, RGI has
retained various structural elements from these directive
methods nevertheless. For example, 1) Providing subjects
with a safe holding environment and an atmosphere
conducive to inner work marked by decreased light and
diminished external noise (i.e., Caslant and Leuner); 2)
Breathing techniques to facilitate Relaxation and a calm,
inward focus (i.e., Happich, Caslant, Leuner); And, most
importantly, 3) a Dyadic relationship between guide and
subject in which the Guide assists in the elicitation of images;
asks questions, and discourages judgment, interpretation, or
rational analysis (i.e., Virel and Frétigny, Crampton, Watkins)
Intrusive provider directivity and control are most
pronounced in Desoille and Leuner, whose shard rationalism,
expert prerogative, and paternalistic interventional style
approached a kind of psychological colonialism. Similar to
Jung's active imagination, more permissive or nondirective
forms include Frétigny and Virel and their method of
oneiodrama. They favored a freer, client-centered approach.
They did not intrude on a subject's imagery in an overly
directive way. They only used suggestion in a subject's initial
imagery experience to help structure the unfamiliar practice.
Patients were expected later to self-direct and became
responsible for their imagery.
Martha Crampton, perhaps more than any of Assagioli's
successors, was instrumental in contextualizing
psychosynthetic visualization in the history of mental imagery
techniques and developing a method of working with images
she called: Dialogical Imagery that arguably informs most
contemporary approaches to RGI. Because she and the
Jungian theorist Mary Watkins developed similar perspectives
regarding image work based on their homologous
genealogical analyses of guided imagery and its antecedent
influences, their concordant approaches to imagery and
image work may be characterized as 1) client-centered, 2)
nondirective, and 3) permissive. Their consonance represents
rapprochement between psychosynthesis and analytical
psychology. In part, I contend the link between them became
obscured due to a methodological pseudo-speciation
inaugurated by Robert Desoille and his followers.
Notable differences exist between relational forms of
guided imagery and Jungian active imagination. For example,
as the name suggests, relational guided imagery sets
imaginal explorations in a relational context. An individual
interacts with spontaneous images emerging from the
unconscious while also interacting (though to a lesser
degree) with an Imagery Guide (or facilitator). The guide holds
space for the individual while providing gentle
encouragement for his or her sustained imaginal exploration.
In his experiments in confrontation with the unconscious,
active imagination was the method Jung devised to engage
personified archetypal figures between 1913 and 1916. Jung
only described his active imagination experiences to a small
circle of devotees who attended his 1925 seminar at the
(psychology club) Psychologischer Club Zürich. Notes from
his lectures went unpublished while Jung was alive. The only
other subjective account of his experiences with active
imagination—presented in Memories, Dreams, Reflections—
was also published posthumously. So, except for a handful of
colleagues and patients who attended his 1925 seminar,
Jung's private experiences with active imagination remained
publicly unknown until he died June 6, 1961.
Literature exploring the relationship between guided
imagery and Jungian and archetypal psychology is lacking.
Therefore, my research objective in this volume is to
articulate their dynamic relationship, shared history, and later
split into two developmental lines. In this volume, I trace the
common lineage between depth psychologies of the
unconscious and the various philosophical approaches and
uses of guided imagery in psychotherapy that proliferated
throughout Europe. Next, Drawing from his Collected
Works and secondary sources, I review Jung's active
imagination method, Corbin's insights pertinent to the
practice of guided imagery, and Hillman's ideas regarding the
nature of images and imagination.
Through its wayward path of individuation, guided imagery
has found a home, today, in the burgeoning field of
complementary and alternative medicine and has become
increasingly embraced by the medical establishment.
Symbolically, guided imagery is a prodigal son returning
home to its native soil, medical sciences from which Jungian
depth psychology partly emerged. By embracing its nullius
filius and reclaiming its scientific and medical lineage, Jungian
and archetypal psychology may re-ensoul Western medicine
through its synthesis of science and spirituality.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Dietrich, Ph.D. , LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist,

certified guided imagery practitioner, clinical supervisor,
teacher, and author. He specializes in imaginal techniques
that make use of imagery, images, and imagination to access
inner resources and wisdom as well as promote insight,
understanding, and personal transformation.
Dr. Dietrich has been in clinical practice for 20 years. He
obtained his Ph.D. in Jungian and archetypal psychology from
Pacifica Graduate Institute and a master’s degree
in transpersonal psychology from the California Institute for
Integral Studies.
Dr. Dietrich worked in a variety of clinical settings: The
California Pacific Medical Center’s Institue for Health and
Healing in San Francisco, Marin General Hospital, the
Department of Health and Human Services Marin County
Specialty Clinic, and the University of California at San
Francisco’s Center for AIDS Prevention Studies.
Dr. Dietrich was a clinical faculty member and training
supervisor for the California Pacific Medical Center's
Integrative Medicine Education Program where he taught
expressive arts therapy and interactive guided imagery. He
served as adjunct faculty and clinical supervisor for the
California Institute of Integral Studies, Integral Counseling
Psychology Program. Dr. Dietrich was an adjunct professor for
John F. Kennedy University’s Deep Imagination Certification
Program, and he most recently taught Active Imagination,
Dreams and Psychic Creativity at the Pacific Graduate
Institute. In his private practice, Dr. Dietrich provides
psychotherapy to individuals, couples, and groups. He is also
an analytic candidate at the C. G. Jung Institute of Los
Angeles.

Dr. Dietrich won the 2018 dissertation award of excellence at

Pacifica Graduate Institute for his original scholarly research
in depth psychology linking the experience of
contemporary practitioners of guided imagery to C.G. Jung’s
individuation process through his experiments in
confrontation with the unconscious. His study identifies
common themes between the experiences of modern
practitioners of relational guided imagery and Jung’s imaginal
interactions with personified beings who provided him with
the prima materia—or foundational building blocks which he
conceptually elaborated in his Collected Works. His research
also relocates contemporary guided imagery practices in the
lineage of Jung’s depth psychology.
2 LITERATURE REVIEWS

Crampton (1969), Hall et al. (2006), Singer (1974), and

Watkins (1976/1984) have all traced the history of guided
imagery, and their respective genealogies reflect each
researcher's area of scholarly focus. Singer (1974), for
example, is interested in laboratory studies of fantasy. His
objective is to show a client's imagery and capacity for
daydreaming are implicated in human emotions and
information processing, which he contends, are two areas
amenable to clinical scrutiny and scientific research. In
contrast to Singer, Crampton (1974/2005) seeks to locate her
formulation of dialogic imagery in historical context, compare
and contrast directive imagery from nondirective imagery,
and advance the importance of grounding archetypal levels
of consciousness in everyday life.
Congruent with Crampton's research, Watkins (1976/1984),
in her review, describes the deleterious consequences of
one-sided scientific rationalism and asserts symptoms and
sickness result from the repression of mythic and metaphoric
consciousness, which is to say the disconnection of mythos
from logos and the imaginal from the real. Representing two
different though necessarily interdependent styles of
consciousness, the need to balance these equiprimordial and
irreducible antinomies is a theme that runs throughout my
analysis of Western philosophical formulations of imagination
in Volume 2. To heal the psyche, one must engage the
unconscious and return to the realms of images and
metaphors.
 Next, to identify themes in dialogic imagery and educate
counselors about the role of the imagery guide, Hall, Hall,
Stranding, and Young (2006), provide an overview of various
guided imagery practices, techniques, and methods, and
review ethical concerns in the practice of guided imagery.
Although some overlap is apparent in these researchers'
different lineages, of the 20 historical figures aggregated
from their combined research, only three individuals and one
research team are common across their respective
genealogies: Alfred Binet (1857-1911), C. G. Jung (1875-1966),
Robert Desoille (1890-1966), Hanscarl Leuner (1919-1996),
Roberto Assagioli (1888-1974), and the French research team
of Andre Virel (1920-200), and Roger Frétigny. Variations
among these researcher's different genealogies arguably
have to do with their divergent scholarly interests and to what
Jung (1948/1969c) described as "the personal equation" (p.
103 [CW 8, para. 213]), which loosely means a researcher's
subjective bias, which I also discuss at length in Volume 2.
Rather than catalog each researchers' orderings or
rationales for inclusion, I will instead cull from their combined
research those historical figures whose work is most relevant
to the practice of RGI. It is important though to identify first, at
least in broad terms, the diverging contexts in which imagery
was either banished from serious psychological discourse
(i.e., United States and the United Kingdom) or embraced as it
was in continental Europe, where the emphasis on subjective
imagery flourished, especially after World War II. In this
regard, Singer's (1974) tripartite delineation between "Early
Psychological Studies of Imagery" (p. 24), "European Studies
of Imagery" (p. 30) and "Recent Applications of Imagery
Techniques in the United States" (p. 35) provides a useful
structure. Singer's third category, "Recent Applications . . ."
refers to a convergence of elements derived from various
European imagery methods in the 1960s and techniques
garnered from the behaviorist school developed by Joseph
Wolpe during the 1950s, both of which emphasized
relaxation. As I will show, mental imagery—which was a vital
topic of interest in the dawning field of psychology near the
turn of the 20th century—later became banished from serious
psychological consideration in what Robert Hebb (1960) has
identified as the first stage of the "American revolution in
psychology" (p. 735). Waged by behaviorists such as
"Thorndike, Watson, Holt, Hunter, Lashley, Cattell, Terman . . .
Tolman and Skinner between 1898 and 1938" (p. 735) and
persisting in the form of behaviorism and learning theory until
the late 1950s, the first stage of this revolution Hebb
contends, "banished thought, imagery, volition, attention, and
other such seditious notions." The second stage, beginning in
the 1960s, recognized the study of these introspective
processes made "good sense . . . [and] related to a vital
problem in the understanding of man" (p. 736). Although
developments in humanistic psychology contributed to the
renomination of imagery as a topic worthy of research, Robert
Holt (1964) rather attributes "The Return of the Ostracized
[Image]" (p. 245) to "engineering psychology and other 'hard-
headed' branches of our [psychological] discipline" which
brought scientific interest to bear on hallucination-like visual,
kinesthetic, and auditory images reported by a variety of
mechanical operators including "radar operators . . . long-
distance truck-drivers . . . jet piolets . . . [and] operators of
snowcats" (p. 257). The lethal potential of hallucination
imagery in these professions, Holt argues, warranted the
psychological reexamination of imagery. A second source
contributing to psychology's renewed interest in imagery, Holt
avers, was first-person accounts of survivors interrogated by
Nazis in concentration camps, many of whom experienced
hallucinatory-like images resulting from sleep deprivation and
isolation and coercive thought reforms (Holt, 1964; Paloczi-
Horvath, 1959). In his book Mental Imagery, Alan Richardson
(1969) delineated four subclasses of mental imagery: "after
imagery . . . eidetic imagery, memory imagery, and
imagination imagery" (p. xi). Imagination imagery in his
scheme encompasses three subcategories: “hypnagogic
imagery . . . perceptual isolation imagery . . . and
hallucinogenic . . . imagery” (p. 93). My research is less
interested in hallucinatory imagery such as that described by
Holt (i.e., imagery a subject believes to be objectively real in
the absence of external sensory corroboration) than it is with
eidetic imagery (i.e., imagery projected of such vividness so
as to seem like an actual percept), and imagination imagery
(i.e., vivid, substantive and novel images which entail
concentrated focus of a quasi-hypnotic state but lack either
familiar context or personal reference). One can evoke Eidetic
imagery and hypnagogic imagination imagery through
various therapeutic techniques, including those developed by
Jung, Happich, Caslant, Desoille, Leuner, Frétigny and Virel,
and Assagioli. Although Assagioli established his
transpersonal psychology (psychosynthesis) in Italy, his
influence on Europe's mental imagery practices was relatively
inconsequential (Singer, 1974). Because his work and that of
his successors had a greater impact in the United States and
Canada, psychosynthetic approaches to imagery will be
discussed under Singer's third heading: "Recent Applications
of Imagery Techniques in the United States" (p. 35).
Although scholarly research on imagery didn't begin until
the 19th century, Singer (1974) asserts that systematic inquiry
in the field is traceable to the 18th-century British philosopher
David Hume (1888), who differentiated percepts (i.e.,
sensations and emotions) from the diaphanous images
operative in thought and reasoning. Hume maintained that
externally derived perceptual images possessed greater
"force and vivacity" (p. 15) than faint impressions characteristic
of internal images. Notwithstanding Hume's assertion—
mental images are weaker or of lesser value than emotions
and sensations, Hall et al. (2006) argue Hume's findings may
have simply have expressed his penchant for logic and
rationality at the price of what was arguably his diminished
imaginative capability. This charge is supported by Sir Francis
Galton's (1880) pioneering imagery research.
EARLY PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES
Though Singer does not explicitly reference him, Galton is
a crucial figure in the history of imagery studies (Holt, 1964).
Following David Burbidge (1994), Shamdasani (2003)
conjectures Galton's interest in imagery may have been
inspired by his reading of Gustav Fechner's 1860 book,
Psychophysics, which is a text Marilyn Nagy (1991) suggests
likely influenced Jung directly or second hand by way of
Freud's reading of him. Be that as it may, Galton was one of
the first researchers to develop and utilize a questioner to
capture data on the prevalence of mental imagery for
statistical analyses, and he was an early representative of The
New Psychology that emerged in the1890s (Holt, 1964).
Galton famously tested renowned scientists of his day on
their ability to evoke visual imagery—specifically, imagined
scenes from their breakfast tables—and found this group
comprised of the leading scientific minds, had great difficulty
summoning images. Galton compared their imagery with the
imagery of politicians, schoolboys, and artists and discovered
to his surprise that unlike scientists who experienced a
paucity of images, artists especially exhibited vivid mental
imagery. Describing his findings, Galton (1880) wrote:
To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of
the men of science to whom I first applied protested
that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they
looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing
that the words' mental imagery' really expressed what I
believed everybody supposed them to mean. They
had no more notion of its true nature than a colour-
blind man who has not discerned his defect has of the
nature of colour. They had a mental deficiency of
which they were unaware, and naturally enough
supposed that those who were normally endowed,
were romancing. (p. 302)
Expressing the intellectual zeitgeist of late 19th-century
England, Galton was particularly interested in thinking and
the processes of cognition, not only because it was the
central activity of the mind, which was the province of
psychology, but also because images seemed to be the
fundamental elements by which cognition could be analyzed
(Holt, 1964).
Alfred Binet is another seminal figure who pioneered the
use of imagery in Western psychology. He conducted a series
of detailed studies on the imagery of two young girls, and
from these findings formed his theoretical analysis of imagery
in general (Singer, 1974). Like Galton, Binet (1886) was
interested in the relationship between imagery, mental
capability, and intellect. And in his book La Psychologie Du
Raisonnement: Recherches Experimentales, translated into
English in 1899 as The Psychology of Reasoning Based on
Experimental Researches in Hypnotism, he forcefully
announced his conclusions:
The fundamental element of the mind is the image;
that reasoning is an organization of images,
determined by the properties of the images
themselves, and that the images have merely to be
brought together for them to become organized, and
that reasoning follows with the inevitable necessity of
a reflex. (Binet, 1886/1899, p. 3)
Binet developed a method he termed "provoked
introspection" and a technique he called "the dialogic
method" (as cited in Watkins, 1974, p. 72). Following Janet,
Binet conjectured images evoked by means of provoked
introspection expressed a patient's dypsychisms (i.e.,
unconscious subpersonalities). Further emphasizing Binet's
importance to the psychological study of imagery, Frétigny
and Virel (1969) argue that Binet's 1903 work L’étude
Expérimentale De L'intelligence (i.e., The Experimental Study
of Intelligence) established a preliminary structural viewpoint
for the process of inner work with images which influenced
even scientifically oriented theorists in their development of
guided imagery methods in psychotherapy. Although context
and chronology situate Galton and Binet in the lineage of
experimental psychology, Singer instead confines his
discussion to the work of three experimental psychologists in
particular: Wilhelm Wundt and his students Edward Titchener
and Oswald Külpe.

EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Wundt, who is commonly identified as "the founding
father of experimental psychology" (Araujo, 2016, p. vii),
developed a method of self-observation called
introspectionism, which entailed a researcher's careful
attention to his subjective experience, including the interior
process of imagery. Titchener, Like Galton before him,
believed images were the primary elements from which
complex mental states are constructed. By way of illustration,
in his 1897 book An Outline of Psychology Titchener wrote:
We cannot think, unless we have ideas in which to
think; ideas are built up from impressions . . . thus most
of us remember, imagine, dream, and think in terms of
sight . . . we see it occurring in our ‘mind’s eye’; when
we ‘imagine’ an experience, we have a mental ‘image’
of it, we seem to see it take place; when we dream . . .
we see ourselves or our friends engaged in this action
or in that; and when we think, we often see the words
in which we are thinking, as if they were printed or
written on an imagined page. (p. 19)
Experiences of mental imagery, he argued, could be
analyzed with dispassionate objectivity by psychologists
trained in the subtle art of introspection (Holt, 1964). Whereas
Titchener emphasized the introspective study of conscious
experience and, like Galton and Binet, he ardently believed in
the cognitive importance of imagery, Külpe rejected Wundtian
introspection on the grounds that it failed to provide a full
explanation of the human mind and its achievements (Holt,
1964). And, in contradistinction to Titchener, he maintained
thought was imageless and ultimately irreducible to
combinations of sensations (Singer, 1974). Through laboratory
studies conducted between 1901 and 1908, Külpe and his
students determined the essential operations of even the
most basic thought processes occurred below the threshold
of consciousness, and they insisted this lacuna demanded
psychology shift its focus away from the subjective
introspection of conscious thought. And while Jon Roeckelein
(2004) opines that the debate between Titchener and Külpe
and their competing notions (i.e., image dependent vs.
imageless thought) was ultimately “salubrious for the
development of a scientific and experimental psychology” (p.
155), in response to the Wurzburg School’s demand for
disciplinary realignment, two very different psychological
solutions were proffered in the years just prior to the Great
War: behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Robert Holt (1964)
contends that although the two schools shared an emphasis
on behavior, and neither put stock in descriptions of
conscious contents, Freudian psychoanalysis did not impact
the psychological mainstream to the degree behaviorism did
for many years.
In contradistinction to Holt’s arguably overly simplistic
conflation between these diverging branches of
psychological thought, I will show specific features from the
historical development of psychoanalysis, in fact, played a
crucial role on the emergence and proliferation of
psychotherapeutic applications of imagery in Europe. The
most significant of these are (1) the influence of hypnosis
including its prototypical expression as magnetism and (2)
Jung’s radical reconceptualization of the unconscious, his
method of Active Imagination, and the role imagery plays in
psychic functioning and development.

BEHAVIORISM
Regarding the transition from experimental psychology to
behaviorism, the triumph of Külpe and the Würzberg School
effectively marginalized interest in the subjective study of
inner experience and imagery from serious scholarly
consideration for decades—especially in the United States,
where psychological behaviorism flourished (Holt, 1964;
Singer, 1974). Founded by John Watson and developed by
such prominent figures as Ivan Pavlov and B. F. Skinner,
psychological behaviorism rejected subjectivism and
introspective methods and instead embraced objectivity,
measurement, and precise definitions of stimulus and
response (Singer, 1974). Reformulated by behaviorism, the
psychological task turned from subjective introspection to the
objective description or explanation of an organism’s
observed (i.e., external) behavior. Introspectivism became
irrelevant then, and psychology’s disciplinary emphases
shifted from cognitive ephemera to concrete problem solving
(Holt, 1964). During this period, Robert Holt (1964) contends,
“imagery, attention, states of consciousness and other such
central concepts of the old era were anathematized as
‘mentalistic’ and cast into outer darkness” (p. 257). In fact,
Holt argues, between the years 1910 and 1970, imagery was
banished from serious scientific consideration (p. 263). Even
worse, having fallen out of fashion in the United States and
Britain, for some behaviorists like Watson inner experience
and imagery became topics worthy of mockery and derision
(Singer, 1974). This attitude stands in stark contrast to the vital
development of imagery techniques that proliferated in
Europe during the same period. However, before turning to
these various guided imagery practices, I will first provide a
summary of dynamic psychiatry’s historical development and
emphasize the influence magnetism, hypnotism,
psychoanalysis, and analytical psychology had on the
emergence guided imagery and its various therapeutic
applications across Continental Europe.
3 AN UNBROKEN CHAIN:
INCUBATION,
MAGNETISM,
HYPNOTISM, AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Henry Ellenberger (1970), in his book The Discovery of the

Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic
Psychiatry, traces psychodynamic psychology’s ancestry from
the earliest forms of what he calls “primitive medicine” (p. 5)
to demonstrate “a continuous chain . . . between exorcism
and magnetism, magnetism and hypnotism, hypnotism and
the great modern dynamic systems” (p. 48). Drawn from
multiple sources (Crampton, 2005; Ellenberger, 1970; Hall et
al., 2006; Singer, 1974; Watkins, 1976/1984), major figures
from Ellenberger’s lineage will be reviewed who contributed
not only to the proliferation of guided imagery in Europe but
also to the contemporary practice of RGI: Franz Anton
Mesmer (1734–1815), Jeanne-Martin Charcot (1825–1893),
Frederick Myers (1843–1901), Theodore Flournoy (1845–1920),
Pierre Janet (1859–1947), Joseph Breuer (1842–1925),
Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and of course, C. G. Jung (1875–
1961). Each of these progenitors’ respective understanding of
images and imagination and their specific contributions to the
contemporary practice of guided imagery will be presented.
FRANZ ANTON MESMER
Mesmer’s influence on the emergence of dynamic
psychiatry, depth psychology, and guided imagery is
evidenced by Ellenberger’s (1970) assertion, “It is an open
question as to whether Mesmer was a precursor of dynamic
psychiatry or its actual founder” (p. 69). Mesmer believed he
had discovered a new curative principle he called animal
magnetism. In his view, illness resulted from the
disequilibrium of this subtle, heretofore unknown, fluid that he
imagined permeated the entire universe, including humans.
According to William Kelly (1991):
This fluid resembled a cosmic sea . . . it had “tides” that
affected the systems of the bloodstream, and of the
nervous system. The force of this universal fluid
affected the smallest particles of the solids and body
fluids of the human body and thus also health to the
body. Mesmer called this force animal gravitation (later
changed to animal magnetism). (p. 13)
As an Enlightenment scion, Mesmer challenged traditional
religious beliefs concerning supernatural causes of disease,
and he provided testimony against his immediate precursor,
the popular exorcist Father Johann Joseph Gassner. Although
Gassner was professedly a sincere man renowned for curing
what he called preternatural illness caused by sorcery or the
devil (Ellenberger, 1970), Mesmer concluded that Gassner did
not understand the actual mechanism operating beneath his
ceremonial pomp and pageantry. According to Mesmer,
“There is only one illness and one healing” (as cited in
Ellenberger, 1970, p. 63). Although other methods, such as
Gassner’s, may have seemed effective, Mesmer argued, all
successful cures achieved by the previous therapies—
regardless of their purported mechanisms—were actually due
to the unbeknownst effects of animal magnetism. This
mysterious magnetized fluid, he conjectured, accumulated in
the person of the healer, who would use it to provoke artificial
tides in patients which resolved their morbid symptoms. In his
1779 book Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal
Broché (On the Discovery of animal magnetism), Mesmer
outlined his system of treatment in the form of 27 key
propositions. Alfred Binet and Charles Féré (1888)
reproduced these propositions in English in their book Animal
Magnatism. And Ellenberger (1970) distilled Mesmer’s points
to these four essential principles:
1. A subtle physical fluid fills the universe and forms a
connecting medium between man, the earth, and
heavenly bodies, and between man and man.
2. Disease originates from the unequal distribution of this
fluid in the human body; recovery is achieved when the
equilibrium is restored.
3. With the help of certain techniques, this fluid can be
channeled, stored, and conveyed to other persons.
4. In this manner, ‘crises’ can be provoked in patients and
diseases cured. (p. 62)
Through dramatic public exhibitions of his animal
magnetism, Mesmer was purportedly able to remedy all
manner of symptomatic illnesses ranging from nervous
spasms and epileptic fits to extraordinary cures of deafness
and blindness. Although he achieved considerable fame and
notoriety for his salutary interventions, among men of
science, his haughty sensationalism also provoked
heightened skepticism and intensified scrutiny. Hence, in
1748 King Louis XVI assembled two investigative
commissions to assess Mesmer and his methods. The first
commission consisted of members from the Académie de
Medicine and the Académie des Sciences. The second
commission was comprised of members the Société Royale
(Ellenberger, 1970). Although these commissions denied that
Mesmer had discovered a new fluid, they rightly determined
that the salubrious effects of his interventions were the real
result of inspired imagination (Rossman, 2003). Although in
time Mesmer and his theories fell into disrepute, he was
nevertheless one of the first to explore psychosomatic
phenomena, hypnotic suggestion, and the phenomenon of
mind over matter, albeit without a coherent psychological
framework that might have allowed him to fully realize the
implications of his discovery. Further, to the extent that
Mesmer leveraged the power of suggestion in his cures, he
was one of the first Western investigators to venture into the
murky realm of the unconscious (Kelly, 1991). Two additional
aspects of Mesmer’s thought are germane to the discussion
of active imagination and guided imagery. The first is
Mesmer’s postulate that there exists a third mediatory
substance that links matter and mind. This idea of a median
and mediating tertium quid that links psyche and soma is an
essential feature of Jungian and archetypal psychology
evidenced in Jung’s psychoid archetype, Corbin’s Mundus
Imaginalis, and Hillman’s formulation of soul. It is a
supposition that arguably underlies all contemporary forms of
mind-body medicine, including guided imagery, that consider
the mind-body connection to be axiomatic. The second
noteworthy element of Mesmer’s thought is his recapitulation
of an idea, which can be traced to Paracelsus in the 15th
century and even earlier to the 2nd-century physician Galen
of Pergamum—that imagination can both create and cure
illness.

JAMES ESDAILE & JAMES BRAID

These essential features of Mesmerism persisted beyond
its founder’s fall from distinction to disrepute in the form
hypnosis, which is evidenced in the work of other renowned
figures in the history of hypnotism, including James Esdaile
(1775–1854), a British surgeon who performed surgery in India
using only mesmeric anesthesia for surgical treatment, and
James Braid (1795–1860), a Scottish physician who explained
mesmeric phenomena (i.e., sleep, trance, anesthesia) in
psychophysiological terms. Regarding Mesmerism, Braid
(1843) wrote, “I am inclined to join in with those who
considered the whole to be a system of collusion or delusion,
or of excited imagination” (p. 116). Considered to be the
“father of modern hypnotism,” Braid coined the terms
hypnosis and hypnotherapy to describe methods that induce
artificial sleep (Kelly, 1991). By emphasizing the psychological
and subjective nature of suggestion over animal magnetism’s
more objective physiological emphasis, Braid’s scientific
approach decisively separated hypnotism and animal
magnetism and thus redeemed from Mesmer’s discredit the
study and treatment of patients using suggestion, auto-
suggestion, induction, and trance states.

SPIRITUALISM
According to several sources (Charet, 2015; Ellenberger,
1970; Watkins, 1976/1984; Webb, 1974), concurrent with
Mesmer’s disgrace and hypnotism’s increased scientific
recognition and acceptance was the countervailing rise of
Spiritualism, a movement that began in the United States in
the 1840s and quickly spread to England, France, and
Germany in the 1850s. The term Spiritualism, according to F.
X. Charet (2015), “refer[s] to a belief in the communication
between the living and the dead . . . [and] the various
experiences and ideas that became attached to this belief”
(p. 1), some of which included mediumistic communion with
spirits, which were “directly contingent upon the
phenomenon of trance states” (p. 33), crystal/mirror gazing,
automatic writing/talking/drawing, and divination. According
to James Webb (1974), “To a large extent [Spiritualism] grew
out of the Mesmeric movement, and the motley collection of
ideas which had fastened themselves to Mesmer” (p. 44).
Webb avers it was also connected closely with the millenarian
expectations of the mid-century. Millenarianism, briefly stated,
is an apocalyptic vision signaled by war, famine, and natural
disasters; it is a vision that heralds the second coming of
Christ, who will vanquish all evil and usher in a golden age
(Herbermann, 1911, p. 308). Underscoring the significance of
spiritualism in the history of depth psychology Ellenberger
(1970) obliquely asserts, spiritualism exposed psychologists to
novel approaches to the mind and provided a variety of
methods, such as automatic writing, by which to explore the
unconscious.

FREDERICK MYERS & THEODORE

FLOURNOY
Regarding the early psychological investigation of the
unconscious using spiritist methods, Eugene Taylor (2009)
points to the significance of Frederick Meyers (1843–1901)
who identified the similarity between hypnosis and the
mediumistic trance states of spiritualism. According to
Ellenberger (1970), in the 1880s Myers, along with other
founding members of the Society for Psychical Research,
concluded that the various occult methods used to commune
with the spirit world (i.e., crystal gazing, scrying, and
automatic writing) actually provided concrete “means for
detecting subconscious material” (p. 121). Myers postulated
the existence of a subliminal region beneath ordinary waking
consciousness he called the hypnotic stratum, which in his
view was the inner wellspring of creative imagination.
Regarding Myers’s subliminal psychological explorations,
Taylor (2009) asserts, “the deeper [Myers] went, the more
ideas became images, which then took on a numinous
character, sometimes creating visions of mythic proportions . .
. Myers called this visionary capacity mythopoesis” (p. 28).
Indeed, it was Myers, before Jung, who first attributed to the
unconscious a “mythopoetic function” which he described as
the unconscious mind’s “tendency to weave fantasies” (as
cited in Ellenberger, 1970, p. 314). Ellenberger (1970), Watkins
(1976/1984), and Taylor (2009) also identify Theodore
Flournoy as a significant figure who examined the
intersection between Spiritualism, psychology, and
hypnotism. Of interest to Flournoy was the phenomenon he
termed cryptomnesia, which entailed the unconscious
accumulation of knowledge, or its repression, which later
emerged into consciousness as a kind of de novo insight not
derived from an external source (Taylor, 2009). Flournoy
described multiple functions of the unconscious, including
creative activity, in which one receives wisdom beyond ego
consciousness, a protective function that signaled warning, a
conciliatory function (i.e., the functional capacity to self-
soothe), a compensatory function—which was a form of
fantasy wish fulfillment, and the ludic (play) function in which
the “unconscious is manifested in romances of the subliminal
imagination” (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 317). Flournoy understood
all parapsychological phenomena (i.e., mediumistic trance
states, somnambulism, possession, mythomanic delusions) to
be expressions of what Myers had described as the
unconscious mind’s innate mythopoesis.

AMBROISE-AUGUSTE LIÉBEAULT,
HIPPOLYTE BERNHEIM, AND JEAN-
MARTIN CHARCOT
Returning to the psychological study of hypnotism, its role
in the emergence of depth psychology and its influence on
guided imagery recall the Scottish surgeon and hypnotist
James Braid. His demystifying mental-suggestive theory
canalized along two divergent lines, which were represented
on one side by the French hypnotists Ambroise-Auguste
Liébeault (1823–1904) and Hippolyte Marie Bernheim (1840–
1919), co-founders of the Nancy School on one side, and on
the other by Jean-Martin Charcot (1823–1893) who headed
the Salpêtrière School. Whereas Liébeault /Bernheim
emphasized suggestion and the psychological nature of
hypnosis, which they viewed in nonpathological terms,
Charcot conversely stressed the physiological and
neurological dimension of hypnosis, which he viewed in
morbid terms akin to hysteria. Contra Liébeault /Bernheim,
Charcot maintained that only proto-hysterics or hysterics
could be hypnotized. In a way similar to Mesmer before him,
Charcot was an avowed materialist. Hence, his physiological
account of hypnosis can be viewed as a refinement of
Mesmer’s physicalist/materialist/fluidic assumptions (Kelly,
1991). According to Kelly (1991), Liébeault /Bernheim
introduced “medical psychology to new dimensions of the
human psyche, to the phenomena of posthypnotic
suggestion, multiple personality, amnesias, paralyses,
sensory and muscular dysfunction . . . [all] related to the
psychology of the unconscious” (p. 28). Charcot, meanwhile,
demonstrated that hypnosis could produce neurological
symptoms and mitigate certain neurological disorders. His
rigorous scientific approach won for hypnotism legitimacy,
respectability, and acceptance from the French Académie
des Sciences and validated the psychological study of
hypnotic phenomena (Kelly, 1991). Moreover, despite his
physicalist leanings, Mitchell and Black (1995) argue that
Charcot’s study of hysteria along with his demonstrations that
hypnotic ideas could produce symptoms and bring about
temporary cures effected Freud by “fatefully shifting his focus
from brain to mind” (p. 2).

PIERRE JANET
Like Meyers and Flournoy, Pierre Janet (1859–1947)
combined hypnosis and spiritualistic techniques such as
automatic writing in his own philosophically informed
psychological investigations. Influenced partly by
experimental psychology and his study with Wilhelm Wundt in
America, Janet emphasized a strictly scientific method that in
his view entailed not only analysis but also synthesis
(Ellenberger, 1970). Janet’s significance to the discovery of
the unconscious and the treatment of psychopathology
cannot be overstated (Ellenberger, 1970; Kelly, 1991; Micale,
2014). In fact, some discoveries for which Freud is credited
were ideas previously set forth by Janet, such as the cathartic
cure for psychoneurosis effected through an elucidation of
historical trauma, or Janet’s recognition that analysands
idealized their analysts and endowed them with significant
powers of influence. Janet called this phenomenon the
rapport which Freud later christened transference
(Ellenberger, 1970; Micale, 2014). Further substantiating
Janet’s significance to depth psychology, Kelly (1991) avers
that Janet’s study of hypnotism, and hypnoid states, which
drew upon both clinical observation and experimental
research, “earned him a significant place alongside Freud
and Jung in the founding and development of the psychology
of the unconscious” (p. 29). Emphasizing Janet’s contributions
to imaginal processes such as active imagination and guided
imagery, Watkins (1974) argues that Janet’s psychological
investigations led him to conclude that the unconscious was
made up of fragmentary subpersonalities similar to the di-
psychism or double ego (Le double moi) described by Max
Dussoire, or the poly-psychism (many souls) annunciated by
the magnetist Durand (de Gros) (Ellenberger, 1970). Watkins
(1974) avers that Janet sought to uncover the essential ideas
or images that constituted the foundational core and hidden
unconscious source of his patients’ psychopathology. In his
1889 book, L’automatisme psychologique (Psychological
Automatism), Janet identified what he called “partial
automatisms” (p. 223) (i.e., split-off parts) of his patient’s
personalities that followed an autonomous process of
unconscious development which he termed subconscious
“idées fixes” (fixed ideas). These unconscious organizations
developed autonomous psychological existences and were
understood by Janet as both the cause and effect of
psychopathology. Although Janet understood hysterical fits to
be enactments of subconscious fixed ideas and he examined
dreams for indications of them, his primary method for rooting
them out was hypnosis combined with other spiritualist
practices such as automatic writing, automatic talking, and
crystal gazing (Ellenberger, 1970, p. 373). Through crystal
gazing, Watkins (1976/1984) asserts, “inner conflicts, hidden
identities and scenes with which the personality was dealing
were projected into the [crystal] ball and experienced as
images and scenes coming from the ball” (p. 35). Conceived
of as originating in the subconscious, Janet believed these
split-off subpersonalities became distinctly real entities, which
held power to subvert a patients’ orientation to ordinary
reality. According to Watkins (1976/1984), Janet viewed the
alternate mythic reality represented by autonomous
subpersonalities in decidedly negative terms. She contends
that his goal was not merely to bring a patient’s unconscious
and pathogenic alternate reality to light so much as it was to
destroy it, or at a minimum to fundamentally alter it “by means
of dissociation or transformation” (p. 35). To achieve this end
required abaissement du niveau mental, a spontaneous or
induced lowering of a patient’s conscious awareness and a
regression to a mental state that was both narrowed and
disunited (Dell & O’Neil, 2015). According to Watkins
(1976/1984), Janet became actively involved in his patients’
imaginal enactments and inserted himself as a character in
their narrative dramas to influence their outcomes. In one
famous example of his intrusive directivity, Janet (1889) asked
a hypnotized woman stricken by hysterical blindness to
imagine herself as a young girl sleeping not by a girl afflicted
by facial impetigo—which he had deduced caused her
tramatogenic blindness—but rather that she was sleeping
beside a “very nice child who was not sick” (p. 440). Janet’s
method, which may be characterized as a directive form of
imagery substitution, is today commonly referred to in the
field of cognitive behavioral therapy as “Imagery Rescripting”
(Homes, Arntz, & Smucker, 2007, p. 298). Janet was of the
opinion a patient could only remember dissociated
experience occluded by trauma by inducing a similar state of
consciousness to that which the traumatic incident itself
provoked. He therefore used hypnosis not only to access
subconscious memories and ideas that caused a patient’s
maladaptive behavior and emotional pain, but also to
transform traumatic images into narratives of personal history
(van der Kolk & van der Hart, 1989). Confirming the efficacy of
Janet’s approach, Ellenberger (1970) asserts that “the most
effective method proved to be [a] substitution, that is, [the]
suggestion of a gradual transformation of the hallucinatory
picture” (pp. 367–368). Watkins (1976/1984) meanwhile
stresses the power of the mythic imagination and asserts that
Janet accomplished his cures by means of fantasy, which
gradually transformed the patient’s personal myth. She avers
that by engaging patients at the imaginal level, Janet could
alter the essential psychic discontinuities caused by the
original traumatic experience. Because Janet achieved his
cures by means of the rapport, which is to say, a combination
of his own authority and suggestive power, one could argue
Janet’s approach to imagery was directive in the extreme
(Watkins, 1976/1984). Summarizing Janet’s approach to
images Watkins (1976/1984) specifies:
1. Janet worked with hysterics who experienced inner
dramas that were like dreams. By lowering the threshold
of a patient’s consciousness inner dramas could be
activated, accessed, and analyzed by the doctor.
2. The emergent fantasy material evinced “other than
‘worldly’ personalities, situations and ideas (believed to
be contained in the unconscious)” (p. 48).
3. These subpersonalities and otherworldly ideas and
situations were conceptualized as resulting from
traumatic events in a patient’s life and were thought to
express the nature of the problem that needed a cure.
4. The doctor entered the patients fantasy drama and
altered the pathological symbolic situation.
According to Watkins (1976/1984), a central feature of
Janet’s method was that the doctor aggressively intruded
upon the imaginal setting and forcefully directed characters—
eliminated some, introduced new ones, and even dispensed
with the patient’s fantasy altogether by imposing his own
narrative, which is to say, “The imaginal structure of action
and image were radically disrupted according to the wishes
of an ‘outsider’” (Watkins 1976/1984, p. 49). Predicated on
doctor-centered directivity and suggestion, Watkins’s critical
evaluation of Janet’s authoritative manipulation of his
patients’ fantasy material is also an essential feature of
hypnotism, which exploits the hypersuggestivity of induced
hypnoid states to affect behavioral change. Hippolyte
Bernheim (1880) the famed hypnotist, underscored this point
in his book Suggestive Therapeutics: A Treatise on the
Nature and uses of Hypnotism (De la Suggestion et de son
Application à la Thérapeutique) when he declared,
“Suggestion rules the greater part of hypnotic manifestations”
(p. xiii). And Ellenberger (1970) expands on the kyriarchal
power differential inherent in hypnosis, which he
characterizes as:
the quintessence of the relation of dependency of one
individual upon another. It is a surrender of one’s will
to the will of another and is more likely to occur when
there is a considerable psychological or social
distance between the two individuals, the one
endowed with power and prestige, the other, passive
and submissive. (p. 190)
Based on a doctor’s authoritative suggestion, this
hierarchically structured and directive approach to fantasy
also characterized Breuer and Freud’s early collaborative
work with hypnotism during the years 1887-1896 and
arguably persisted in the ensuing “psychoanalytic tradition
[which] grew out of Freud’s early experiences with hypnosis”
(Hall et al., 2006, p. 11).

JOSEPH BREUER AND SIGMUND FREUD

In their collaborative work Studies on Hysteria, Breuer and
Freud (1893/1957) deduced that emotional catharsis conjured
acute visual memories of nearly “hallucinatory vividness” (p.
9). And, in keeping with their discovery that “hysterics suffer
mainly from reminiscences” (p. 7), they used hypnosis to
access intense visual images of hysterical patients’ traumatic
memories. These images, constituting a “hallucinatory form of
an experience” (p. 177), stimulated the abreaction of
dissociated affects and made it possible for patients to
integrate their re-vivified emotions with semantically encoded
thoughts characteristic of ordinary consciousness. In Breuer’s
(1893/1957) view, hysteria resulted from both “physical injuries
—traumas in the narrowest sense of the word” (p. 209) and
“psychical trauma” which includes “any experience which
calls up distressing affects such as those of fright, anxiety,
shame or physical pain” (p. 6). Breuer theorized that if a
person was not able to identify, feel, and express distressing
emotions associated with a traumatic experience that the
person’s disturbing affects became dissociated and shut
away from ordinary conscious (Breuer & Freud, 1893/1957).
Unlike Freud, who stressed repression (i.e., a defensive
psychic function that censors unacceptable sexual contents
from consciousness) in the development of hysteria, Breuer
more openly acknowledged Janet, “to whom the theory of
hysteria owes so very much and with whom [he was] in
agreement in most respects” (p. 230). Although he could not
agree with Janet—that dissociability necessarily correlated to
psychological weakness (p. 230)—he nevertheless credited
him with discovering the etiological significance of
dissociation in mental illness. Because dissociated states
were similar to the trance-like states of hypnosis, Breuer
called them “hypoid states,” the importance of which, he
averred, “lies in . . . the amnesia that accompanies them and
in their power to bring about the splitting of the mind” (p. 216).
Recovery and healing, Breuer maintained, required an
“associative correction” (p. 17), a process by which one
gained access to and abreacted one’s dissociated emotions,
and through this catharsis, integrated them with ordinary
consciousness. The essential differences between Breuer
and Freud’s theories are that whereas Breuer understood
traumatic dissociation to be the etiology of mental illness and
catharsis its cure, Freud believed sexual conflict and
defensive repression caused psychopathology, which only
analysis could remedy.
The dubious combination of analysts’ authority imposed
on patients’ spontaneous imagery also characterized Freud’s
quasi-hypnotic “concentration technique,” which is also
known as the “pressure technique” (Moran, 2010, p. 29).
According to Hall et al. (2006), in this practice, Freud would
press his hand against a patient’s forehead and suggest,
either upon its application, sustained pressure, or removal,
that images would emerge into his patient’s awareness. He
believed these images were connected to sexually themed
pathogenic memories beneath ordinary conscious awareness
and that by way of his forceful suggestion, a patient would
recollect these forgotten memories that were the cause of
hysteria (Watkins 1976/1984). According to Watkins
(1976/1984), Freud would instruct his patient to lie down and
close her eyes. He would then tell her to focus her attention
on a specific symptom and any memories associated with it
and then ask her to form an image pertaining to the time
when the symptom was first experienced. If nothing
happened, Freud would press his patient’s forehead and
assure her that when he removed his hand, a memory or
visual image would form. One could argue that this procedure
was merely a form of immediate hypnotic suggestion. Freud
(Breuer & Freud, 1893/1957), however, said of his pressure
technique:
This procedure has taught me much and . . . I can no
longer do without it. . . . It would be possible for me to
say by way of explaining the efficacy of this device that
it corresponded to a ‘momentarily intensified
hypnosis’; but the mechanism of hypnosis is so
puzzling to me that I would rather not make use of it as
an explanation. I am rather of opinion that the
advantage of the procedure lies in the fact that by
means of it I dissociate the patient’s attention from his
conscious searching and reflecting—from everything,
in short, on which he can employ his will—in the same
sort of way in which this is effected by staring into a
crystal ball, and so on. The conclusion which I draw
from the fact that what I am looking for always appears
under the pressure of my hand is as follows. The
pathogenic idea which has ostensibly been forgotten
is always lying ready ‘close at hand’ and can be
reached by associations that are easily accessible. It is
merely a question of getting some obstacle out of the
 way. This obstacle seems once again to be the
subject’s will, and different people can learn with
different degrees of ease to free themselves from their
intentional thinking and to adopt an attitude of
completely objective observation towards the
psychical processes taking place in them. (pp. 270–
271)
Despite Freud and Breuer’s initial enthusiasm for hypnosis,
Freud later became disaffected by the practice when he
realized that hypnosis failed to provide complete access to
the hidden store of a patient’s pathogenic memories that he
believed was essential to bring about the enduring
extirpation of a patient’s neurotic symptoms. Nevertheless,
through his and Breuer’s forays into nonordinary states of
consciousness, Freud discovered what he imagined was an
unconscious mechanism of psychological defense that
banished pathological memories from consciousness.
Although induced trance states did allow the analyst some
degree of access to a patient’s hidden pathogenic contents,
Freud maintained they did not fully eliminate the patient’s
symptoms. To eradicate them, he averred, the patient must
remember the actively repressed material, which did not
occur with hypnosis because the patient’s defensive amnesia
immediately reinstated once the patient emerged from the
trance state (Mitchell & Black, 1995). According to Mitchell
and Black (1995), Freud’s scuttled efforts to bring about
lasting change through hypnosis led him to shift his clinical
focus away from hypnosis as the means to reveal a patient’s
forgotten memories to the person of the analyst, who would
eliminate defensive psychic repression, which concealed
hidden secrets within the patient’s own mind. In place of
hypnosis, Freud developed free association as the basic
procedure of psychoanalysis, which he used to unearth
concealed unconscious contents whilst the psychological
defenses that obscured them remained in place. This allowed
a patient’s defenses to be analyzed and directly confronted
by the analyst (Mitchel & Black, 1995). Hall et al. (2006)
contend that because freely associating patients kept their
eyes open, the procedure greatly diminished the
spontaneous generation of imagery. Notwithstanding this
procedural change, though, visual and auditory images
remained a crucial part of Freud’s method of dream analysis
(Hall et al., 2006). And, as evidenced by the abandonment of
his seduction theory for the Oedipal theory of neurosis, Freud
considered fantasy itself to be a potent, potentially
tramatogenic phenomenon. And although he remained
suspicious of imaginal processes and tended to emphasize
the defensive nature of fantasy (Singer, 1971), Watkins
(1976/1984) nevertheless argues that the unique circumstance
of the psychoanalytic encounter, in which the analyst sat
behind the patient in a private, dimly lit room, whilst the
patient lay supine “maximized the opportunity for imagination
imagery and their associated affects to arise” (pp. 39–40).
Though Singer (1971) argues that Freud paid little attention to
the nature or formal properties of fantasy and imagery in
psychoanalysis (i.e., he never systematically investigated the
imagery capacities of his patients, never explored the origin
or variation of their images, and never assessed the
indicators of growth that a patient’s images might represent),
Freud (1923) notably did explicitly acknowledge the value of
mental imagery in his book The Ego and the Id when he
wrote:
It is possible for thought-processes to become
conscious through reversion to visual residues [and] in
many people, this seems to be a favorite method. . . .
Thinking in pictures . . . approximates more closely to
unconscious processes than does thinking in words
and is unquestionably older than the latter both
ontogenetically and phylogenetically. (p. 21)
Still, for Freud, mental imagery was essentially seen as a
manifestation of primary process, a rudimentary thought form
governed by the pleasure-seeking ID and inclined to wish
fulfillment and immediate gratification. Hence, Anna Nucho
(1995) avers, despite Freud’s interest in free association, he
was more interested in a patient’s semantically encoded
insights than he was with a patient’s images. Indeed, it would
be left to Freud’s heirs in the ensuing psychoanalytic
movement to more fully appreciate the importance of
hypnogogic imagery for both its symbolic and
epistemological value (Nucho, 1995; Singer, 1974; Watkins,
1976/1984). Singer (1974), for example, argues that revived
psychoanalytic interest in the function and structure of
daydreams was largely due to the work of David Rapaport
(1951), whose edited manuscript Organization and Pathology
of Thought included essays on directed thought, symbolism,
fantasy thinking, and the motivation and pathology of
thinking. Watkins more specifically points to the work of two
early Freudians: H. C. Warren (1921), who authored a paper
titled “Some Unusual Visual After-effects,” and Herbert
Silberer (1951), whose chapter “A Report on a Method of
Eliciting Certain Symbolic Hallucination-Phenomena”
appeared in Rapport’s volume, as two of the first analytically
oriented psychologists to provide autobiographical accounts
of what Watkins (1976/1984) terms “the half-dream state” (p.
53). Singer specifies that although these authors
reinvigorated psychoanalytic interest in images and
daydreams, these curiosities remained subordinate to their
primary objective: the search for and investigation of
transference phenomena (Singer, 1974).

CARL GUSTAV JUNG

Because Jung’s work on active imagination is discussed in
detail in the second category of this literature review under
the heading Jungian and Archetypal Psychology, I will close
this section on the lineage of psychoanalytic thought and its
early antecedent influences by simply noting the different
viewpoints about Jung expressed by our various imagery
genealogists (i.e., Crampton, Hall et al., Singer, and Watkins)
and the value they each ascribe to his contribution to the
assorted guided imagery practices that arose in Europe after
the Second World War, which in turn influenced the varied
forms of contemporary guided imagery including RGI. In
general terms, Crampton, Hall et al., and Watkins describe
Jung and his method, active imagination in respectful if not
sympathetic terms whereas Singer’s tone, owing to his
epistemological commitment to scientific empiricism, is more
restrained.
Noting Jung discovered his method of active imagination
in a state of tumult and confusion following his break from
Freud, Crampton highlights what she believes are the
distinguishing characteristics of Jung’s method:
1. Rather than facilitate active imagination during the
therapeutic encounter, Jung prescribed the technique
and encouraged patients to practice it on their own. The
patient’s inner explorations were later explored by Jung
in the following session.
2. Active imagination is not singularly focused on
visualization but includes a variety of techniques such
as writing, sculpting, and painting which all function to
anchor imaginal experiences in the sphere of a patient’s
conscious awareness.
3. To encourage the patient’s continued inner work after
termination of the analytic relationship, the method was
most often prescribed toward the end of a patient’s
analysis.
4. Because Jung believed focused attention on an image
brings about its dynamic unfoldment, the vivifying power
of directed consciousness is emphasized to provoke
imagery.
5. Active imagination entails imagery dialogue with wise
archetypal figures. (Crampton, 1974/2005, pp. 5–7)
Hall et al. meanwhile emphasize Jung’s model of the
psyche and his conviction that repressive societal forces
disconnect people from instinctual life and the inner workings
of the unconscious. They describe Jung’s view: that an
unbalanced and one-sided identification with ego
consciousness resulted in eruptions from the unconscious,
which manifested as individual psychological symptoms and
collectively as mass-minded brutishness and war. Active
Imagination, they explain, was Jung’s method of balancing
the psyche and improving relations between the unconscious
and the conscious. Because for Jung the unconscious is
purposive, prospective, and creative, Hall et al. affirm that
fantasy material was conceived by him as not only meaningful
but also necessary to the developmental process Jung
termed individuation, which briefly stated is the full and
unique development of individual personality. Regarding
Jung’s pioneering work, Hall et al. (2006) express
unequivocally their assessment: “Jung has probably had more
influence than any other writer in developing an awareness of
the importance of the imagination for understanding the
unconscious process of the human mind” (p. 12).
Surpassing these affirming valuations of Jung and his
influence on guided imagery is Watkins—a Jungian theorist
who studied briefly in Zurich—who is arguably the most
adoring commentator herein reviewed. Hers is a deeply
informed understanding of active imagination situated in the
wider context of Jung’s psychology as a whole. Watkins
contrasts Freud’s method of dream interpretation, which
emphasized decoding images to reveal their instinctual
(sexual) nature and personalistic references, with Jung’s
approach, which understood dreams as purposive
communiques, of a compensatory nature, which arose from a
living inner world (Watkins, 1976/1984). This point is
evidenced by Jung (1942/1967), who wrote: “The unconscious
is not just a ‘subconscious’ appendage or the dustbin of
unconsciousness, but is a largely autonomous psychic system
for compensating the biases and aberrations of the conscious
attitude.” Moreover, through symbolic images the
unconscious seemed to Jung to portend “future conscious
processes” (p. 185 [CW 13, para. 229]). Unlike Freud, Watkins
(1976/1984) specifies, Jung did not view symbolic images in
personalistic terms in reference only to a person’s memory or
events from outer world life, but to different aspects,
including the unconscious “which seemed to have an
objective existence of its own, with its own values and ways
of knowing” (p. 44). For Jung, Watkins explains, images were
not mimetic references to the outer world. They referred
rather to unrecognized or devalued parts or attitudes of the
person dreaming or imagining (Watkins, 1976/1984). Even
seemingly introjected object relations (i.e., the internalized
images of early caregivers), Watkins claims, exist in the
psyche beyond their external referents, and these images
draw one into the inner world of the archetypes Jung termed
“the collective unconscious,” from whence they arose
(Watkins, 1976/1984). Watkins rightly avers that for Jung the
link between an image and the meaning of it was of
paramount importance. Jung (1946/1954) substantiates this
point:
Interpretation must guard against making use of any
other viewpoints than those manifestly given by the
content itself. If someone dreams of a lion the correct
interpretation can lie only in the direction of the lion; in
other words, it will be essentially an amplification of
this image. Anything else would be an inadequate and
incorrect interpretation since the image “lion” is a quite
unmistakable and sufficiently positive presentation. (p.
88 [CW 17, para. 162])
Prior to Jung’s discovery of active imagination, among
Western psychologists, only dreams were thought to permit
access to the imaginal. Dreams, Jung maintained, were
disappointingly insufficient because they were sourced in
somnolence, transmitted in monologue, and were often
difficult to remember. Whereas dreams did not allow direct
communication between the conscious and the unconscious,
Active Imagination made their dialogical interplay and
collaboration possible through fantasy, which Jung
(1946/1966) argued “has its own irreducible value for it is a
psychic function that has its roots in the conscious and the
unconscious alike, in the individual as much as in the
collective” (p. 290 [CW 7, para. 490]). Because he discovered
a way to interact with images by willfully lowering the
threshold of ordinary consciousness, Watkins (1976/1984)
argues, Jung’s great contribution, not only to imagery
research but to the field of psychology more broadly was that
he provided a method and conceptual framework for “helping
modern man have a way to become at home once again with
his soul and its imagination” (p. 50)
Although Singer (1974), like our previous authors,
acknowledges that Jung’s emphasis on symbolic material
found in myths, dreams, and fantasies had a significant
impact in Europe, he nevertheless opines, because Jungian
psychology never established a prominent position in the
academy, that “Jung’s influence on thought in Britain and in
the Western hemisphere has been mainly upon isolated
literary figures” (p. 31). Singer does, however, credit Jung for
having broken away from Freud’s method of free association,
which in Singer’s view led both analyst and analysand away
from understanding dreams and fantasy as unified
experiences complete unto themselves. Even though Jung
failed to provide a fully detailed technical description of
active imagination, Singer asserts, “there seems no question
that Jung’s method underlies the mental imagery movement
in psychotherapy” (p. 33).

EUROPEAN STUDIES
According to Singer (1974), Holt (1964), and Sheikh (2011),
dispassionate scientific discourse and controlled
experimentation which constrained American and British
psychological investigations of interior phenomena were not
as determinative, or as limiting, as they were in Europe. This
was arguably due, at least partly, to sociopolitical variances
between the two regions at the beginning of the 19th century.
Whereas Europe had been devastated by war and social
upheaval, in America, the technological zeitgeist (i.e.,
mechanization, materialism, mass production, consumerism,
and empiricism) came to inform American psychology’s
emphasis on observable and measurable (i.e. external)
responses such that—in the American academy—inner
experience was collectively repressed in a way that did not
take place in Europe (Singer, 1974). Several authors
(Crampton, 1974/2005; Hall et al., 2006; Holt, 1964; Sheikh,
2011; Singer, 1974; Watkins, 1976/1984) have identified
additional factors that account for European psychologists’
persistent interest in human subjectivity and inner
explorations of imagery, and Anees Sheikh (2011) summarily
annunciates these considerations:
1. Experimental psychologists (i.e., the forerunners of
behaviorism) who were opposed to introspective
methods fled Europe in droves during the 1st and 2nd
World Wars.
2. Inaugurated by Jung, subjective investigations of the
inner world of imagery influenced numerous European
clinicians.
3. French and German phenomenology (i.e. Bachelard and
Husserl) deeply informed European science and clinical
psychology.
4. Eastern philosophical systems based on subjective
explorations of consciousness influenced the clinical
practice of European psychologists.
One further explanation for the proliferation of mental
imagery approaches in Europe is, there remained among
Europeans an irrepressible and enduring romantic sensibility
regarding the world of imagination and inner experience
(Singer, 1974; Watkins, 1976/1984), which arguably had always
been a part of Europe’s intellectual climate.
Before turning to the respective founders of the various
forms of guided imagery practice in Europe, it should be
noted some contemporary guided imagery researchers
(Achterberg, 1985; Miller, 2016; Rossman, 2003; Sheikh,
Kunzendorf, & Sheikh, 2003) trace guided imagery’s earliest
origins in Europe to ancient sources in Greece—specifically to
Hippocrates, the legendary father of medicine, and still
further through the mists of time to the mythic figure of
Asclepius, to whom I shall now turn.

ANCIENT EUROPEAN INFLUENCES

 Asclepius. Drawing from the Alice Walton’s (1894)
philological work, The Cult of Asklepios, C. A. Meier (2012)
(2012)examines the enigmatic figure and cult of Asclepius
through the lens of Jungian psychology to understand the
“eternal and ubiquitous” (p. ii) motif of incubation as a
treatment for soul sickness, which Meier avers is akin to
modern psychotherapy. From the Latin incubāre, the word
incubation means to lie or recline on the ground. Simply
stated, the procedure required that a patient sleep in a cave
on the ground overnight in order to experience a curative
dream or a vision (Ellenberger, 1970). In a view arguably
shared by Ellenberger, Meier (2012) argues incubation is an
ancient analog to the “modern therapeutic situation” (p. ii)—
the “genius loci,” or place where one can “observe . . .
spontaneous healing process at work” (p. i). By Meier’s
account, Asclepius began as a mortal physician who, over
time, metamorphized in status and stature into “a chthonic
oracular demon or hero, and . . . an Apollonian deity” (p. 22)
who evolved in the Middle Ages into a “Christian deity or
saint” (p. 24). More important to the practice of guided
imagery than Asclepius’s metamorphic development, though,
is the healing method associated with the deity: dream
healing or divine sleep, which is a form of dream therapy that
Christian practitioners later termed “incubation sleep”
(Achterberg, 1985, p. 55). The sleep ritual itself was an
elaborate process that entailed ablutions and purification
rights, including baths, to purify the body and soul. According
to Meier (2012), these rites liberated the soul from bodily
contamination and “set the soul free for communion with the
god” (p. 50). After offering sacrifices to Asclepius, the sick
petitioner was taken to the abaton, (i.e., the innermost
sanctuary), where the petitioner slept and awaited a healing
dream of the deity which was the conditio sine qua non of the
incubation rite. Although the god would appear to petitioners
while they were asleep and dreaming (onar), he was also
known to appear while sick petitioners were awake (hypar).
Such waking visitations may arguably be conceived of as
hypnogogic visions or images (Meier, 2012). The god would
appear in human (i.e., as a boy or a bearded man) or in
theriomorphic form (i.e. as a dog or serpent). Achterberg
(1985) paints a more romantically alluring picture and asserts
that Asclepius appeared to votaries as “a handsome, gentle
and strong healer who either cured or advised treatment” (p.
55). Both Meier’s and Achterberg’s characterizations of the
Asclepian theophany and the god’s appearance in human or
animal form accord with one of RGI’s core procedures: the
inner advisor technique, in which individuals interact with kind
and loving inner wisdom figures to gain insight, deeper
understanding, and healing.

HIPPOCRATES
Sir William Osler, in his 1921 book The Evolution of Modern
Medicine, provides a eulogistic introduction to Hippocrates
who he calls “The Father of Medicine” (p. 66). Citing Émile
Littré (1840) from his book Oeuvres complètes d’ Hippocrate
(Complete works of Hippocrates), Osler (1921) emphasizes the
importance of Hippocrates’s formulation of humoral
pathology that he extrapolated from Empedocles’s
speculations regarding the elements of Fire, Earth, Air, and
Water as “the root of all things” (p. 67). Whereas the
Macrocosm of the world is comprised of these four
fundamental elements, Hippocrates conjectured that the
Microcosm of the human body was made up of four humors:
“blood, phlegm, yellow bile (or choler) and black bile (or
melancholy), which corresponded to the four qualities of
matter, heat, cold, dryness and moisture” (p. 38). Regarding
the four humors, in his treatise Nature of Man, which he
composed sometime in the 5th century BCE (Jouanna, 2012,
p. 335), Hippocrates (trans. 1931) wrote:
The body of man contains in itself blood and phlegm
and yellow bile and black bile, which things are in the
natural constitution of his body, and the cause of
sickness and of health. He is healthy when they are in
proper proportion between one another as regards
 mixture and force and quantity, and when they are well
mingled together; he becomes sick when one of these
is diminished or increased in amount, or is separated
in the body from its proper mixture, and not properly
mingled with all the others. (p. 11)
Constituting a proto-psychological theory, Hippocrates’s
four humors were correlated with four different personality
types: melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine, and choleric which
each represented a preponderance of a particular vital fluid:
black-bile, phlegm, blood and yellow-bile respectively.
Following Asclepius and Aristotle, the notion that imagination
exerted a material effect on the body was a commonly held
belief in 5th century Athens (Rossman, 2003), and although it
is nowhere specifically stated in the Corpus Hippocraticum,
Martin Rossman (2003) suggests that images and imagination
moved the four humors toward balance or imbalance;
sickness or health. This feature of humoral medicine, that
images and emotions influence physiology, persisted well
into the 17th century. For example, in J. B. van Helmont’s
(1683) idea of the psychophysiological principle of the
archeus influus (i.e. the spirit of life) or the idea morbosa (i.e.
the hurtful idea) in which disease was essentially imagined,
though not unreal (Fischer-Homberger, 1979). Rossman
(2003) explains that at the time of Hippocrates, it was
believed that the human heart “took in reality, subtracted its
matter and took the remainder into the psyche (soul) where it
formed images.” These images, “stimulated emotional
reactions . . . moved the four humors . . . [and] balance[d]
health” (Rossman, 2003, p. 90). Pincus and Sheikh (2009)
meanwhile underscore Hippocrates’s focus on the role of the
physician to activate “the body-mind toward intrinsic healing”
(p. 42). And Achterberg (1985) asserts that Hippocrates
championed the Asclepian values of loving concern,
gentleness, and dignity. Predicated on the notion there exists
a link between images, emotions, and health, contemporary
guided imagery, such as that practiced by Rossman, Pincus,
Sheikh, and Achterberg, shares an affinity with Hippocrates’s
humoral medicine. Mental imagery expresses the central
nervous system’s simultaneous information processing
system which is a primary encoding system that affects all
major physiological functions: respiration, heart-rate, blood-
pressure, metabolic rates in cells, gastro-intestinal motility
and secretion, sexual function and immune response
(Bressler & Rossman, 2002, p. 627). Extending in a
contiguous line from the ancient Greek cult of Asclepius and
Hippocratic medicine, one could argue RGI represents a
contemporary iteration of these earliest forms of mind-body
medicine.

EUROPEAN STUDIES OF IMAGERY:

GASTON BACHÉLARD.
Singer (1974), Watkins (1976/1984), and Hall et al. (2006) all
stress the seminal importance of Gaston Bachelard to the
inception and exponential diffusion of guided imagery
methods in Europe. That Bachelard’s neo-Romantic
philosophical writings were greatly influenced by Jung’s
psychology and more specifically by his experiments with
active imagination is evidenced by Bachelard’s specific
references to Jung, and his conceptual appropriations of
Jung’s work. For instance, in his book La psychoanalyze du
feu (The Psychoanalysis of Fire), Bachelard (1938/1964) drew
upon Jung’s notion of complexes in his own formulation of
mythological, ancient, and modern forms of “primitivity”
(archaic mentality). Bachelard’s complexes were eponymously
instantiated by Prometheus, Empedocles, Novalis, and
Hoffmann (Chimisso, 2013). Of key significance to Bachelard
was Jung’s (1916/1949) Wandlungen und Symbol der Libido
(Transformations and Symbolism of Libido; published in
English as Psychology of the Unconscious). From this volume,
Bachelard (1938/1964) drew upon Jung’s theory of archetypes
to support his hypothesis: that a universal level of psychic
primitivity exists across all cultures and at all times; that this
material can be “drawn from a mental zone . . . closer to that
of objective knowledge” (p. 35); and that these primitive
mental forms or prime images spontaneously arise, not from a
personal, but rather a collective psychic stratum (Chimisso,
2013). In his 1948 book La terre et les rêveries du repos: Essai
sur les images de l’intimité (Earth and Reveries of Will: An
Essay on the Imagination of Matter) Bachelard correlates
explicitly his notion that there exists an underlying
unconscious shared by all humans, to Jung’s archetype:
While studying prime images, one can develop for
each of them almost all the problems of a metaphysics
of the imagination. In this respect, the image of the
root is particularly apt. It corresponds in the Jungian
sense to an archetype buried in the unconscious of all
races and it also has, in the clearest part of the mind
up to the level of abstract thought, a power of multiple
metaphors, always simple, always understood. The
most realistic image and the freest metaphors thus
cross all regions of the psychic life. (as cited in Kaplan,
1972, p. 7)
Referring to Bachelard as “a poet-philosopher of science”
(p. 67), Singer (1974) affirms that Bachelard considered the
creative imagination to be a primary human faculty, one that
contributed as much to a person’s perception of reality as did
outer events drawn from the person’s sensual experiences of
the external world. According to Bachelard (1958/1969),
“thought and experience are not the only things that sanction
human experience . . . [rather] the values that belong to
daydreaming mark humanity in his depths” (p. 6). That
Bachelard considered imagination to supersede sense
experience in terms of its influence on the imagining person’s
interpretation of the phenomenological world is a position
reaffirmed by Hall et al. (2006) who explain Bachelard’s term
valorization (i.e., simultaneously knowing and changing the
world through feeling) as a process by which, in a state of
reverie or daydreaming, human perception is molded by
affective fluctuations mediated by images which shape reality.
Or, said another way, valorization is a way of knowing by
means of a sensuous gestalt that combines intuition,
imagination, and emotion in a unified image that integrates
subjective and objective worlds. Bachelard (1958/1969)
described the ontological significance of images, daydreams,
and reverie to the act of valorization more rhapsodically when
he wrote: “At the level of the poetic image the duality of
subject and object is iridescent, shimmering, unceasingly
active in its inversions” (p. xv). Singer (1974) and Chimisso
(2001) both emphasize Bachelard’s move away from a
sexually reductive psychoanalytic understanding of symbols
to Jung’s more expansive view that symbols are an essential
component of all human experiences. Like Jung, Bachelard
maintained that whereas fantasies and symbols represent a
person’s individual context, they are also interwoven with the
symbols and metaphors of the person’s culture. Because
these transpersonal symbols color phenomenological
experience with personal affect and thereby endow reality
with unique forms of emotional significance, a person’s
perception of the world is always, at least partly, an
imaginative vision created by the person’s own imagery
(Singer, 1974). One could argue that Bachelard’s faith in the
ongoing meaningful unfoldment of imagery, his
understanding imagery is an essential part of human reality,
and his belief that imagery is inherently therapeutic all
became incorporated into the various approaches to guided
imagery comprising what may arguably be called the
European School of Imagery.
4 EUROPEAN SCHOOLS OF
GUIDED IMAGERY

Owing to the long tradition of European philosophical

speculation regarding images and imagination (see Volume 2)
and more proximately Bachelard’s influence, Hall et al. (2006)
suggest that the various forms of European imagery
presented herein may be considered “philosophically driven”
(p. 10), which contrasts with American Behaviorism and Jay
Staddon’s (2004) claim that the behaviorist school was
instead predicated on “scientific imperialism [and] . . .
evolutionary epistemology” (pp. 321-232). Presentation of
these schools, their founders, and respective formulations of
guided imagery are drawn from several sources (Crampton,
1969; Frétigny & Virel, 1969; Hall et al., 2006; Kretschmer,
1951/1965; Singer, 1974; Watkins, 1976/1984).
Crampton’s (1969) organization of this material is drawn
from Roger Frétigny and Andre Virel’s (1969) text L’apport des
techniques d’imagerie le á l’etude de l’imaginiaire (The
Contribution of Imagery Techniques to the Study of the
Imaginary), which she contends is the most authoritative text
in the field of the history of mental imagery. Watkins also
acknowledges her indebtedness to Frétigny and Virel—in
particular their presentation of French and German schools of
imagery—and she asserts their 1968 work L’ Imagery mentale,
introduction à l’onirothérapie (Mental Imagery, an
Introduction to Onirotherapy) “shows clearly the unfortunate
gap in communication,” regarding the open exchange of
ideas about imagery and its therapeutic applications
“between European and American [therapists]” (Watkins,
1974, p. 69). Singer (1974) meanwhile extols Frétigny and
Virel’s systematic inquiry into the processes and parameters
of imagery and, similar to Crampton, asserts that their work is
“the most scholarly and definitive statement available on the
mental imagery techniques” (p. 73). Remarkably (and
regrettably), Frétigny and Virel’s writings on imagery are, to
date, not available in English translation. Nevertheless,
because Crampton was colleagues with Frétigny and Virel
and collaborated with them in 1967 to organize the first
professional society dedicated to the exchange of ideas
concerning guided imagery, her account arguably provides
the most knowledgeable exposition of their work. And it
informs my own presentation of the practitioners (along with
Jung) whom I consider to be the most noteworthy European
influences on the development of RGI: Carl Happich
(1878-1947), Eugene Caslant (1865-1940), Robert Desoille
(1890-1966), Hanscarl Leuner (1919-1996), and Frétigny and
Virel (1969). Of continued significance in this section is tracing
the movement from more directive, therapist-driven
approaches to more permissive client-centered methods
which arguably begins with Frétigny and Virel and continues
in Crampton’s Dialogic Imagery and Watkins’s elaboration of
waking dreams to current forms of contemporary RGI.

CARL HAPPICH
Happich was a devout Christian who began investigating
mental imagery as early as 1920 (Crampton, 1974/1977). He
combined Eastern spiritual practices with the insights of
modern depth psychology and created imagery techniques
that he believed facilitated psycho-spiritual growth and
transformation. As stated by Hjalmar Sundén (2014), Happich
articulated his fundamental principles regarding guided
imagery, the practice of which he called Mediation, in two
journal articles and one short introductory monograph: his
1932 “Bildbewusstsein als Ansatzstelle psychischer
Behandlung” (Image Consciousness as the Point of
Psychological Treatment); his 1939 “Bildbewusstsein und
schopferische situation” (Symbolic consciousness and the
creative situation); and his 1938 manual Anleitung zur
Meditation (Guide to Meditation) which was released in
English translation in 2015. According to Happich (1938/2015),
“meditation takes place in an ancient part of our conscious, to
which our sense of logic and reason have no access; it is a
place of images and feelings” (p. 25). He further asserted,
“genuine meditation . . . is accomplished in the realm of the
Soul . . . in the mental realm that is known as image-
consciousness” (p. 25). Wolfgang Kretschmer (1951, 1962,
1951/1965, 1969)—in his essay “Die meditativen Verfahren in
der Psychotherapie” (“Meditative Techniques in
Psychotherapy”), which was republished as a chapter in
Roberto Assagioli’s 1965 Psychosynthesis: A Collection of
Basic Writings and in Charles Tart’s 1969 Altered States of
Consciousness—provides an overview of Happich’s work. As
reported by Kretschmer (1951/1965), Happich identified a level
of “symbolic consciousness” (p. 305) situated between
ordinary waking consciousness and the unconscious.
Expressed through images and dynamic symbolism, and
accessible through meditation (i.e., guided imagery), Happich
believed that this ancient dimension of consciousness was
the locus of all creative production and healing. The efficacy
of Happich’s practical techniques, Kretschmer (1951/1965)
contends, resulted from his “religious attitude . . . [which was]
based on sound psychological principles . . . confirmed by the
work of the Jungian school” (p. 308). Happich’s (1938/2015)
method, which was adopted mainly by theologians, entailed
the following:
1. Happich maintained that relaxation rather than a
suspension of consciousness or an abaissement du
niveau mental, allowed the subject to access the realm
of imagery or “the spiritual domain” (p. 29). The
relaxation state, he believed, was amenable to an
 “associative mode of thinking rather than the logical,
analytical and critical mode of thinking” (p. 28).
2. In contradistinction to Jung’s method of active
imagination, Happich prescribed “a conscious form of
breathing” (p. 55) before and during the therapeutic
session, which Kretschmer (1951/1965) characterized as
a “passivity of respiration” (p. 306).
3. Happich (1938/2015) argued that inner work should be
overseen by a teacher or guide to “safeguard
against . . . dangers [or] . . . being led astray” (p. 56). The
imagery guide, in Happich’s view, helped one “make
sense of . . . images and . . . bring order into the inner
[realm] so that [one] may gain in strength and vigor” (p.
56).
4. Happich assigned predetermined imagery scenes such
as a meadow, a mountain, or a Chapel. He quietly
observed his subjects who described their unfolding
imagery experiences to him. And he utilized their verbal
accounts diagnostically and therapeutically (Crampton,
1974/1977).
Two crucial elements of Happich’s method which are still
employed in RGI include the use of breathing techniques to
promote a relaxed and inward focused state of attention and
the dyadic relationship between the imagining subject and
the imagery guide.

EUGENE CASLANT
Edward Casey (2000) identifies the occultist Eugene
Caslant as one of the pioneering figures in imagery studies in
France. As a means of cultivating a subject’s capacity for what
he believed were extrasensory powers (i.e., clairvoyance or
double vision, and premonitory or retrospective vision),
Caslant (1921/1937) developed imagery techniques
themetized around imaginal ascent and descent. His method,
like Happich’s, was directive, such that he would instruct the
imagining subject to follow a path of either ascent or descent
that he theorized triggered various emotions that advanced
the subject’s level of psychic development. He would also
impose specific images on the subject’s imaginal experience,
which in his view facilitated upward and downward
movement such as staircases or ladders (Watkins, 1976/1984).
During these directed inner experiences, a subject would
encounter a variety of energy centers or conscious beings
who populated these imaginary worlds, some of whom were
enlightening guides, while others were decisively more
deceptive or misleading (Caslant 1921/1937). Crampton
(1974/2005) avers that Caslant (1921/1937) believed
archetypal figures encountered during visualization, which he
called “extra-terrestress” (p. 42), (i.e., extraterrestrials or
aliens), were higher order beings than humans.
Reminiscent of Jung (1952/1967), who distinguished two
kinds of fantasy, Caslant (1921/1937) distinguished two kinds
of imagination, which he termed active imagination and
passive imagination. His terms and the phenomena they
describe, however, are arguably the inverse of Jung’s, such
that their theorizing is in greater consonance then semantics
would suggest. Whereas Jung emphasized active imagination
and conscious engagement with spontaneously arising
images from the unconscious and viewed passive fantasy in
terms of indolent daydreaming, Caslant instead extoled the
occult power of the passive imagination, which in his view
provided the means by which a subject could access
supernormal (archetypal) levels of consciousness. Passive
imagination, Caslant (1921/1937) explained, entails the
spontaneous appearance of images, that associatively link
with other images to become “coherent scenes that embrace
the whole field of consciousness” (p. 15). Another vehicle for
passive imagination and its spontaneous images Caslant
opined, is telepathy, which bridges the consciousness of
people and establishes a spontaneous subconscious
connection between them. It is this form of passive
imagination, Caslant asserted, that accounts for “intuition,
hunches . . . perception of atmosphere [auras], cases of
double vision, mind reading and other anomalous
phenomena” (p. 15). In contrast to Jung’s notion of fantasy,
passive imagination in Caslant’s usage emphasized the
spontaneous creativity of the unconscious, while active
imagination—which for Jung entailed the collaboration
between the ego and Self—for Caslant, referred only to the
ego’s willful machinations. According to Caslant (1921/1937):
Active imagination is the faculty that willfully and
purposively engages internal images. Through active
imagination the writer constructs his novels, the artist
establishes his musical composition or painting, or the
scientist prepares his laboratory and combines
mathematical operations. It is the source of
understanding phenomena, creation and evolution. It
is the ego that serves as the basis of judgment, that
forms ideas, and a great number of mental
phenomena. (p. 14)
Caslant (1921/1937) believed a subject’s imagery held
prognostic value. Accordingly, the level that a subject could
achieve in the imagination not only revealed but also
delimited the subject’s degree of attainable “facultiés supra-
normales” (p. 13), or supernormal powers. Building on the
work of his teacher, Charles Henry, Caslant was convinced
expansion or inhibition of imagination corresponded to
directional movement (Watkins, 1976/1984, p. 76). For
example, moving upward from left to right or downward from
right to left seemed to enhance a subject’s generation of
images, while the reverse movements (i.e., right to left, or
downward from left to right) seemed to inhibit a subject’s
production of imagery. Crampton (1974/2005) meanwhile
clarifies that in Caslant’s view, the subject could only ascend
as high in imaginal space as the subject’s level of
development would allow. Caslant’s emphasis on
directionality, ascension, and descension was later
appropriated by his student Robert Desoille in his method of
Directed Daydreaming, which I will discuss momentarily. First,
though, I will underscore several elements of Caslant’s
technique which have been retained as structural features in
contemporary guided imagery practice. These include the
following:
1. The imagery guide facilitates a psychophysiological
state of calm by means of deep, slow breathing.
2. The imagery guide offers an environment conducive to
inner work that includes soft light and the reduction of
external sounds to facilitate a relaxed and inward focus.
3. The imagery guide provides a safe holding environment
characterized by empathic attunement.
4. The imagery guide assists with the elicitation of images.
5. The imagery guide poses questions and discourages
judgment, interpretation, or rational analysis of inner
experience.
6. The imagery guide eases return to ordinary, outer-world
consciousness.
Of the foregoing, one could argue that the most crucial
element of Caslant’s method is that the guide remains
present and empathically attuned to the subject’s imaginal
experience. And employing the imagery of Mesmeric fluid,
Caslant described how the guide can immersively attend to
and vicariously resonate with a subject’s inner experience.
According to Caslant (1921/1937):
One can achieve this by attentively observing him, in
other words, by remaining with him in thought. As
every thought produces fluidic emissions, one can
create in this manner, a current on which the subject
can support himself in order to observe and retain his
images. The experimenter will note, in fact, that every
distraction on his part, will be accompanied by some
weakening of the subject’s vision and in general by
descent to a lower plain. (pp. 75–76)

ROBERT DESOILLE
Desoille, as noted, was a student of Caslant’s who had
developed mental imagery techniques with the intention of
inducing supernormal phenomena. It was from Caslant, with
whom he studied in 1923 but whom he failed to credit in his
own work that Desoille adopted the themes of imaginary
ascent and descent, which he believed generated imagery
independent from perceptual memory and made
transpersonal experience possible. More specifically, Desoille
associated step-wise ascending images with the incremental
sublimation of instinct and a concomitant activation of a
subject’s higher spiritual and ethical qualities, which resulted
in archetypal encounters with numinous figures and, at the
highest reaches of ascension, led to a particular state of
mystical union in which a subject merged with or was
surrounded by celestial light. Desoille (1945) insisted that the
attainment of mystical experience was paramount because it
constituted the “only experience of creative value . . . which
can be a point of departure for the reconstruction of the
personality” (p. 379). Simply stated: Desoille believed
transformation and healing through ecstatic or mystically
inspired states was only possible by means of imagined
ascent. According to Desoille (1945):
Images, associated with a euphoric state, should only
be sought through symbolic ascent. Although it is
possible to bring about euphoric states through
symbolic descent, these states, however attractive
they may be, do not lead to sublimation or a desire for
greater contact what reality: rather they encourage the
patient to take refuge in an unhealthy type of reverie.
The search for these euphoric states through symbolic
ascent is a necessary condition for ultimate
sublimation, despite their apparently regressive
quality. It seems that such state, which take the subject
back to the infantile level, give him a corrective affect
of experience in a short time, thereby compensating
for the distorted affective education of his childhood.
(1945, p. 378)
Descent imagery, meanwhile, in which the subject was
directed downward though imagined holes or fissures in the
earth, or beneath watery surfaces—aside from providing
access to symbolic material to be sublimated and
transformed through ascent, led the subject to confront
primitive instinctual nature, which was symbolically expressed
as a subterranean or under-sea encounter with theriomorphic
figures, chthonic beings or other shadowy denizens of the
underworld. According to Watkins (1976/1984), Desoille
associated ascent imagery with the collective unconscious
which produced sensations of light and induced feelings of
soothing calm, somatic ease, and even euphoria. Desoille
conversely linked descent imagery with the personal
unconscious which provoked feelings of anxiety, dyspnea,
fear, trembling, and tachycardia. Watkins (1976/1984) avers
that horizontal movement also held significance for Desoille.
She states, for example, that Desoille believed left to right
movement in imaginal situations had to do with the future,
whereas a right to left movement provoked images of a
subject’s past. Continuing in this vein, Desoille (1966)
suggested that imaginal movement of the right arm signified
optimism, altruism, and struggle, whereas the imaginal
drawing-in of the left arm indicated to him avoidance and fear
or that a subject wished to internally withdraw.
It was Desoille’s view that monstrous underworld figures
encountered by a subject through terrestrial or aquatic
descent represented regressive dimensions of the subject’s
psyche. And he encouraged subjects to bravely face sinister
archetypal forms. He even counseled subjects to kill
imagined figures when he deemed it necessary (Crampton,
1974/2005, p. 4). Crampton (1974/2005) argues that the
cultivation of higher spiritual values that facilitated the
realization of a person’s full potential was the central concern
of Desoille, who insisted it was only through the refinement of
a spiritual attitude that one could confidently embrace one’s
destiny in service to others and thus realize what he called
the “oblative state” (p. 5) of selfless generosity.
Desoille authored three major works: Exploration de
l’affectivité subconsciente par la méthode du rêve-éveillé:
Sublimation et acquisitions psychologiques (Exploration of
Subconscious Affectivity Using the Waking Dream Method:
Sublimation and Psychological Findings) (1938); Le rêve-
éveillé en psychothérapie: Essai sur la fonction de régulation
de l’inconscient collectif (The Waking Dream in
Psychotherapy: Essay on the Function and Regulation of the
Collective Unconscious) (1945); and Théorie et pratique du
rêve-éveillé dirigé (Theory and Practice of the Directed
Waking Dream) (1961). Because these texts are not available
in English translation, most English speakers know Desoille’s
work through a series of his lectures translated in 1965 by the
psychologist Frank Haronian for the Psychosynthesis
Research Foundation (Hardy, 1987). Whereas Desoille’s first
book relied heavily on the works of Freud and Janet and his
second book drew primarily from Jung, his third book, which
represents a curious departure from dynamic psychology,
appealed to Pavlov and the behaviorist school.
In the first of his three translated lectures, “The Directed
Daydream”—a name Crampton (1974/2005) notes he
appropriated from the French journalist and novelist Léon
Daudet (1926)—Desoille referred to the particular kind of
imagery he sought to evoke by means of his technique Le
Rêve Éveillé Dirigé (R.E.D) (i.e., The Directed Daydream)
which, without credit or citation, drew heavily from Caslant’s
theorizing (Crampton, 1974/2005; Hall et al., 2006; Sheikh &
Jordan, 1983; Singer, 1974; Watkins, 1976/1984). Desoille
(1965) specified:
The style of the imagery . . . [of interest to him]
progressively departs from one’s memories of reality
and from the habitual imagery of nocturnal dreams . . .
[to] an entirely new world that was unknown to both
Freud and Adler. Only Jung, the visionary, managed to
catch a glimpse of this domain. (p. 12)
Although this sentence suggests that Desoille held Jung in
higher regard than Freud or Adler, his opinion of him was not
altogether positive, which is evidenced in the same
paragraph when he states Jung only described the uncharted
vistas of this new world of imagination “in a very sketchy
fashion by drawing on traditional legends” (p. 12). Although
Desoille referenced Jung and appropriated his concepts and
terminology—especially, as noted, in his second book Le
rêve-éveillé en psychothérapie: Essai sur la fonction de
régulation de l’inconscient collectif —it is apparent, based on
his questionable statements regarding Jung and his
psychology he lacked an intimate understanding of Jung’s
work. In the second of his three 1965 lectures, for instance,
Desoille claimed that although “the Jungian school [attends
to] the imagery of fables,” they are only familiar with such
images “as they have arisen spontaneously from folklore
traditions.” He further stated, “They have no methods for
intentionally evoking them so that they can be studied in vivo
and used therapeutically [emphasis added]” (p. 38). This
assertion, however, is counterfactual given Jung had already
described his experiments with the process he would come
to call “active imagination” in rudimentary terms in a series of
lectures he provided in English at the Psychologischer Club
Zürich, in July 1925 (Shamdasani, 2011). In his 6th seminar
lecture transcribed by Cary Baynes, for example, Jung
(1925/1989) stated:
I devised such a boring method by fantasizing that I
was digging a hole, and by accepting this fantasy as
perfectly real. This is naturally somewhat difficult to do
—to believe so thoroughly in a fantasy that it leads you
into further fantasy, just as if you were digging a real
hole and passing from one discovery to another. But
when I began on the hole I worked and worked so
hard that I knew something had to come of it—that
fantasy had to produce, and lure out, other fantasies.
(p. 49)
Joan Chodorow meanwhile states that Jung wrote his first
professional paper about active imagination, “The
Transcendent Function,” in 1916. In it, Chodorow (1997)
specifies, Jung “sets forth both his new psychotherapeutic
method and . . . describes the stages of active imagination
and some of its many forms, he also links active imagination
to work with dreams and the transference relationship” (p. 4).
Although this work was not published until 1958, it was
nevertheless available in Jungian circles 7 years before
Desoille’s inaccurate claim that Jung articulated no method
by which to engage mental imagery. Jung first used the term
active imagination publicly in his 1935 Tavistock lectures
delivered in London, which in 1936 were privately distributed
by the Analytical Psychology Club of London and published
by Dr. Roland Cahen in French in his 1944 release of Jung’s
L’Homme à la découverte de son âme (Modern Man in
Search of his Soul)—still 1 year before the publication of
Desoille’s (1945) Le rêve-éveillé en psychothérapie: Essai sur
la fonction de régulation de l’inconscient collectif, which drew
heavily on Jung’s theorizing. A second instance of Desoille’s
arguably shallow understanding of Jung that is evident in his
lectures is his assertion Jung believed the symbol of a dragon
referred singularly to “the mother who refuses to give herself
to her son” (p. 10) while Desoille believed the symbol of the
dragon represented “all the prohibitions imposed on the
subject by his cultural milieu . . . the family. . . the patient’s
social class and . . . vocational commitments” (p. 10).
Desoille’s faulty interpretation of Jung’s view—and indeed his
suggestion the image of a dragon is tantamount to the
Freudian superego—confuses a sign which is a knowable
thing for a symbol which points beyond itself to what is
unknown, partly known, or unknowable. Jung drew a clear
distinction between these terms and their meaning in his
1921/1971 work Psychological Types, of which Desoille
seemed unaware. While Desoille’s comment could
generically refer to Jung’s (1955-1956/1970) account of hero
myths (p. 531 [CW 14, para. 756]), reflecting the terrible and
devouring aspect of the dual mother (Jung, 1952/1967, p. 366
[CW 5, para. 522]), a quick review of the General Index to the
Collected Works of C. G. Jung shows that Jung referred to
dragons and dragon symbology hundreds of times in many
different ways, which in contrast to Desoille’s own arguably
concretized interpretation, underscores the fact that for Jung
(1921/1971), “a symbol . . . signifies something more and other
than itself which eludes our present knowledge” (CW 6, para.
817), which is to say it points beyond what can be fully known.
Further, despite Desoille’s transpersonal emphasis on
mystical experience and Crampton’s (1974/2005) insistence,
Desoille embraced Jung’s conception of the psyche’s
dynamic structure wherein personality integration is only
possible by shifting the center of identity from the ego to the
Self (p. 5), Desoille (1965) expressly rejected the existence of
the Self archetype “to which Jung attributes almost
superhuman qualities” because, he proclaimed, it shifts
“psychology to metaphysics [which is] in inimical to scientific
research” (p. 43).
Signaling an understanding of Jung’s psychology arguably
as dubious and imprecise as Desoille’s, Wolfgang Kretschmer
(1951/1965) wrote that “Desoille’s valuation of the ‘Collective
Unconscious’”—a theoretical construct he clearly
appropriated from Jung— “is more radical and consequential
than Jung’s in that [Desoille] holds that the meeting with the
‘Collective Unconscious’ is a decisive and unavoidable
presupposition of the therapeutic process” (p. 310). This,
Kretschmer argued, is because, in Desoille’s method, a
subject must learn to consciously “control the ‘Archetypes’
within himself, to be free of them, and . . . lose his fear of
them” (p. 310). Aside from his attribution to the archetypes of
the collective unconscious—which may be inferred through
images but remain ultimately unknowable—the status
knowable things, Kretschmer failed to recognize the central
feature of Jung’s (1928/1966e) analytical psychology is
individuation, “which is a process of differentiation, having for
its goal the development of the individual personality” (p. 155
[CW 7, para. 242]). Because individuation entails an expansion
of consciousness through the ego’s progressive
differentiation from the archetypes and the individual from
the collective, which liberates one from “unconscious
contamination . . . [and] compulsion” (p. 225 [CW 7, para.
373]), one could argue—in contradistinction to Kretschmer’s
assertion above—Jung’s psychology certainly requires
confrontation with, and differentiation from, the archetypes of
the collective unconscious which as Kretschmer notes works
to increase psychological freedom and mitigate fear.
It is possible Desoille’s facile understanding of Jung,
reinforced by Kretschmer’s diminished misapprehension of
his work contributed to Jung’s influence on the development
of guided imagery becoming obscured or unacknowledged
by some contemporary researches. Jung’s ambivalence
regarding publication of his 1916 findings though may also
have contributed to the blurring of his importance. Because
Jung’s methods for working with fantasy images were
privately circulated among his acolytes and not widely
distributed, Singer (1974) asserts, “the major thrust of modern
imagery techniques came from Desoille . . . [who] formalized
many of the procedures still used with variations by
practitioners” such as Hanscarl Leuner, Frétigny and Virel,
and Roberto Assagioli, “all of whom had formal medical or
psychological training (p. 34). One could also argue that these
researchers, each of whom achieved notoriety in the field of
imagery research, emphasized their technical variations over
and against any antecedent influences. Singer (1974) further
states that Desoille’s methods, which were subsequently
elaborated by scientific researchers, paved the way for
experimental investigations and the application of scientific
methods in the field which may also have contributed to
Jung’s opacity and lack of recognition. Because, as Singer
(1974) notes, “the major impetus to the development of
mental imagery techniques in Europe came from the work of
Desoille” (p. 69) who, as discussed, not only misunderstood
Jung but came to disregard depth psychology for being
“much too literary for it to claim to be a science” (Desoille,
1965, p. 33), it is not surprising guided imagery’s intellectual
paternity, which I have shown is traceable to Jung, became at
this significant juncture discontiguous and obscure.
Distinct from other European imagery researchers and
practitioners reviewed in this section, Desoille was by trade
an engineer with no formal training as either a psychologist or
a psychiatrist. His lack of clinical training and renegade
practice of teaching imagery techniques to lay-people in the
community he called “guides” provoked ire and disapproval
from professionally trained members of the academy who
sharply criticized Desoille, not only for his lack of theoretical
sophistication, but for his failure to acknowledge his
predecessors in the field of mental imagery (Frétigny & Virel,
1969).
Desoille presented his technique to subjects in a simple
and straightforward way (Singer 1974). He would instruct his
subject to lie in a recumbent position in a semi-darkened
room with eyes closed and then lead the subject through a
process of progressive relaxation. Once he had induced his
subject to a relaxed and inward focused state, Desoille (1965)
would instruct the subject to envision one of six specific
images representing six different themes, which he believed
“had the subject face every possible kind of life situation” (p.
6). These scenarios, he averred, allowed him to explore all his
subject’s habitual responses. Desoille’s six imagery situations
include the following:
1. A preliminary session in which subjects were directed to
face themselves, through what today would be
considered stereotypical images expressing
retrogressive gender reifications (i.e., swords for males,
vessels for females).
2. The second situation either aquatic or terrestrial
descent was designed to bring a person into a
confrontation with hidden or suppressed character
traits, which arguably correspond with Jung’s
conception of the shadow.
3. The third situation was intended to reconcile unresolved
issues with the opposite sex parent.
4. The fourth situation was designed to resolve issues with
the same-sex parent. In the third and fourth situations,
Desoille once again employed images that by today’s
standards represented sexist gender reifications. Males,
for example, were instructed to venture down into a
cave to meet a witch, whom Desoille conjectured
represented the mother and a wizard for the father.
Women meanwhile were instructed to follow this same
pattern only reversed, encountering first the father (a
wizard) and then the mother (a witch).
 5. The fifth imagery theme focused on inhibitive societal
constraints. And the stock image for both sexes in this
imagery situation was a dragon.
6. The sixth scenario was intended to address Oedipal
issues. Both sexes were instructed to venture into
Sleeping Beauty’s castle. And in keeping with the same
arguably stereotypical sex roles, men were told to
identify with Prince Charming whereas women were
instructed to imagine themselves as Sleeping Beauty.
(Desoille, 1966)
Salient features of Desoille’s technique become clear
based on the foregoing which include an extremely high
degree of therapist directivity; the imposition onto the
subject’s imaginal exploration of pre-formulated images
based on gender reifications; and a significant power
differential wherein the therapist, as God-like authority,
governs the subject’s imagery process, determines what
images the subject will encounter, and defines the concrete
meaning of codified images. Problems associated with these
characteristics features of Desoille’s method are astutely
observed by Watkins (1976/1984) who wrote:
Desoille’s techniques arising from his theoretical
notions can end, I think, by often imposing on patient’s
inner worlds, a structure and set of values not
necessarily their own. The possible beneficial results
of having a person establish contact with his imagery
and learn to move in that realm is compromised by a
detailed schedule of places to get to and things to be
accomplished that the therapist thought were
important. . . . Desoille believed that his directiveness
was justified because he understood the patient to be
in need of alternatives for movement. However, there
is harm . . . in not being willing to wait for the client to
generate his own symbolic situations and modes of
being. (pp. 79-80)
Extending Watkins’s critique, one could argue, Desoille’s
inclination to rigidly control every aspect of his subject’s
imagery, including his tendency to lead subjects to imagery
he considered more positive or hopeful, not only overlooked
the value of his subject’s spontaneous imagery he dismissed
as “negative,” but it also arguably underscores the adverse
consequences of his lack of clinical training. Specifically,
Desoille’s reflexive impulse to rescue his subjects
accentuates what one could argue was his inability to
effectively manage his countertransference reactivity, which
resulted in his imposing value judgments on to his subject’s
imagery experience to quell his anxiety. If this was indeed the
case, not only did Desoille fail to stick with the image, by
foreclosing his subject’s imaginal process, he arguably
betrayed it.

HANSCARL LEUNER
Themes of therapist authority and directivity in therapeutic
applications of imagery in European psychotherapy continue
in Leuner’s approach to mental imagery, which Singer and
Pope (1978) extolled as “the most systematic of the European
mental imagery or waking-dream approaches that reflect the
influences among others of Jung’s active imagination
method, Schultz’s autogenic training, and Desoille’s Reve
Éveillé method” (p. 212). Although several guided imagery
historians provide summary presentations of Leuner and his
work (Crampton, 1974/2005; Frétigny & Virel, 1969; Singer,
1974; Singer & Pope, 1978; Watkins, 1976/1984), Leuner
himself offered an epigrammatic introduction to his method
for working with mental imagery in an abbreviated version of
his 1966 lecture to the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute
in Princeton, New Jersey, which published them in The
American Journal of Psychotherapy in 1969. In this lecture,
Leuner asserted he began longitudinal experimental studies
in 1948 to assess psychotherapeutic uses of guided imagery
and its efficacy in clinical practice. Leuner’s (1954) first
professional article, “Kontrolle der Symbolinterpretation im
experimentellen Verfahren” (Control of Symbolic
Interpretation in Experimental Procedures) presented his
techniques for utilizing imagery diagnostically and as a means
for measuring progress in psychotherapy. At that time, Leuner
(1969) referred to his method as “Experimentelies katathymes
Bilderleben (EkB),” which in English is “experimentally
induced catathymic imagery” (p. 2). And he defined
catathymic imagery— a term coined by H. W. Maier in his 1912
journal article titled, “Über Katathyme Wahnbildung und
Paranoia”—as “inner visions which occur . . . with and are
related to affect and emotions” (Leuner, 1969, p. 1). From the
Greek kata which means dependent and thymos, which
means soul, Meloy (2010) asserts that the derived term
catathymic can most easily be understood as “in accordance
with emotion” (p. 1).
Leuner developed his diagnostic and assessment imagery
techniques into a comprehensive psychotherapeutic system
he first designated as Symboldrama which William Swartley
(1965) introduced in the United States as Initiated Symbol
Projection (Hardy, 1987). Leuner subsequently branded his
method Guided Affective Imagery (GAD) (Leuner, 1969). In his
lecture to the New Jersey Psychoanalytic Institute—in which
he provided his first description of GAD in English—Leuner
(1969) claimed to have “formulated and crystallized a
sensitive system of psychotherapy which can provide the
psychodynamic material needed for a genuine depth
psychotherapy” (p. 2) His therapeutic approach, he asserted,
was “able to relieve acute neurotic disturbance in a short
time,” and treat chronic illness “in much less time than is
usually needed for psychoanalysis” (p. 2). Further extolling
the virtues of his method, Leuner reported that even
seemingly intractable psychoanalytic cases “as long as 15
years duration have been treated successfully” (p. 2),
whereas positive outcomes of his method “persisted for
follow-up periods of as long as six years” (p. 2). Even more
impressive, Leuner claimed, was the fact that “the average
treatment took 40 hours, and the range was from one to 160
hours” (p. 2).
As with Desoille and Happich, a central feature of Leuner’s
approach entailed the use of relaxation techniques,
specifically those developed by the psychiatrist Johannes
Heinrich Schultz, which he published in his 1932 book
Autogenous Training. Later, in 1969, Schultz developed his
methods into a comprehensive psychotherapeutic system
with Wolfgang Luthe, with whom he co-authored a six-volume
series of textbooks titled Autogenic Therapy. It is beyond the
scope of this literature review to provide a detailed analysis
of their methods. Luthe (1979), however, provided an
epigrammatic summary in his essay “About the Methods of
Autogenic Therapy,” which essentially describes Autogenic
Training as a method of progressive relaxation that employs a
combination of breathing techniques and somatically focused
autosuggestion designed to induce a deeply relaxed and
inward focused state.
In Leuner’s approach patients were instructed to lie on a
couch and relax using Schultz’s (1932) autogenic training
techniques. He advised GAI practitioners to reduce external,
potentially distracting stimuli, and to dim the lights prior to
initiating the patient’s guided imagery. Leuner developed 10
standard imagery themes, and five principle techniques
designed to encourage the generation of mental imagery,
which also informed his interpretations of his patient’s
images. Singer (1974) describes these techniques as “the
training method, the diagnostic method, the symbol dramatic
method, and psychoanalytic method” (p. 83). Leuner
identified six techniques, which he found especially valuable:
1. The intrapsychic peacemaker. A method used to give
subjects control over the inception of their fantasy
material and affects. (Provides training in assertiveness,
control, and mastery).
2. Confrontation—a kind of desensitization technique.
(Elements of implosive therapy and desensitization).
3. Feeding. Employed to appease scary monster-like
images that may arise. (Desensitization).
4. Reconciliation. Similar to the behavioral technique of
symbolic modeling, this technique allowed the patient to
play out alternative ways of relating.
 5. Exhausting and Killing. Imaginal abreaction or discharge
of aggression.
6. Magic Fluids. A combination of imaginal analgesia
associated with experiences of maternal love and
soothing). (as cited in Singer, 1974, p. 83)
In his lecture to the New Jersey Neuropsychiatric Institute,
Leuner also prescribed ten standard imagery scenarios the
first three of which—including specific tasks and techniques
directed by the therapist—comprised the basic tools of his
method. These include the following:
1. The Meadow (adopted from Happich). Leuner claimed
that an open meadow is a beginning place conducive to
visualization which can also serve as a screen upon
which patients project their current mood or most
distressing problems. Possibly symbolizing a
supralapsarian paradise, a return to nature, and spiritual
renewal for Leuner, the meadow represented the
foundational source of an individual’s life (i.e., the
introjected maternal object relationship) (Leuner, 1969)
2. The Mountain (also adopted from Happich). Leuner
instructed his patients to climb a mountain and describe
the view from its summit. He believed that this situation
symbolically indicated the degree to which patients felt
capable of influencing the course their lives. It also
suggested to him the likelihood of patients’ success or
failure in their vocational pursuits. Additionally, Leuner
opined, it might reveal a patient’s repressed desire for
success, notoriety, or fame.
3. The Stream. After descending from the mountaintop and
returning to the meadow Leuner directed his patients to
find a brook or stream and follow it, either to its source
upstream, or downstream where it emptied into the
ocean. To Leuner the stream not only symbolized
constriction or flow of a patient’s psychic energy, but
also the patient’s capacity for emotional growth. In
regard to neurotic patients, Leuner conjectured the
stream never flowed all the way to the ocean without
meeting some form obstruction. Further, water which
 was blocked or dammed suggested to him psychic
resistance, the clearing of which he believed led to
insight, enjoyment, and higher development.
4. The House. Evincing Freud’s influence, Leuner saw the
image of a house as a symbol for his patients or their
personalities. Either appearing spontaneously or firmly
suggested by the therapist, Leuner believed patients
could project all their fears and hopes onto the image of
a house. He maintained, for instance, if a patient
envisioned a magnificent palace that it could suggest an
inflated sense of grandiosity whereas a modest dwelling
might indicate low self-regard. Leuner also explored the
layout and different areas of the house (i.e., the kitchen,
bathroom, bedrooms, as well as the size and proximity
of beds). Further exhibiting his fidelity to psychoanalytic
theory, Leuner followed Oedipal themes and suggested,
for example, that a female patient might locate her
clothes in or near her father’s closet. Attics and
basements, meanwhile, were thought by him to lead
back to early developmental experiences and the
possible evocation of repressed traumatic scenes from
childhood.
5. A Close Relationship. The fifth standardized situation
asks patients to imagine their parents, siblings, or some
other intimate relative. Leuner instructed patients to
observe their family members from a distance and to
describe family members’ appearances, attitudes, and
behaviors—especially when family members or relatives
approached the patient. This situation, Leuner believed,
indicated of kind and quality of relationship patients had
with their early caregivers and other important
attachments in their lives. Leuner stated parental figures
could appear in familiar anthropic form or appear as
theriomorphic figures, which he believed helped
circumvent patients’ resistance to directly confronting
their parents. Leuner, for example, specifically linked the
father and mother to an elephant or a cow respectively.
6. A Sexual Scene. Leuner asked his patients to visualize
images and scenes designed to elicit erotic feelings and
sexual fantasies. Like Desoille, Leuner prescribed
arguably heteronormative and sexist stock images
based on reified notions of gender and sexuality. A
woman, for example, was told to imagine that she was
alone and vulnerable on a long walk or a country drive
when her car breaks down. She was then instructed to
imagine a handsome man driving up to rescue her from
this vulnerable situation by offering her a ride. Although
Leuner claimed there existed innumerable possible
outcomes to this scenario, those he specified included:
no car appears, the castrated symbol of a small boy in a
toy care appears, or a sinister, sexually inclined man
drives the woman into a dark forest. A man, meanwhile,
was instructed by Leuner to find a rosebush in the
meadow, to describe the soft pink or red of its
blossoms, touch the delicate petals, and pluck a flower
from the bush to take as his own.
7. A Fierce Beast. In Leuner’s seventh structured
visualization he subtly suggested or directly
commanded his patients to envision a lion or some
other fierce beast. He employed this technique to reveal
a patient’s instinctual nature and aggressive tendencies.
Leuner would, for instance, direct a patient to imagine a
lion or some other ferocious animal and then imagine a
person the patient didn’t like to appear facing the lion in
the same setting. The patient was instructed to describe
the ensuing scene, which often included violent images
of wild carnage.
8. An Ego Ideal. In his eighth standardized imagery
exercise, Leuner directed his patients to state the name
of a person of their same gender without thought or
reflection, and then imagine the figure of a person who
would bear the name the patient blurted out. Leuner
claimed the figure that appeared usually represented
the patient’s idealized self—or ego ideal—which is the
person the patient wished to be. This was helpful, he
 averred, in working through issues concerning the
consolidation of identity.
9. A Dark Forest or Cave. Leuner believed certain symbols,
like a cave or darkened woods elicited images that
symbolized more deeply repressed psychological
material. Peering into the dark forest for example, or a
dark cave (which culled material from an even deeper
psychic level) often resulted with a sinister figure
emerging from the dark such as a frightening witch or a
gruesome ogre. Typically, the dark figure was of the
same sex as the patient. Such figures, Leuner averred,
represented the patients early object relationships,
which are internalized representations of a patient’s
early caregivers, along with neurotic relational patterns,
behaviors, and affects.
10.A Swamp. In Leuner’s tenth and final standardized
visualization, the patient was instructed to imagine a
swamp somewhere near the meadow. Leuner told his
patient a figure would emerge out of the swamp’s muck
and mire. This figure, which he specified might be
reptilian, amphibian, fish, or anthropoid symbolically
represented, he claimed, the patient’s most deeply
repressed psychic material and the archaic dimensions
of the patient’s instinctual drives.
Singer (1974) argues that although “Leuner was clearly
influenced in some of his symbolism by the more mystical
Jung” (p. 112), he was more Freudian in his approach which,
Singer claims, is evinced by Leuner’s focus on the personal
level of a patient’s life (i.e., areas of intrapsychic conflict that
emphasized “relationships among striving, ego, ideals, and
parental figures” (p. 112). Leuner’s objective was to make
unconscious personal material conscious and to discharge
repressed material related to a patient’s childhood, not delve
into the mystery of archetypes with the hope of evoking
spiritual experiences. And although he did directly
acknowledge Jung, Leuner (1969) declared, “Although I have
learned a lot about symbolism from the Jungian school, I do
not see any reason to employ its rather mystical theory as
long as there is an adequate theoretical framework which is
more down to earth” (p. 8).
Regarding his general attitude toward imagery and the
unconscious, Watkins (1976/1984) importantly underscores
Leuner, like Desoille before him, segregated images by what
he determined was their positive or negative value. The
problem with imposed valuations of this sort, though, is not
only that it evidences exogenous missionary-like piety, but
the therapist’s influence can align with patients’ own biases
concerning their imagery. Such collusion can censor the
creative unconscious and stifle its poesies. In this way, depth
psychology is reduced to a goal-driven ego-psychology that
intends to bypass negative emotions in singular pursuit of
positive feelings. Consequently, a person’s depth and full
range of images and affects are disregarded in compliance
with the therapist’s imposed authority. Watkins (1976/1984)
aptly notes Leuner’s method is heroic. It follows an arguably
monomythic pattern of descent into the underworld,
confrontation with and the killing of monsters, ascent and
return to the outer world of ego bearing treasures purloined
from the unconscious. One could argue that such imagery
colonizes and exploits the unconscious for outer world gain
and results in the unconscious expressing itself in
symptomatic or destructive ways. To wit, Watkins contends,
“in this view of the conscious relation to the unconscious all
that tends to keep the person in the unconscious, that
refuses to be brought up, becomes threatening [and]
monstrous indeed” (p. 88).
Founded on practitioner authority, objectivity, and
rationality, our first four philosophically informed imagery
practitioners (i.e., Happich, Caslant, Desoille, Leuner) evince
starkly modernist values which, especially in the case of
Desoille and Leuner, contestably devolved into a sort of
psychic colonialism. Their mutual tendency to omnisciently
insert their imagery onto a subject’s imaginal experiences as
deus ex machina demonstrates that they understood the
indigenous psyche to be dangerous, dark, and primitive. It
follows from this shared belief that imaginal work, in their
view, required a practitioner’s strict moral guidance to ensure
their patients’ salvation, which is to say their patients’ proper
psychic development and maturation. Diverging from these
first four European imagery practitioners, our next
researchers: Frétigny and Virel, Roberto Assagioli, Martha
Crampton and Mary Watkins each devised more egalitarian
approaches to guided imagery which arguably expressed the
values of humanistic psychology. Simply stated, this means
their approaches were comparatively more client-centered,
nondirective, and permissive than those previously surveyed.

ROGER FRÉTIGNY AND ANDRE VIREL.

As noted, the research team of Frétigny and Virel
organized and meticulously documented the various
theoretical schools and methods of mental imagery used in
psychotherapeutic practice in Europe (Crampton, 1974/2005;
Singer, 1974; Watkins, 1976/1984). Frétigny was a psychiatrist
who had used mental imagery techniques in clinical practice
before he began his collaborative work with Virel in 1945.
Virel, meanwhile, was an anthropologist who later shifted his
focus to psychophysiology and psychology. Lauding their
scientific bonafides, Singer (1974) asserts that Frétigny and
Virel not only related their guided imagery experiments to
electrophysiological brain research, the sleep-cycle, and
dreams; they also undertook psychophysiological
experiments with mental imagery while subjects were
attached to a polygraph and found subjects experienced a
spike in alpha rhythm during their engagement with mental
images. This demonstrated, Singer argues, that “there is
much richer and more colorful imagery with fairly immediate
description of this fantasy process and the maintenance of
close rapport with the psychotherapist of an active nature in
contrast to the more passive role observed in hypnosis” (p.
80). Singer affirms Frétigny and Virel’s work brought a higher
degree of legitimacy to scientific imagery studies which, as
noted, is Singer’s particular area of interest.
 Derived from the Greek word oneiric meaning dream-like,
Frétigny and Virel categorized the first four methods
previously reviewed (i.e., Happich’s Meditation, Caslant’s
spacio-directional imagery, Desoille’s Directed Waking
Dream, and Leuner’s Guided Affective Imagery) under the
broad heading of Oneirotherapy. Beyond their detailed
survey and categorization of European imagery methods,
Frétigny and Virel also drew from these schools to develop
their therapeutic system they named Oneiodrama which,
notwithstanding their scientific approach celebrated by
Singer, Crampton (1974/2005) avers was freer and more
permissive than the other systems from which they drew
inspiration. This is because, she states, they did not impose
“specific ‘images of departure’” or intrude on a subject’s
imagery experience in a way that was “overly directive” (p. 8).
Similar to our previous four researchers—and in contrast to
Jung’s active imagination— Frétigny and Virel’s and
Oneiodrama was set in the interpersonal framework of the
therapeutic relationship and consisted of three distinct
phases:
1. Interviewing patients, gathering detailed histories, and
then constructing analytic formulations and treatment
plans.
2. Patients’ actual engagement with the oneirodrama.
3. Consolidation and maturation.
This last phase—consolidation and maturation—took place
between sessions when patients documented their imagery
experience and tried to integrate insights gained from the
procedure into their everyday lives.
Although the hallmark of Frétigny and Virel’s (1968)
Oneiodrama is the vivid enactment of a patient’s most
pressing issues mediated by images, additional features of
their method include progressive relaxation techniques,
induction, and psychoeducation to familiarize patients with
their procedures and terminology (Frétigny & Virel, 1968;
Watkins, 1976/1984).
In the first phase of their work with patients, Frétigny and
Virel used suggestion as a means of eliciting patients’
imagery. However, once patients were familiar with the
practice, it was expected that they would become self-
directed and assume responsibility for the evocation of their
imagery (Frétigny & Virel, 1968; Watkins, 1976/1984).
Eschewing practitioner directivity and control which
characterized the methods of our previous four imagery
researchers, Frétigny and Virel (1968) instead favored a more
permissive, client-centered approach which they believed
promoted a patient’s spontaneous generation of mental
imagery.
In Oneiodrama, a patient is not asked to fabricate an
imaginary scene, nor is one imposed on the patient by the
therapist. Rather, the patient is encouraged to become
immersed in spontaneously imagined scenes and to
participate with images that arise from the unconscious
(Frétigny & Virel, 1968; Watkins, 1976/1984). Although the
general framework of their method was indeed nondirective,
Crampton notes certain instances when Frétigny and Virel
believed therapist directivity was indicated. Examples include
the following:
1. Providing anxious patients in threatening imaginal
situations with a protective image such as a magic
wand, a shield, or instructions to cast a magic circle.
2. Offering vague and diffuse imagery to dependent
patients to force them to be more energetic and
assertive participation in the oneirodrama.
3. Proposing substitute images to counteract or nullify an
obsessional patient’s ruminations on a single image or
theme.
4. Instructing patients to focus on and more deeply
explore a single image to regulate otherwise florid
imagery.
5. Assigning homework between sessions (Crampton,
1974/1977 pp. 18–20).
The Oneirodrama is an embodied method that
emphasizes the intersection of soma and psyche through
what Frétigny and Virel call the “Imaginary Corporal Ego” (as
cited in Watkins, 1976/1984, p. 68). Their emphasis on the
subtle body, Crampton (1974/1977) notes, can be traced to the
Swiss physician Marc Guillerey (1943) who was instrumental in
the advancement of psychotherapeutic applications of
imagery techniques in Switzerland. His nondirective method
Rêverie Dirigée (Guided Reverie) put forth in his book
Médecine Psychologiqui (Psychological Medicine) was
grounded in the psychosomatic theories of Roger Vittoz, a
Swiss physician in Lausanne who drew a correlation between
symptom resolution achieved through imagery with
salubrious neuro-physiological effects (Crampton, 1974/1977).
Vittoz described his method in his 1907 book Traitement des
Psychonévroses par la rééducation du contrôle cérébral
(Treatment of the Psychoneuroses by the Rehabilitation of
Brain Control). Regarding his approach, Vittoz (1907) wrote:
“The reverie is directed in such a way as to transform the
conflicts and the level of consciousness into conflicts of
motor tendencies,” which subjects could then gradually learn
to control. In his view, this entailed subjects identifying with
their “imaginal body-image[s] (‘moi corporel illusionnel’).” Akin
to the dream ego, the imaginal body-image, he maintained,
“is the dynamic motor element of the reverie,” which the
doctor reinforced by continually drawing a subject’s attention
to “the tactile and kinesthetic sensations of his imaginal
body” (as cited in Crampton, 1974/2005, p. 5). Emulatively
derived from Guillerey and Vittoz, Frétigny and Virel believed
treatment success, had mainly to do with the extent to which
patients’ could fully reside in their imaginal bodies during the
Oneiodrama (Crampton, 1974/2005).
Although archetypal psychology will be discussed in detail
in the next section, it is worth contrasting here, Frétigny and
Virel’s and conceptualization of the imaginal ego, as a
process of strengthening the image of one’s body in the
imaginal realm to promote outer world adjustment or
improved psychological functioning to Hillman’s antithetical
understanding of this term. The imaginal ego to which
Hillman (1979a) refers is the image of the imaginer’s self “at
home in the dark, moving among images as one of them” (p.
102). He contends image work, such as Frétigny and Virel’s,
conducted for the purpose of converting underworld imagery
into material for the heroic ego’s use, dishonors the soul.
Instead, he asserts, image work must convert the detritus of
waking consciousness into “psychic substance by means of
imaginative modes—symbolization, condensation,
archaisation . . . [which] takes matters out of life and makes
them into soul, at the same time feeding soul . . . with new
material” (p. 96). Rather than ego enhancement, Hillman
argues, the purpose of image work is soul-making. When
undertaking in the right spirit (i.e., according to poetic
consciousness not heroic consciousness), Hillman maintains,
image work is an initiatory process by which the ego
repeatedly detaches from the outer world and enters the
underworld so as to prepare “the imaginal ego for old age,
death and fate by soaking it through and through in Memoria”
(Hillman, 1960, p. 187).
Returning to Frétigny and Virel, as a living, dynamic, and
constantly evolving process, their Oneiodrama recruits all of a
subject’s senses (i.e., sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch) to
vivify and deepen the patient’s imaginal experience (Frétigny
& Virel, 1968; Watkins, 1976/1984). Yet, in contrast to this
vitalizing description, and arguably instantiating what can be
described as concretizing tendency that would reduce
multifarious symbolic meanings to semiotic signs, Watkins
(1976/1984) claims that Frétigny and Virel believed that “cold
and hot represent anxiety and securifying, respectively [and]
on another level, light and dark represent revelation and
uneasiness” (p. 89). Distillation of the manifold symbol to
mono-meaning in this way, while perhaps adding simplistic
clarity, is tantamount to sealing an insect in amber. The
image’s animated form and infinite possibility thus enclosed
becomes a dead thing—a bauble or paperweight.
Frétigny and Virel used the term operator instead of
facilitator or guide, which Singer (1974) argues “suggests
someone who starts a process in motion . . . but who is not
himself actively involved at each stage of the process” (pp.
7576). Notwithstanding Singer’s characterization of the
operator’s diminished involvement in a patient’s imagery
though, Frétigny and Virel delineated various roles an
imagery guide can assume during the Oneiodrama:
1. A nondirective role. Here imagery is permitted to flow
spontaneously without the guide’s interference.
2. A supportive role in which the guide provides soothing
to mitigate anxiety or prescribes protective image.
3. A questioning role where imagery is evoked
interrogatively without suggestion.
4. A directive role characterized by suggestion, strong
intervention, prescribed commencement settings and
codified images (Crampton 1974/1977, p. 27).
The operator’s central task was to facilitate the patient’s
“second degree imagination” (as cited in Watkins, 1976/1984,
p. 89), a term Frétigny and Virel and used to describe
instances when “the subject, in the midst of an imagery
session spontaneously . . . leaves the ongoing sequence of
his imagery to enter his inner world and allow a different
order of imagery to appear” (Crampton, 1974/2005, p. 11).
Frétigny and Virel believed that successful treatment should
build incrementally and culminate in well-timed abreaction,
which marked the end of the dramatic imaginal situation,
whereas premature abreaction could have negative, even
potentially traumatic consequences. (Frétigny & Virel, 1968;
Watkins, 1976/1984).
Frétigny and Virel (1968) argue that one can gauge the
directivity—or nondirectivity—of imagery methods by
determining whether an imagery method employs a codified
approach or prescribes fixed inductive images. A
practitioner’s therapeutic stance and the roles the practitioner
plays according to the practitioner’s methodology are
additional indicators. Based on these criteria, Frétigny and
Virel categorized Caslant’s, Desoille’s, Happich’s, and
Leuner’s methods as directive and those of Binet, Jung, and
Guillerey as nondirective. Watkins (1976/1984) maintains that
most contemporary forms of imagery practice find some
balance between these extremes and suggests that a
researcher’s methodological locus on this spectrum not only
expresses the value the researcher places on spontaneous
imagery but more fundamentally belies the researchers’
attitude concerning “the desired relations between the ego
and the unconscious” (p. 70). Those more directive methods,
she argues, value the ego over and against the objective
psyche.
Crampton and Watkins juxtapose Oneiodrama with the
other therapeutic imagery methods herein reviewed to
underscore Frétigny and Virel’s relative nondirectivity, which
Crampton and Watkins each adopted, refined, and rendered
even more permissive in their methods, which they
christened Dialogic Imagery and the Waking Dream,
respectively. Before moving on to review Crampton and
Watkins, however, I will first present Roberto Assagioli’s
psychosynthetic mental imagery techniques which instantiate
Singer’s (1974) final category “Recent Applications of Imagery
Techniques in the United States” (p. 35). This review of
Assagioli, Crampton and Watkins will conclude my utilization

4
of Singer’s tripartite structural framework in this literature
review.

RECENT APPLICATIONS:
ROBERTO ASSAGIOLI
AND PSYCHOSYNTHESIS
Roberto Assagioli was an early transpersonal psychologist
and the founder of Psychosynthesis. In 1905, he was among
the first Italians to join the psychoanalytic movement.
Assagioli (1974) corresponded with but never met Freud. He
did, however, meet Jung, and by his own account not only
exchanged letters with him for decades but maintained what
he described as a “cordial relationship” (as cited in Keen,
1974) with Jung from their first 1907 meeting in Zurich until
Jung’s death in 1961. Massimo Rosselli and Duccio Vanni
(2014) traced their “long term professional and friendly
relationship” (p. 7) in their article “Roberto Assagioli and Carl
Gustav Jung,” which was published in The Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology. Drawing on Assagioli’s three 1967
transcribed lectures titled Jung and Psychosynthesis and
“papers and other materials in the Assagioli Archives” (p. 31),
Rosselli and Vanni trace Jung’s influence on Assagioli and
document what they contend are parallel developments in
their psychological systems rather than Assagioli’s
appropriations of Jung’s ideas. Aside from their stated
purpose—to distinguish Assagioli’s psychosynthesis from
Jung’s analytical psychology and advance the case that
Assagioli was a pioneer equal to Jung in the founding and
expansion of transpersonal psychology, their article also
arguably demonstrates Jung’s indelible influence on
Assagioli, who along with many other psychosynthesis writers
reviewed (Crampton, 1969, 1975, 1977; Gerard, 1967;
Haronian, 1976; Vargiu, 1977) all seem incapable of describing
psychosynthesis without repeated references to Jung and his
seminal ideas.
According to Martha Crampton (2001), psychosynthesis
refers to Assagioli’s theory and practice of transpersonal
development, which aims to unify a patient’s personality with
the foundational indwelling source of meaning, direction, and
purpose Assagioli called “the transpersonal Self.” Understood
as a wellspring of wisdom, love, and spiritual inspiration, the
transpersonal Self, she states, not only functions to organize
and integrate the individual personality, but also propels “the
will to meaning and service” (p. 567). Assagioli’s presented
his system in two published volumes, Psychosynthesis: A
Collection of Basic Writings (1965) and The Act of Will (1973).
Two additional works by him were published posthumously,
Transpersonal Development: The Dimension Beyond
Psychosynthesis (1993) and Freedom in Jail (2016). Assagioli
believed that depth psychology, while important, only
captured part of the fullness of human life. Wholeness
required a “height” psychology to compensate the depth
perspective and make it fully representative of the sublime
dimensions of human experience (Cortright, 1997). Thus,
Assagioli developed a series of techniques by which the “I”
(i.e., the conscious personality) could gain access to and align
with the superconscious (i.e., the higher, spiritual region of the
psyche), leading to realization and identification with the
transpersonal Self (i.e., the timeless ontological center of life).
According to Assagioli and Vargiu (n.d.), “the Self is
unchanging in essence, yet it sends out its energies, which
are stepped down in intensity and transmitted through the
Superconscious, and received, absorbed and utilized by the
personality” (p. 2). Utilizing guided imagery as the primary
technique, the psychosynthetic process entails a series of
identifications and disidentifications with contents from the
lower unconscious called “subpersonalities” (p. 2). These
split-off and disavowed aspects of the personality are similar
to Jung’s (1969/1948) notion of complexes, which he
characterized as autonomous personalities independently
operating in the sphere of consciousness (p. 96 [CW 8, para.
201]). By disidentifying from these lower parts, one begins to
make contact with ever higher levels of consciousness that
culminate in identification with the transpersonal Self
(Cortright, 1997). Before turning to the specific ways mental
imagery is conceived of and utilized in psychosynthesis, I will
analyze Rosselli and Vanni’s (2014) juxtaposition of Jung and
Assagioli’s transpersonal psychologies and present key
theoretical differences identified by them.
Rossi and Vanni compare Jung and Assagioli’s
psychological systems in a variety of ways, including their
respective views on archetypes, psychic structure, and
models of the unconscious; conceptual entities (i.e., the ‘I’, the
Self archetype and the transpersonal Self); their views
regarding psychological growth and development (i.e.,
individuation vs. psychosynthesis); and psychotherapeutic
methods (Rosselli & Vanni, 2014). Regarding the collective
unconscious and the nature of archetypes, Rosselli and Vanni
(2014) specify that Assagioli was in basic agreement with
Jung—that there exists “a collective-archetypal unconscious
beyond the personal unconscious” (p. 9). Yet more than Jung,
they insist, Assagioli developed a structured approach to
these transpersonal dimensions that emphasized a direct
experience of archetypal contents. Although one might agree
that Jung was less than systematic in his description of
individuation and provided little operational guidance in
terms of specific techniques one might use to facilitate the
process, his account of intense engagement with archetypal
images emerging from the creative unconscious—such as
those he documented in his The Red Book—were published a
full seven years before Rosselli and Vanni’s article. Contrary
to their assertion, therefore, direct confrontation with
archetypal contents (i.e., numinous archetypal images) is the
sine qua non of Jungian psychology. Moreover, as Slater
notes, many of the precepts of Jung’s psychology,
appropriated by Assagioli and delineated by Rosselli and
Vanni, were well established without reference to his imaginal
experiences long before The Red Book’s publication (G.
Slater, personal communication, December 8, 2016), not the
least of which was Jung’s emphasis on the dynamic
relationship between the conscious and the unconscious
mediated by images, which is arguably the cornerstone of
Jung’s psychology. Rossi and Vanni next criticize Jung for
what they argue was his lack of conceptual clarity, especially
for what they see as his failure to carefully distinguish the
various strata of the collective unconscious, namely what
Assagioli described as the archaic lower layer associated with
early childhood issues; the middle layer—where experience is
integrated into a nonreflexive but coherent personal
expression; and the higher layer called the transpersonal
unconscious—or superconscious—which is related to
aesthetics, peak experiences, and inspired creativity (Firman
& Gila, 2002). Rossi and Vanni (2014) also charge that Jung
committed what transpersonal psychologist Ken Wilber (2011)
termed the “pre- trans- fallacy” which simply stated means
that he did not clearly differentiate pre-personal/pre-rational
and trans-personal/trans-rational levels of consciousness.
When reductively muddled, authentic mystical experiences
are viewed as forms of regression to states of “infantile
narcissism, oceanic adualism [and] indissociation” (p. 88). One
could argue that Freud committed this error in his theorizing.
Alternately, when elevated, undifferentiated prepersonal
states are confusedly assigned a grandiose status so that
primary infantile narcissism is conflated with transrational
mystical union. And this error, Assagioli (1974) and Wilber
(2011) claim, is more commonly committed by Jung and his
followers. Noting a tendency among transpersonal
psychologists to devalue the primal and instinctual psyche for
the soulless transcendent fantasy of pure spirit, Slater refutes
the charge that Jung conflated lower and higher dimensions
of the collective psyche (G. Slater, personal communication,
December 8, 2016). As evidence, he points to Jung’s
(1954/1969a) infrared/ultraviolet analogy, which Jung used to
describe the dual nature of archetypes. Jung’s illustrative
analogy conceives of archetypes as existing on a visible
spectrum of light bracketed by two invisible poles: infrared
light on one side and ultraviolet light on the other (pp. 211–
215 [CW 8, paras. 414-420]). In this symbolic model, ultraviolet
light is seen as the spiritual/psychic dimension of the
archetype, whereas the infrared is understood as the
archetypes instinctual/physical (psychoid) dimension. This
analogy, he rightly contends, not only illustrates Jung’s
differentiation of the lower and higher psychic realms contra
Rossi and Vanni’s claims but demonstrates his understanding
that lower and higher dimensions of the psyche must
collaborate and finally be drawn together (G. Slater, personal
communication, December 3, 2016).
Assagioli believed that expanded consciousness hinged
not only on engagement with the numinous psyche but more
specifically with “direct experience of the transpersonal Self,”
which he understood as “an experiential reality [and] a core
point of identity” (Rosselli & Vanni, 2014, p. 9). This distinction,
Assagioli’s conception of the Self as empirical and
personalistic, evinces that for him, the transpersonal Self was
not an archetype beyond consciousness as it was for Jung
but was rather seen by him as an ontological reality that
could be fully realized through human experience. Assagioli’s
experiential conception of the Self illuminates what is
arguably the problematic nature of Jung’s commitment to
Kantian epistemology (examined in detail in Volume 2), which
differentiated phenomenal reality from unknowable numinal
entities and informed Jung’s division between archetypes as
a priori unknowable (numina) and archetypal images
disclosed to consciousness which are a posteriori
(phenomenal) experiences. Kant’s philosophy comported
neatly with the values of scientific materialism, which in turn
conferred legitimacy on what was then the burgeoning field
of dynamic psychology. And while Jung’s Kantianism shielded
him from charges of metaphysical speculation or mysticism, it
left him open to critiques like Rosselli and Vanni’s (2014) who
assert that “for Jung, the Self, as archetype, could not be
experienced and remained unconscious” (p. 9). By arguably
bypassing the subtlety of Jung’s notion of psychological
reality, Rosselli and Vanni proudly distinguish Assagioli’s
psychosynthesis over and against Jung’s analytical
psychology. Based on Assagioli’s belief they trumpet, “for
Assagioli the transpersonal Self is a reality that can be
directly experienced” (p. 9). It would seem, however, that
Rosselli and Vanni misconstrue Jung’s idea of the archetype
per se. Conceived of by Jung, the archetype per se is a
noumenon, a mere potential, proclivity, or form that must be
filled with empirical content to be experienced. Properly
understood, Rosselli and Vanni’s suggestion that Assagioli—
by means of psychosynthesis—could directly experience the
transpersonal Self is nonsensical, because “by definition,
there is nothing to experience if one encounters this empty
imaginative predisposition” (G. Slater, personal
communication, December 8, 2016).
Further describing the phenomenology of the
psychosynthetic Self, Rosselli and Vanni (2014) remark that
“the Self can be experienced both as ‘personal self or I’ at the
center of the personality and as ‘transpersonal Self’ at higher
levels of consciousness” (p. 9). Because the Self, in
Assagioli’s view, is an all-inclusive ontological reality, they
argue his view of the transpersonal Self cannot be limited to,
and indeed far surpasses, Jung’s conception of psychic
totality (i.e., the combined spheres of the conscious and the
unconscious).
In the parlance of Jungian psychology, the personal self is
simply called ego, and its superordinate ground, from which it
emerges, differentiates, and ultimately returns is called The
Self. Beyond semantic inflection, Rosselli and Vanni seem to
suggest, in contrast to Jung, that for Assagioli there is no
other—no objective dimension of the psyche. One could
argue this characterization not only denies phenomenological
experience of the unconscious (i.e., the seeming objectivity of
dreams or the intrusive disruption of complexes), it also paints
the unconscious in cozy terms of sameness, and thus
reduces the psyche from a system of propulsive alterity to
one of bipolar (i.e., either inflated or mundane) ego states.
Notwithstanding their conflation, Rosselli and Vanni’s
account of the Self calls to mind Edward Edinger’s (1972)
description of the Jungian Self as “the ordering and unifying
center of the total psyche (conscious and unconscious) just as
the ego is the center of the conscious personality” (p. 3).
Whereas the psychosynthetic conception arguably combines
ego and Self, Jung considered the ego to be “the seat of
subjective identity,” and the Self to be “the seat of objective
identity . . . [and] the point where transpersonal energies flow
into personal life” (pp. 3–4). Beyond these theoretical
distinctions, which arguably become irrelevant during
phenomenological (in vivo) experiences of the numinous,
Rosselli and Vanni stress that “in psychosynthesis . . . the Self
and . . . integration of the transpersonal are both the goal
and the means . . . [to achieve] the creation of a connection
between the transpersonal and the personal” (p. 9). This
description of Assagioli’s Self as both object and aim, though,
is arguably no real departure from Jung’s understanding of
individuation as the full and unique development of the
personality mediated by the transcendent function (described
in detail in Volume 2) which, briefly stated, is a dialogical
process between the conscious (ego) and the unconscious
(Self) that works to symbolically transcend the opposites and
balance the psyche. In his comparison of Jung’s and
Assagioli’s respective psychologies, the transpersonal
psychologist Brant Cortright (2007) asserts that though their
systems may have originated independently, their maps of
the psyche are “very similar.” However, “instead of Jung’s
Self,” for Assagioli “there is the Transpersonal Self to which
the I or ego is to subordinate itself.” Additionally, in place of
Jung’s “collective unconscious and archetypal energies, there
is the higher unconscious and the transpersonal will.”
Notwithstanding these differences, “In both systems the path
to transcendence lies through the personal wounds,
complexes and subpersonalities of the unconscious” (p. 95).
Regarding Assagioli and Jung’s respective ideas about
individual and transpersonal development guided by the Self,
Assagioli admitted, “the goals are the same . . . [and] the
methods used in the process of individuation are partly the
same and inclusive” (as cited in Rosselli, 2014, p. 10). These
methods included “dream work and self-exploration by
means of symbols, creativity and the imagination” (p. 30).
Concerning the promotion of synthesis and personality
integration, because Assagioli emphasized consciousness
and will, which he saw as the primary function of the Self,
Rosselli and Vanni contend that his directed, structured, and
active techniques (i.e., guided imagery and visualization) are
superior to Jung’s method of active imagination, which in
their view is a more unpredictable synthetic methodology
(Rosselli & Vanni, 2014). Assagioli meanwhile fully
acknowledged the synthetic dimension of Jung’s psychology
and observed, the shared goal of analytical psychology and
psychosynthesis is the reconstruction and integration of the
personality. He wrote, “what Jung called the ‘process of
individuation’ [is] a goal shared by psychosynthesis itself” (as
cited in Rosselli and Vanni, 2014, p. 20). Rosselli and Vanni
make these final points concerning the similarities between
Jung and Assagioli’s psychologies: both systems, they write,
frame “the human existential journey,” as a sort of “spiritual
quest,” which progresses through “various stages of
transformation and inner growth,” towards the realization of
one’s “essential uniqueness and wholeness.” One becomes
oneself through this process and integrates “all the different
conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche” (p. 28).
Assagioli first met Jung in August 1907 during his first trip
to the Burghölzi hospital in Zurich, where he worked on an
association study with Edouard Claparéde and Theodore
Flournoy (Berti, 1988). In July 1909 Assagioli returned to the
Burghölzi to complete his doctoral dissertation, which he
titled “La Psiconalisi” (Psychoanalysis). Three months earlier,
on April 2, 1909 Jung wrote to Freud, “There must be [a]
special complex . . . having to do with the prospective
tendencies in man. If there is a ‘psychoanalysis’ there must
also be a ‘psychosynthesis’ which creates future events
according to the same laws” (McGuire, 1994, p. 216). Timing
alone would suggest that Jung originated the term
psychosynthesis, which Assagioli appropriated as the
moniker for his psychological system. And this argument
becomes even more compelling when one considers
Assagioli’s wider embrace of Jung’s ideas (i.e. the collective
unconscious). However, citing Gary Lachman’s (2010) book
Jung the Mystic: The Esoteric Dimensions of Jung’s Life and
Teachings, Rosselli and Vanni (2014) intimate the opposite
direction of influence and assert that “Lachman put forward
the view ‘Jung got the idea of psychosynthesis from Roberto
Assagioli, whose work he admired’” (p. 30). This paraphrased
quotation comes from a footnote in Lachman’s book, which
amounts to an off-hand remark with no real evidentiary
support. Moreover, Lachman’s actual words are, “it is possible
Jung got the idea of psychosynthesis from Assagioli whom
Jung met 1909, and whose work he admired” (p. 223). On its
face, this statement is more conjecture than argument.
Furthermore, after raising the question of influence and
dubiously implying Assagioli originated the term, Rosselli and
Vanni (2014) admit that “it is a plausible hypothesis that Jung .
. . was . . . the first to propose the term ‘psychosynthesis’”
(30). Regarding Jung and his influence, the final word goes to
Assagioli (1974) who pronounced:
Jung . . . [was] an explorer of the vast and little known
territory of the psyche . . . he was a courageous and
brilliant pioneer who opened up new paths and gave
new dimensions to the human mind. . . . He
contributed greatly to the freeing of psychology from
the narrow trammels of a purely descriptive
objectivism and expanded immensely its field by
demonstrating the existence and the value of the
higher psychic functions, of spiritual levels and
need. . . . Moreover . . . he points the way to liberation
from the conditioning pressures on the personality and
from the powerful influences exerted by the images
and structures of the collective unconscious. (p. 7)

PSYCHOSYNTHESIS IMAGERY
TECHNIQUES
Assagioli (1965) devised “techniques of visualization” (p.
145) to promote both personal psychosynthesis and spiritual
psychosynthesis, which is to say the integration of both
personal and transpersonal levels of the psyche. Though he
wrote about visualization as a discrete practice, imagination
and imagery are aspects of a many of his therapeutic
techniques. Personal psychosynthesis techniques that utilize
images and imagination include catharsis, self-identification,
and disidentification. The catharsis technique asks patients to
re-live distressing emotional situations or scenes by
imagining they are in the original situation living the
experience in the present. This process can be augmented
by having patients express themselves to an imagined person
or persons related to the re-vivified scene (Roberto Assagioli,
1965). Self-Identification and Disidentification are paired
techniques that also employ images and imagination and are
related to patients’ imagined explorations of their processes
of introspection, affect, and thought. Assagioli (1965) asserted
evocation of images by means of visualization and the
recruitment of all the subtle senses of the imagination—visual,
auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, and olfactory—is “one of the
most important and spontaneously active functions of the
human psyche, both in its conscious and in its unconscious
aspect or levels” (p. 144). Which is why, he maintained—
emphasizing the ego’s domestication of it— that the
imagination “has to be controlled when excessive or
dispersed; to be trained when weak, and to be utilized owing
to its great potency” (p. 144). Assagioli differentiated between
consciously selected images he called “reproductive
imagination,” and spontaneous images arising from the
unconscious he termed “creative imagination” (p. 146).
Because he emphasized strengthening the imaginal senses
by means of training a patient’s will—one could argue—he
favored reproductive (and highly directive) techniques by
which he essentially told a patient what images to see and
what actions to take (Assagioli, 1965). Ideal Model Imagery is
another important imagination-based psychosynthesis
technique. After identifying and deconstructing a patient’s
faulty life model—usually fashioned from external
expectations and social imperatives—the therapist facilitates
the patient’s construction of an ideal model which expresses
“a dynamic, inner creative pattern” (p. 168).
Citing the mental imagery practices of Happich (1938) and
Desoille (1945), Assagioli states that Symbol Utilization is
another psychosynthetic technique that utilizes images and
imagination. One could argue, however, that his version of
this technique might be more accurately described as Sign
Utilization for the seemingly univocal meanings of the images
he prescribes. Referring to a compendium of stock images
used in psychosynthesis, Assagioli states, for example, “only
symbols of a positive value are presented to the patient and
are therefore listed here” (p. 183). These images include a
variety of “Nature Symbols . . . animal Symbols . . . Human
Symbols . . . Man Made Symbols . . . Religious and
Mythological Symbols . . . Abstract Symbols . . . and Individual
or Spontaneous Symbols” (pp. 181–182). His belief that these
cataloged images are uniformly positive gives lie to their
status as symbols whose definitive meaning, Jung insisted—
unlike signs—can never be fully known. Recalling Watkins’s
(1976/1984) critique of Desoille, one could further argue
Assagioli’s moral valuations regarding the positive or
negative value of images has no place in a truly client-
centered method of working with images and imagination
which psychosynthesis purports to be (Roberto Assagioli &
Vargiu, n.d., p. 2).
Techniques that Assagioli employed to facilitate a patient’s
spiritual psychosynthesis include, once again, specific
“symbols” that “can indicate or evoke the spiritual Self” (p.
203). These comprise geometric mandala-like symbols,
nature symbols like the Sun, and importantly—in relationship
to both Jungian psychology and contemporary RGI practices
—personified wisdom figures (Assagioli, 1965). Similar to
Jung’s (1963) dialogical engagement with “ghostly gurus” like
“Philemon . . . [who] represented the spiritual aspect,” or “Ka
[who] represented a kind of earth demon” (pp. 184–185)—and
anticipating contemporary guided imagery’s inner advisor
technique—personified wisdom figures in Assagioli’s system
were thought to mediate the relationship between the
personal and transpersonal Self by means of inner dialogue
(Assagioli, 1965). Assagioli’s methods designed to facilitate
spiritual psychosynthesis are as directive as those he
employed at the personal level and include exercises based
on the Grail Legend, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and the image
of a rose blossoming (Assagioli, 1965). These exercises
address the higher spiritual dimensions of human experience,
which Assagioli attributed to “the superconscious” whose
functional elements include “aesthetic, ethical, religious
experiences, intuition, inspiration [and] states of mystical
consciousness” (p. 6). It is important here to underscore
Assagioli’s distinction between the superconscious and the
Self. The superconscious is a transpersonal region of the
psyche and the energies and functions associated with it. The
Self meanwhile is the focal point and cause of
superconscious processes. A simple analogy clarifies this
distinction: “The Self is to the superconscious as the ‘I’, or
personal self, is to the elements and functions of the
personality” (Assagioli & Vargiu, n.d., p. 2). Additional mental
imagery procedures utilized by Assagioli include techniques
to develop intuition; induce states of tranquil serenity; evoke
personal relationships; and control, sublimate, and transform
sexual energy (Assagioli, 1965).
Because Assagioli strenuously emphasizes consciousness
and will as the means to integrate the personality, he seems
to invite Hillman’s (1975) critique of the “Modern Disciplines of
the Imagination” (p. 38), which in Hillman’s view uniformly
work to depotentiate autonomous images and strengthen the
ego. The aim of such techniques, Hillman argues, “is less the
realization of the images . . . than it is the realization of the
personality performing the exercise, i.e., the ego.” And this
fact, he avers, exposes the “disciplines of the imagination” for
what, in his view, they truly are—misguided despotic efforts of
“disciplining of the image” (p. 39). While one may sympathize
with Hillman’s characterization of modern imagery disciplines
as vehicles for the pedestrian ego to trammel over and spoil
pristine imaginal lands and exploit its resources, his depiction
is arguably one-sided and hyperbolic. Contrary to Hillman’s
contestably projected neo-colonial fantasy, one can, I argue,
approach the imaginal word with ecological reverence,
openness, and receptivity. Hillman’s withering reaction to
various disciplines of the imagination (i.e., Desoille’s, Leuner’s,
Assagioli’s), although illuminating, can be understood as a
necessary compensation to what was modern Western
psychology’s arguably monocular emphasis on ego
consolidation, which reached cartoon-like proportions in
some new-age applications of image work which Tacey
(2004) describes as “positively infantile and deeply
regressed” (p. 24). Hillman’s revisioning, inverted the ego’s
dominion and subordinated its heroic autonomy to the
imaginal soul. After this reactive penance, though, I will argue
for a more ecologically balanced approach, one that
acknowledges the reciprocal need for a relationship between
the ego and the inhabitants of the imagination who emerge
ex nihlo from the autonomous psyche that is their creative
source.

PSYCHOSYNTHETIC VISUALIZATION:
THE ENVELOPING EGO AND ITS
LEGATEES.
Assagioli’s heirs (Crampton, 1969, 1974/1977, 1974/2005;
Ferrucci, 2009; Gerard, 1967; Rowan, 1989; Vargiu, 1977) all
developed mental imagery techniques under the aegis of
psychosynthesis in order to access “regions of our being
which are completely unavailable to our analytical mind,” and
can only be disclosed through the “faculty…[of] the intuition”
(Ferrucci, 2009, p. 118). Consonant with Assagioli’s arguably
ego-centric approach to images, Robert Gerard’s (1967)
method of Symbolic Visualization also emphasizes the willful
“development and control of imaginative processes” (p. 1).
Gerard insists by using “Controlled Symbolic Visualization” (p.
1), a patient can acquire “control over imaginative processes,”
and strengthen “his sense of self-identity as a directing agent
over his inner and outer life” (p. 2). Employing stock images,
Gerard directs his patients’ imagery to ensure specific
outcomes he believes to be therapeutic. If his patient fails, as
instructed by him, to imagine a flower blossoming to full
bloom, for example, he insists that the patient repeatedly
undertake the procedure until the patient is able to “produce
a beautiful rose and . . . realize that the whole process is a
significant symbol of . . . inner growth” (p. 1). Given that the
images to which he refers seem to possess only one
meaning, Gerard, like his teacher Assagioli, mischaracterizes
as symbols what are actually signs. The image of a sunflower
with an inner core surrounded by petals, for example, is
defined by him as an image of “synthesis . . . integration and
balance” (p. 2). A pair of clasping hands, he definitively
claims, are a symbol of relational harmony. And dusting off
Desoille’s reified gender tropes, Gerard defines swords and
cup-like receptacles as symbols of masculinity and femininity
respectively. According to him, even colors signify a one-to-
one relationship to specific affects. He claims, for instance,
that in his psychophysiological studies the color “blue was
found to have a tranquilizing effect” (pp. 2–3). Although
“Spontaneous Symbolic Visualization” (p. 4) is briefly
mentioned by Gerard, he frames this counterpoint to
controlled visualization in terms of disruption to those
therapist-directed methods he prefers. Gerard cites Jellinek
(1949) and Goldberger (1957) as clinicians who utilized
spontaneous symbolic visualization. A quick review of their
published articles, however, suggests that while they may
have entertained elements of spontaneous imagery, their
methods were nevertheless quite directive. Take Jellinek
(1949), for example: although she did invite a patient to
visualize a spontaneous image of his speech impediment—
which he did by imagining his stuttering as a small dwarf
sitting on his shoulder—she told him, “If you speak slowly, you
will starve the little demon and it will die” (p. 380). Next,
insofar as he would instruct his patients to visualize images of
specific verbal thoughts, Goldberger (1957) was similarly
directive in his approach. On a positive note, though,
Goldberger did caution therapists to make every “effort to
avoid suggesting to the subject what he should see” (p. 128).
To his credit, Gerard (1967) acknowledges Jung’s “‘active
imagination’ technique . . . in which . . . the patient is asked to
continue an interrupted dream or imagine a dialogue with the
figures of the dream” (p. 4) as being perhaps the most
unstructured techniques of spontaneous symbolic
visualization. The accuracy of his description notwithstanding,
Gerard rightly identifies the nondirective and spontaneous
nature of Jung’s method.
Although in his chapter on symbolic visualization Piero
Ferrucci (2009) refers to Jung’s idea of symbols that “point to
something that is very little known or completely unknown”
(p. 118), he nevertheless asserts that by means of
identification with a symbol, one can “understand the symbol
from within . . . the formless reality the symbol represents,” so
that it becomes a “reservoir of revelation” (p. 119). Insofar as
Ferrucci is suggesting that an image can reveal to the
imagining person considering it a specific meaning related to
that person’s specific imaginal inquiry—which is to say that
one can ask an image what it means and allow the image
itself to answer—I am in agreement. However, because he
goes on to prescribe a series of stock images designed to
induce particular experiences (i.e., The Lighthouse; The
Butterfly; The Sun; The Flame; The Fount; The Diamond; The
Sky; The Ship; The Bell, The Arrow; and The Villa), it would
appear that Ferrucci too falls prey to a one-sided emphasis
on ego development in his approach to mental imagery.
Of particular relevance to this IPA study on the relationship
between Jungian active imagination and RGI are
subpersonality techniques developed by James Vargiu (1977)
and John Rowan (1989). Based on the notion the psyche is
multiple, comprised of what William James (1890) described
as “various selves” (p. 315) and range from persona-like roles
that coalesce around the ego to frank dissociative states,
these guided imagery techniques may be applied to working
with parts, polarities, and conflict. Analogous to Jung’s (Jung
& Riklin, 1904/1973) notion of “emotionally charged
complexes” (p. 72 [CW 2, para. 167]), Rowan (1989) defines a
subpersonality as “a semi-permanent, and semi-autonomous
region of the personality capable of acting as a person” (p. 8).
This definition accords with Jung’s (1948/1969c) description of
a complex, which possesses “a powerful inner coherence . . .
wholeness and . . . a relatively high degree of autonomy so
that . . . it behaves like an animated foreign body within the
sphere of consciousness (p. 96 [CW 8, para. 201]). The
experience of a subpersonality, according to Rowan, feels like
“being ‘taken over’ by a part of ourselves . . . we didn’t know
was there” and makes one say to oneself “‘I don’t know what
got into me’” (p. 7). Jung (1948/1969c) meanwhile avers,
because they “behave like independent beings” (p. 121 [CW 8,
para. 253]), “There is no difference in principle between a
fragmentary personality and a complex” (p. 97 [CW 8, para.
202]). To that, one could argue, neither is there much
difference between a complex and a subpersonality. Vargiu
(1977) specifies that subpersonality integration takes place
around “a higher order center . . . the ‘I,’ the personal center if
identity” (p. 7) by means of “a ‘guided daydream,’” which he
states is “a means of establishing two-way communication
with the unconscious.” This dialogical process is facilitated by
a guide, he says, who “encourages . . . and helps [one] to
move on and face and resolve problem areas, usually on a
symbolic level” (p. 9). The guided daydream, Vargiu further
specifies, can be utilized to access the transpersonal
dimension of the superconscious and channel
superconscious energies toward subpersonality
harmonization, which entails recognition, reciprocal
abreaction, acceptance, coordination, identification,
disidentification, empathy, and synthesis (Vargiu, 1977).
Martha Crampton, perhaps more than any of Assagioli’s
successors, was instrumental not only in contextualizing
psychosynthetic visualization in the history of mental imagery
techniques but also in developing a method of working with
images that arguably informs most contemporary approaches
to RGI. Because she and the Jungian analyst Mary Watkins
developed similar perspectives regarding image work based
on their homologous genealogical analyses of guided
imagery and its antecedent influences, I will present their
approaches to imagery and image work—which may be
characterized as client-centered, nondirective, and
permissive—under the same heading. This pairing arguably
not only represents a kind of rapprochement between
psychosynthesis and analytical psychology, but it also more
consciously re-locates contemporary RGI practices in the
history of Jungian and archetypal psychology, which I argue
became obscured, in part, due to a pseudo clade divergence
inaugurated by Robert Desoille and his followers.
Concomitant with his rejection of Jung’s psychology for
Pavlovian behaviorism, the widespread dissemination of
Desoille’s technique Le rêve éveillé dirigé (The Directed
Waking Dream), and the varied European methods it
spawned arguably filled the methodological vacuum created
by Jung’s early ambivalence regarding public disclosure of
his imaginal experiences and his seeming disregard for
operationalizing his method of active imagination.

MARTHA CRAMPTON AND MARY

WATKINS: RAPPROCHEMENT
Given that both Martha Crampton and Mary Watkins
published surveys of mental imagery practices and
introduced approaches to working with images based on
their research findings in 1974, it is difficult to answer the
question “who may have influenced whom?” Crampton’s
monograph An Historical Survey of Mental Imagery was
originally published 1974 by the Canadian Institute of
Psychosynthesis and subsequently republished by the
Synthesis Center in 2005 under the title Guided Imagery: A
Psychosynthesis Approach. Watkins’s article, “Waking
Dreams in European Psychotherapie,” published in Spring
Journal in 1974, was later released as a chapter in her
similarly titled book Waking Dreams, distributed by Spring in
1976. Whereas Crampton cites Singer’s (1974) historical
survey Imagery and Daydream Methods in Psychotherapy
and Behavior Modification, and Watkins does not—even
though hers and Singer’s surveys of European imagery
methods are strikingly similar—neither Crampton nor Watkins
cites the other. It may be the case, given that both authors
relied heavily on Frétigny and Virel’s (1969) text L’apport des
techniques d’imagerie le á l’etude de l’imaginiaire, and
followed parallel lines of research that they developed similar
perspectives concerning images and image work
independently. Leaving this question as a topic for future
research, I will provide a brief overview of Crampton’s and
Watkins’s work and underscore those aspects most important
to the practice of RGI. Regarding Assagioli’s emphasis on
technique over theory when working with, rather than
theorizing about, images and imagination, one could arguably
draw the analogy Assagioli was to Jung as Crampton is to
Watkins. Whereas Crampton outlines specific procedures and
technical considerations, Watkins (1976/1984) more loosely
refers to a variety of methods drawn from her historical
survey of “Waking Dreams” (p. v), which she then synthesizes
and presents in general terms. Nevertheless, she writes
forcefully concerning what she believes is the appropriate
attitude with which one should approach the psyche’s
images. Although these two authors seem to recapitulate the
arguably technical/pragmatic (Assagioli) and speculative/
philosophical (Jung) temperaments of their respective
disciplinary founders, their shared respect for the sovereignty
of the image is nevertheless congruent. This consonance can
be seen to represent rapprochement between Jungian
psychology and the European schools of guided imagery, the
roots of which were forgotten due to the success and
widespread influence of Desoille, who appropriated Jung’s
psychology but then abandoned it for Pavlovian behaviorism.

MARTHA CRAMPTON’S DIALOGICAL

IMAGERY METHOD
Crampton (1974/2005) chose the name of her imagery
method to emphasize its dyadic, facilitated, and dialogical
structure. Similar to a variety of other methods reviewed in
her genealogical survey, Crampton’s use of facilitated
dialogue differentiates her method from nonfacilitated
methods such as “the ‘active imagination’ of Jung” (p. 15),
whom she deliberately singles out. Although Crampton
studied with Desoille in Paris, she is critical of what she
describes was his constant emphasis on steering his subjects’
imagery toward grandiose states he believed would
essentiate mystical transformations (Crampton, 1974/1977, p.
29). By directing his subjects’ imagery in this way, Crampton
argues, Desoille fostered a kind of spiritual bypass, which is
to say, he skirted his subjects’ developmental, emotional, and
relational difficulties through appeals to lofty spiritual ideals.
Although his interventions sometimes stimulated
extraordinary experiences, they did little to affect subjects’
habituated pathological patterns or have any lasting impact
on their ordinary lives. Based partly on her critical appraisal of
Desoille and her clinical applications of guided imagery,
Crampton’s approach to image work is decidedly more
modest. Rather than direct her subjects to strive for spiritual
illumination, she is content with identifying and working
toward “whatever is a person’s next step” (p. 15). Further
distinguishing herself from Desoille (and for that matter, from
Caslant, whose ideas Desoille appropriated), Crampton
specifies that she rarely—if ever—directs ascent or descent
imagery, nor does she suggest what image or images a
subject should start with or explore. This is because “in
allowing the free-flow of a subject’s imagery to take place he
[or she] is able to contact whatever is most important in that
moment” (p. 15). That said, she qualifies that peak
experiences are not excluded from her method. Rather, she
argues, by allowing such experiences to happen in their own
time, at their own pace, and in accordance with a subject’s
degree of readiness, such experiences will not only be more
meaningful but, owing to their organic occurrence, will more
likely be assimilable to the subject’s ordinary life (Crampton,
1974/1977). Irrespective of Crampton’s stark differentiation
from Jung based on their dissimilar views concerning
facilitation, and because her method allows for the unfettered
flow of spontaneous imagery, Crampton’s dialogical imagery
is arguably more akin to Jung’s active imagination than any of
the other imagery practices herein reviewed. Crampton also
juxtaposes her method with Frétigny and Virel’s and asserts
her dialogic imagery is simultaneously more directive and
less so than their oneiodrama. In terms of being more
directive, Crampton avers that she interacts more with her
subjects during their imagery experiences and doesn’t leave
them in prolonged periods of silence without inquiring about
their moment-to-moment experience—which she contends
Frétigny and Virel do (Crampton, 1974/1977). One could,
however, argue that the term “directive” in this context is a
misnomer and that the word “inquisitive” more accurately
describes her therapeutic stance. This is because asking
open-ended questions—as opposed to telling a subject what
to see or do (i.e., inquiring not directing)—arguably facilitates
a subject’s deeper exploration and greater insight. Said
differently, rather than controlling or directing her subjects,
Crampton seems to relate to them inquisitively, which
enhances the subject’s imaginal experience rather than
distract from it. Further, making the case her method is in
some ways more directive than Frétigny and Virel’s,
Crampton underscores in the oneiodrama a subject, whilst in
the imaginal world, is allowed to act out the subject’s
aggressive urges impetuously and without interruption
(Crampton, 1974/1977). She illustrates this with one of Frétigny
and Virel’s (1968) transcribed sessions in which a subject,
without question or therapist interruption, randomly murders
multiple imaginal figures without bothering to get to know
them in any way. Because in Crampton’s psychosynthetic
method, which is arguably also deeply informed by analytical
psychology, all images are considered aspects of the
imaginer’s psyche tout court, such violence is anathematized.
And by means of therapist intervention, reconciliation with
antagonistic images, rather than their annihilation, is
encouraged. Crampton sees her method as less directive.
Unlike Frétigny and Virel, she does not prescribe beginning
place imagery (i.e., an opening setting or scene), nor does
she impose exogenous images onto a subject’s imaginal
experience. Additionally, unlike Frétigny and Virel, Crampton
never introduces a Deus ex Machina to rescue her subjects
from difficult situations, frightening figures, or painful affects.
One final way Crampton (1974/1977) differentiates her
psychosynthetic method from other imagery methods
surveyed in this literature review is by emphasizing what she
calls “the grounding process” (p. 32), in which a subject’s
symbolic imagery experience is related to and integrated into
the subject’s quotidian life. Crampton asserts, “Though it
values the wisdom and healing available through the
unconscious, psychosynthesis . . . considers it necessary to
help the person assume responsibility for what the
unconscious reveals, and to use his will to integrate this
material in his life” (p. 36). This is similar Jung’s view that it is
ethically imperative that one put into action the insights
gained through active imagination. In his book Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, for instance, Jung (1963) wrote:
It is equally a grave mistake to think that it is enough to
gain some understanding of the images and that
knowledge can here make a halt. Insight into them
must be converted into an ethical obligation. Not to do
so is to fall prey to the power principle, and this
produces dangerous effects which are destructive not
only to others but even to the knower. The images of
the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a
man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of
ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness
and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life. (p.
192)
As noted, Crampton’s approach to image work is technical
and interventional, and several of her specifications
concerning the practice of dialogic imagery have been
incorporated into contemporary RGI practices, of which her
prototypical method may arguably be regarded as one of the
first. These include a preliminary period of centering and
relaxation, dialogical facilitation, the nondirective role of the
imagery guide, an invitational and receptive attitude toward
images, and the tripartite framework she devised for
conducting a guided imagery session. In his book Guided
Imagery and Psychotherapy: Healing through the Mind Body
Connection, Rubin Battino (2007) broadly asserts, “Guided
imagery sessions are in two parts (1) orientation and
relaxation and (2) delivery of the guided image itself” (p. 30).
Starkly absent from his description, however, is the third
“part” Crampton champions (i.e., grounding), which I will
describe. First, though, according to Crampton, the role of the
imagery guide is to attend to the imaginer’s inner exploration
and hold space for the person in a permissive, nondirective,
and encouraging way. The axiomatic attitude she encourages
meanwhile may be characterized as a respectful
acknowledgment of the image as person (i.e. possessed of
subjectivity, sentience, and inherent dignity). It is conceivable
Crampton derived her tripartite structure from Frétigny and
Virel who followed a similar sequence: (1) interview, history
gathering, case formulation, (2) the oneiodrama, and (3)
consolidation and maturation. Crampton (1974/2005)
nevertheless expands on these phases. Phase 1 entails a
preliminary discussion with subjects to explain the imagery
procedure. In this phase Crampton recommends subjects
record their sessions because the details of imagery
experiences are easily forgotten and, like dream details, are
subject to what she calls “psychic erasure” (p. 19). The guide
also assesses subjects’ present life circumstances, reviews
progress, and identifies which topic subjects would like to
explore during this preliminary phase. Once it has been
established that subjects want to do image work, they are
encouraged to lie down, the lights are lowered, and eye
shades or blankets are offered (Crampton, 1974/2005). Once
settled, subjects are instructed to take additional time to relax
and notice the rhythmic flow of their breathing. This,
Crampton states, has the effect of drawing subjects’
awareness away from the outer world to a calm and inward
focus. Next, in Phase 2 the oneiric phase, subjects are asked
either to allow a spontaneous image to appear on what
Crampton (1974/2005) terms the “mind screen” (p. 19), or to
invite an image that pertains to a specific problem or concern.
Subjects are encouraged to accept whatever image comes.
When appropriate, subjects are invited to become their
images to better understand their meaning. Her suggestion
that subjects disidentify with their imaginal bodies (i.e., their
ego images), is contrary to Frétigny and Virel’s claim that
successful imagery work hinges on the degree to which
subjects can fully identify with their imaginal bodies (as cited
in Crampton, 1974/2005, p. 5). Arguably distinguishing her
system from other triphasic oneiotherapies such as Frétigny
and Virel’s and perhaps even Caslant’s, the third and final
phase that Crampton demarcates is “the grounding process”
(p. 22), which in her view these and other systems lack (p. 10).
In the grounding phase—which Crampton considers to be an
integral part of the imagery process that must take place
during the session—the guide encourages subjects to take
responsibility for their imagery. This is done by helping
subjects identify proactive ways to integrate the wisdom
derived from their imagery experience into daily life.
Crampton’s tripartite structure—inclusive of the grounding
process—has arguably been incorporated into a variety of
RGI methods. For example, in their method, Interactive
Guided Imagery™, Bresler and Rossman (2002) rebranded
these stages as “Foresight,” “Insight,” and “Hindsight” (pp.
841–842). Leslie Davenport meanwhile has adopted a similar
framework; however the three phases she designates are
“Rapport, Imagery and Grounding” (L. Davenport, personal
communication, August 25, 2016). One could argue that all
triphasic imagery structures, regardless of the terminology
used by different practitioners, essentially refer to the period
before, during, and after the imaginal work.

MARY WATKINS’S WAKING DREAM

METHOD
Mary Watkins (1976/1984) wrote her first book Waking
Dreams in her mid-20s, when, in a process reminiscent of
Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious, she experienced
“a personal in-break of dreams and waking dreams” (p. 31).
Describing these imaginal visitations in terms not dissimilar to
Jung’s active imagination, Watkins asserts that waking
dreams occur in a liminal space “between sleeping and
waking” (p. 14). In this altered state, while the physical body
reposes, the ego observes and records the nonego and
conscious awareness is maintained (Watkins, 1976/1984).
Although images possess a dreamlike quality, Watkins
maintains that they are nevertheless “recorded, remembered
and at times interacted with.” She calls this liminal state of
consciousness “the half dream state” and describes it as a
metaxy between consciousness and the unconscious, which,
she avers, “has in many instances been regarded as sacred”
(p. 14). Corbin (1977/1989), for instance, described this median
and mediating third area as the “Mundus Imaginalis—[or] the
Imaginal World” (p. ix) and it is here, he argued, where all
theophanies and sacred revelations occur.
One could argue that Watkins’s volumes Waking Dreams
and Invisible Guests together comprise what may be
described as a complete book of etiquette to the imaginal
realm and a primer to the customs, and manners of its
unfamiliar inhabitants. In Waking Dreams, for example,
Watkins writes of the individuality and autonomy of the image,
which “discloses its own character . . . by being itself [and]
tells what it is doing by doing it” (p. 129). By describing the
image first as a “fish” and then as a “friend,” Watkins not only
affirms the wild yet relatable sovereignty of the image, she
fulfills her own imperative to balance mythos and logos (i.e.,
science with myth; the real with the imaginal; and matter with
metaphor). The image is like a fish, she asserts, because to
experience its living vitality and indigenous beauty one must
venture from the shallows of ego consciousness into its
depths (p. 168). As fidus Achates, she explains, the image
yearns to share its story. It is essential therefore that one
does not intrude upon the image; interrupt its narrative; label
its contents; rush, advise, or judge it. Instead, she
recommends one sit with the image and let it “spin,” its
experience, and become “deeper,” and “more profound” (p.
167). One should, Watkins further encourages, “keep the
image in its context [and] try to see what emotions the image
conveys” (p. 175).
The image of Jane Goodall’s immersive participation in the
social world of chimpanzees symbolically captures the spirit
of openness and humility Watkins (1984/2000) recommends
in her second book Invisible Guests. She advises, for
example, that one should allow “the other to freely arise . . .
exist autonomously . . . [and] patiently wait for relation to
occur in this open horizon.” She further counsels that one
should “move toward difference, not with denial or rejection
but with tolerance, curiosity, and a clear sense that it is in the
encounter with otherness and multiplicity that deeper
meanings can emerge” (p. 179). Watkins recognition of
images as autonomous beings follows Jung (1958/1969), who
characterized his engagement with images as a meeting
“between two . . . beings with equal rights” (p. 186 [CW 8,
para. 186]). Respectful acknowledgment of the image is
essential Jung insisted because to fully come to terms with
oneself and other people one must first “admit the validity of
the . . . ‘other’ within” (p. 89 [CW 8, para 187]).
Whereas Crampton provided a clearly defined framework
for conducting guided imagery, Watkins’s approach is
arguably opaque. Rather than formulate any set of guidelines
she more obliquely draws elements from the different
imagery methods herein reviewed in her own discussion of
waking dreams. Nevertheless, in her survey of the various
oneiotherapies, Watkins identifies a gradual refinement of
technique and greater theoretical cohesion in the
psychological understanding of mental imagery.
Watkins (1976/1984) contends the storied history of guided
imagery herein reviewed—from the earliest psychological
studies to the rise, proliferation, and refinement of European
guided imagery practices, shows the progressive and
systematic organization of mental imagery into a legitimate
overarching therapeutic modality predicated on the following
foundational suppositions:
1. Inner images, scenes, and dramas reveal not only the
patient’s current situation, but also the patient’s general
 attitude, degree of inner conflict, and level of
psychological resiliency.
2. The unconscious is inherently creative and
communicative and serves as an inner source of
wisdom, strength, and support.
3. Conscious participation in the creative psyche’s
mythopoetic imagery is in itself healing and
transformative (Watkins, 1974/1984, p. 91).
Watkins (1976/1984) avers that these various oneiric
techniques reconnected people with their imaginations,
stimulated curiosity about the meaning and value of
spontaneous imagery, and helped establish conscious
rapport between the ego and unconscious mediated by
images (p. 92). Indeed, she argues, much was accomplished
using the combined European techniques:
[They] trained the patient to relax, to separate his
consciousness from its usual contents, to turn his
awareness towards the movements of the imaginal . . .
to . . . learn to enter into his imaginary body, to insert
himself in the imaginary scene, to move within it, to
encounter threatening images and to allow affect to
arise . . . to recognize and work with resistances . . . [to
discern] how or whether to interpret and analyze the
waking dream [and] . . . to see the patient’s experience
in the imaginal realm in relation to the other aspects of
his existence. (Watkins, 1976/1984, p. 71)
Most significantly, perhaps, Watkins rightly claims,
especially in regard to the European oneiotherapies, that
therapist directivity decreased over time and “a less directive
mode . . . has been adopted” (p. 91). Notwithstanding,
Watkins notes that directive techniques are still employed to
provide patients with enough structure to ensure that they
initially experience “a ‘meaningful’ scene” (p. 91) into which
they can project themselves. Watkins discerns the various
European guided imagery practices all seem to treat the
psyche and its mythopoetic productions as meaningful and
purposeful. She quotes Singer (1971), who wrote, “Fantasy-life
symbolism really seems there for most European therapists; it
is not merely a reflection of conflicts but a fundamental part of
the personality that may require treatment and modification”
(para. 30). Although the various European imagery
practitioners seemed to respect imagery, Watkins accurately
notes that they nevertheless approached the unconscious
and the imaginal from “the position of the ego, with some
goal in mind” (p. 91). One could argue that it is precisely this
persistent one-sided imbalance and skewed emphasis on
ego-consciousness and its outer world adjustments that
typifies the European oneiotherapies that the image work of
Jungian and archetypal psychology seeks to rectify.
Before delving into Jungian and archetypal psychological
views concerning images and imagination, I will first present
contemporary figures in the field of guided imagery. I will
point to the work of Michael Samuels (1990) and Martin
Rossman (2003) to exemplify a problematic tendency among
contemporary imagery practitioners to conceptualize images
in either overly spiritualized or scientifically positivized terms.
I will make the case such diametric thinking omits the median
of Soul, which is contestably the unique province of Jungian
and archetypal psychology. This will conclude the guided
imagery section of this literature review—which also traced
the antecedent influences on Jungian psychology generally
and Jung’s technique of active imagination in particular.

CONTEMPORARY GUIDED IMAGERY

Accepting the existence of a mind-body connection,
relational guided imagery purports to channel the power of
imagination to affect health and healing and provide access
to inner wisdom (Davenport, 2009; Reed & Ezra, 2008;
Rossman, 2000). Although explanations accounting for
guided imagery’s efficacy are often omitted, when they are
provided, they range from the esoteric (Naparstek, 1990;
Samuels, 1990) to the scientific (Achterberg, 1985; Rossman,
2000).
 Describing guided imagery as an act of faith similar to the
relationship between a spiritual initiate and a learned sage,
Michael Samuels (1990) asserts, “Spirit frees the mind to heal
the body” (loc. 173). By embarking on inner journeys, he
contends, one can access the inner world, wherein “we can
align body, mind, and spirit and cause a transformation that
heals our body” (loc. 176).
Appealing to neuroscience, conversely, Rossman (2000)
argues that “imagery is the natural language” of the brain’s
right hemisphere. Thus, for healing to occur, a balance must
be achieved between the left brain’s logical, sequential
processing system and the right brain’s emotional, synthetic
processing system. According to Rossman, “The imagery
produce[d] by [the right brain] . . . lets [one] see the big
picture . . . put ideas together in new ways . . . [and] see the
opportunity hidden in . . . illness” (p. 532).
One could argue that Samuels’s exclusively esoteric
emphasis commits what Hillman (1975) called a “spiritual
fallacy” (p. 40), in that it relies singularly on religious
structures or meditative discipline as a basis for working with
images. One could also argue that Rossman’s neuroscientific
perspective commits a “naturalistic fallacy” (p. 84) insofar as it
reductively emphasizes scientific facts based on sense
perceptions (i.e., materialism) to justify images of the
imagination. Pushed to its extreme, this perspective
subordinates psyche to physis, it views mind as an
epiphenomenon of brain, and it regards imagination as a
subordinate phenomenon secondary to perception. At
variance with this position, Jungian and archetypal
psychology instead upholds the yes/and, in between
perspective of soul that opposes absolutism and all
monotheistic dogmas.
Resounding clearly in Hillman’s (1975) assertion that
“nature cannot be the guide for comprehending soul” (p. 84),
Jungian and archetypal psychology rejects both reductive
scientific naturalism and metaphysics as adequate
explanatory principles to account for the power and
importance of the imagination, which is arguably of an
entirely unique ontological and epistemological order.
Neither Samuels’s purely metaphysical approach nor
Rossman’s scientific approach to imagery based on
materialism bridge the gap between sense perceptions and
ideas; the conscious and unconscious; matter and mind. Both
authors seem to lack an awareness of a third, a median and
mediating tertium quid linking these apparent dualities, which
has been variously described in the Jungian and archetypal
literature as the psychoid archetype, the imaginal realm, and
soul, which will be described in detail in the following section.
Contemporary figures contributing to the refinement of
RGI include Carl and Stephanie Simonton (1978), Irving Oyle
(1975), David Bresler and Martin Rossman (2002), and Leslie
Davenport (2009). Although these authors have made
important contributions, the work of Irving Oyle and Leslie
Davenport is of particular interest to this study.
Providing access to personified inner wisdom and
guidance, Oyle (1975) is credited with developing the inner
advisor technique, a form of inner guide imagery that I
explore in my research linking students’ imaginal encounters
to Jung’s experiences with personified archetypes, as well as
the accounts of Persian mystics meeting their angel guides.
Leslie Davenport (2009) is notable for the fact that she
frames imagery as means of tapping into the heart’s wisdom,
“which is greater than our minds can understand (p. x). By
imagining the heart as a source of wisdom, Davenport’s work
correlates with Hillman’s (1992/2007) The Thought of the
Heart in which he explores Corbin’s (1969) term himma
(borrowed from Ibn ‘Arabi), which is the power of the heart to
access and understand spiritual reality. Engendered by the
heart’s ardent will, desire, and faith, Sufis regard himma as an
ontological power that produces creative transformation in
the external world (Avens, 1982, p. 216). Of particular
importance to this study, Hillman (1992/2007) proclaims,
“Himma creates as ‘real’ the figures of the imagination” (p. 5).
5
C. G. JUNG
JUNGIAN AND
ARCHETYPAL
PSYCHOLOGY

Through his transformative experiments with the

unconscious, Jung created the technique he called Active
Imagination, which brings the ego (the center of
consciousness) and the autonomous archetypes (universal
personified forms governing the psyche) into dialogical
relationship. This interlocutory connection between the ego
and objective others within the psyche, Jung argued,
facilitates a teleological process he called individuation,
which is a life-long development toward wholeness and the
full integration of the personality.
A variety of commentators have provided detailed
bibliographies and constructive accounts of Jung’s
development of Active Imagination (Chodorow, 1997; Cwik,
1984; Hull, 1971; Humbert, 1971). The most detailed
historiography though is arguably provided by Wendy Swan
(2005, 2007, 2008, 2012), a self-described “independent
historian of psychoanalysis” (Swan, 2008, p. 185). Using a
historical and archival research methodology and drawing
from all available published and unpublished primary sources
including the Collected Works, private letters, and seminar
notes, Swan traced the origins of Jung’s method and
compiled a comprehensive list of Jung’s professional
comments regarding the theoretical underpinnings and
clinical applications of active imagination. Because Jung
spoke of active and passive fantasy long before he employed
the term active imagination in his 1935 Tavistock Lectures,
Swan (2005) bifurcates this primary source material into two
referential categories: (1) “Active Participation with
Unconscious Fantasy Material” (p. 24) and (2) “Active
Imagination” (p. 33), where Jung specifically employed this
descriptor. Rather than recapitulate Swan’s findings, I refer
the reader to her two appendices: “Appendix A: Detailed
Citations for Active Fantasy . . . the forerunner of the concept
of active imagination (before 1935)” (pp. 145–146), and
“Appendix B: Detailed Citations for Active Imagination . . .
(after 1935)” (pp. 147–148). Swan (2005) also provides a
meticulous bibliography of secondary sources, which
includes the works of Jung’s biographers “(Bair, 2003;
Ellenberger, 1970; Hannah, 1976; Hayman, 1999; Homans,
1979; Jaffé, 1989; McLynn, 1996; von Franz, 1998)”; clinical
applications and case studies of active imagination written by
Jung’s intellectual heirs “(Adler, 1948, 1955, 1961; Cwik, 1984;
Dallett, 1984; Dieckmann, 1979; Edinger, 1990; Hannah, 1981;
Henderson, 1955; Humbert, 1971; Keyes, 1983; Kirsch, 1955;
Singer, 1973; Weaver, 1973; Wickes, 1927/1966)”; and assorted
theoretical analyses concerning various aspects of active
imagination “(Casey, 1974; Davidson, 1966; Durand, 1971;
Fordham, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1967, 1978; Hannah, 1953;
Henderson, 1955; Hull, 1971; Powell, 1985)” (p. 53). Omitted
from Swan’s research are those contemporary Jungians who
arguably appropriated the core of Jung’s method and refined,
revised, or rebranded it, such as Aizenstat (2011), who
refashioned active imagination into “Dream Tending” (p. 10),
and Bosnak (2007), who restyled Jung’s method into what he
calls “embodied imagination” (p. 7). Swan’s (2005) scrupulous
bibliography nevertheless serves as a useful roadmap to
Jung’s development of ideas from his earliest engagement
working with unconscious fantasy material to the full
elaboration of his method, active imagination.
 Concerning Jung’s personal experiences with active
imagination, Swan (2005) correctly observes there exists a
paucity of information. What information is available is located
in two published descriptions: (1) Jung’s personal account,
which took place in 1925 in a lecture series titled
“Introduction to Analytical Psychology” (Jung, 1925/1989), and
(2) what Swan—following Shamdasani (1999)—argues is
Jaffé’s version of Jung’s imaginal experience presented in
Chapter 6 of Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Jung, 1963, pp.
170–199). According to Sonu Shamdasani (2011), “the only
reliable firsthand source,” of Jung’s “development of his ideas
and his self-experimentation with [active imagination]” (p. vii)
are notes taken from his 1925 Psychologischer Club seminar
in Zurich which Jung carefully reviewed and ratified. These
mimeographed notes were only privately distributed. In this
seminar consisting of 16 lectures and attended by 26 people
—both professional colleagues and analysands—Jung
outlined his approach to working with images and fantasies
emerging from the unconscious (Swan, 2005).
In his 4th lecture of April 13, 1925, Jung confided his strong
preliminary resistance to fantasy thinking which he admitted
was so intensely distasteful to him that he projected his
disavowed capacity for it on to the mythological fantasies and
dream content of Théodore Flournoy’s American patient, Ms.
Frank Miller. Jung encountered Ms. Miller’s (1906) fantasies in
her memoir, “Quelques faits d’imagination créatrice
subconsciente” (“Some Instances of Subconscious Creative
Imagination”) published in Archives de psychologie, which he
read whilst writing his Psychology of the Unconscious.
Corresponding to his fantasy material, the decidedly
impersonal character of Ms. Miller’s dreams and fantasies
catalyzed Jung’s understanding that mythopoetic contents of
this kind originate autonomously from an objective layer of
the psyche he later called the collective unconscious. It was
Ms. Miller’s fantasy material, which Jung (1952/1967)
characterized as a prodrom to schizophrenia that served as
the basis his volume Symbols of Transformation. According to
Jung (1925/1989), Ms. Miller “took over my fantasy and
became stage director to it” (p. 27). Expressing revulsion over
his recognition that he too possessed an inner world of
fantasy, Jung averred, “it shocked me and it went against all
the intellectual ideals I had developed.” So formidable was his
initial resistance to fantasy, Jung stated, he “could only admit
the fact [by] . . . projecting [his] material into Miss Miller” (p.
27). Long repressed intrusive fantasy material, it seemed to
Jung, was a form of “passive thinking,” that was so “weak and
perverted [he] could only handle it through a diseased
woman” (p. 28). Nevertheless, over time, Jung re-owned his
displaced and projected “fantasy function” (p. 28). Elsewhere
(i.e., Jung’s second March 30 lecture) he asserted, though he
was initially ambivalent about engaging unconscious
fantasies he came to see, “Fantasy is the creative function . . .
[which] will lead the way,” out of a psychological impasse if
“one . . . gives free rein to the fantasy” (p. 11). In his 5th
lecture, Jung pronounced what can arguably be read as the
inceptive form of archetypal psychology’s imperative to “stick
to the image” (Berry, 1982/2008, p. 59; Hillman, 1983, p. 54;
Jung, 1925/1989, p. 35). He specified, “the technical rule with
regard to fantasy is to stick to the picture that comes up until
all possibilities are exhausted.” Although Jung acknowledged
that this might be an affront to consciousness and provoke
resistance, he nevertheless asserted that by sticking with the
image, “one makes the fantasy move on” (p. 35). In this same
lecture Jung (1925/1989) disclosed his apocalyptic fantasy
from October 1913, the account of which was later included in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
I began to fantasize . . . I was looking down on the map
of Europe in relief. I saw all the northern part, and
England sinking down so that the sea came in upon
it. . . . I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in
progress, towns and people were destroyed, and . . .
the whole sea turned to blood. . . . [T]he sense of the
catastrophe gripped me with tremendous power. I
tried to repress the fantasy, but it came again and
again and held me bound for two hours. (Jung, 1963,
pp. 41–42)
 Disturbing fantasies like this, which initially made Jung
(1963) feel he “was menaced by a psychosis” (p. 176), later
confirmed for him that the unconscious was much more than
a repository of repressed personal contents. Instead, the
unconscious seemed to possess autonomous life and will,
about which he knew virtually nothing (Jung, 1988/1925, p.
40). Jung’s recognition that there existed an objective level to
the psyche inspired his “systematic attempt to examine [the]
unconscious” (p. 38) through immersive interaction with
images and fantasies that seemed to ensue from it. Jung first
recorded drafts of his imaginal experiences in six small
leatherbound notebooks he called the Black Books. He later
refined and developed this fantasy material in his
posthumously published, now famous, and widely acclaimed
The Red Book (2009). Aniela Jaffé described these volumes
in Jung’s (1963) Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
The Black Book consists of six black-bound, smallish
leather notebooks. The Red Book, a folio volume bound in
red leather, contains the same fantasies couched in
elaborately literary form and language, and set down in
calligraphic Gothic script, in the manner of medieval
manuscripts. (p. 188)
Swan (2005) embraces Shamdasani’s (1999) repudiation of
what he claims was Jaffé’s essentially ghostwritten account of
Jung’s personal experiences with active imagination in
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which Shamdasani (1999)
insists “was by no means Jung’s autobiography” (p. 33).
According to Shamdasani, before Jung’s death, in private
conversations with Richard Hull—which Hull documented—
Jung voiced his strong disapproval of Jaffé’s account, which
he complained “‘auntified’ or ‘old-maidified’” him
(Shamdasani, 1999, p. 44).
Notwithstanding Shamdasani’s forensic efforts to
invalidate Memories, Dreams, Reflections, this study instead
affirms Paul Bishop’s (1999) assertion, despite important
personal omissions that may have been excluded from the
text, that Jung’s contested autobiography nevertheless
“remains an extremely powerful work” (p. 14). This study also
supports Susan Rowland’s (2016) critique of Shamdasani’s
“perilously limiting” historical approach, which “rejects Jung’s
emphasis of the primacy of the creative unconscious” (p. 47),
casts him as the “authorizing Father God of his psychology
and writing” (p. 48), and stifles unsanctioned (i.e., imaginal)
ways of knowing Jung’s text. Beyond it being a powerful work
exhibiting the primacy of the creative unconscious, for Jung,
one could argue that Memories, Dreams, Reflections also
represents the most balanced synthesis in Jung’s oeuvre of
his formidable imaginative and reflective capacities (i.e.,
mythos and logos). Whereas, Jung’s written accounts of his
work with unconscious fantasy and active imagination in the
Collected Works are presented academically and emphasize
his conceptual reflections in conscious alignment with
consensual reality (i.e., physical reality, social reality, historical
and scientific facts), and The Red Book arguably combines,
Jung’s florid imagery and “bombastic” prose to expresses
imaginal reality disconnected from consensual reality and
external facts of any kind, Memories, Dreams Reflections
conversely balances reflexivity and creativity and
underscores imagination and reflection are complementary
psychic functions—not opposites. One could argue that
Jung’s autobiography, which is itself a compilation of
imaginally real psychological facts, represents the
coincidentia oppositorum, and read the book itself as an
emergent symbolic third born of the transcendent function.
Jung’s candid accounts of his imaginal experiences and his
ascription of meaning to them derived from his fervent
conscious reflections arguably express the balance and
psychological wholeness of individuation. In this sense, a
more fitting title for this work might be Imaginings,
Reflections, and Meaning.
Because Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963) and
Analytical Psychology: Notes on the Seminar Given in 1925
(1925/1989) were published following Jung’s death on June 6,
1961, Swan (2005) contends that “with the exception of a
limited number . . . of colleagues and analysands in
attendance at the 1925 seminar . . . Jung’s personal
experiences with active imagination, prior to his death, were
virtually unknown to the public” (p. 21). I have argued that it
was in this vacuum that Robert Desoille’s (1938, 1945, 1961,
1965, 1966) method The Directed Daydream (Rêve-eveillé
dirigé)—which was predicated on Jung’s theoretical insights—
emerged as the prototypical method for working with mental
images in Europe. Another deficiency in the literature Swan
(2005) notes is the “lack of first-person accounts by Jung’s
patients describing their experiences with active imagination”
(p. 22). Swan (2005, 2012) nevertheless does her part to
rectify this lacuna in her research on Jung’s analysand Tina
Keller, which includes her translation and analysis of Keller’s
“autobiographical accounts, correspondences, published
essays, and one book” (Swan, 2005, p. 44).
Jung’s most thorough account concerning his synthetic
and constructive method for consciously accessing
archetypal imagery and other fantasy material from the
unconscious is arguably presented in his essay “The
Transcendent Function” (1958/1969, pp. 67–91 [CW 8, paras.
131-193]). I discuss in detail in Chapter 2 the transcendent
function in the context of philosophical dualism, and in
relationship to Schelling’s understanding of the opposites as
equiprimordial and eternally unassimilable pairs. For brevity’s
sake here, as it regards terminology and explanation, it will
suffice to quote Jung (1969g/1954), who described the
transcendent function as “a process and a method at the
same time.” According to Jung, “the production of
unconscious compensations is a spontaneous process [while
their] conscious realisation is a method.” The function itself,
he asserted, is “‘transcendent’ because it facilitates the
transition between one psychic condition to another by
means of mutual confrontation of the opposites. (p. 489 [CW
11, para 780]). Jung (1958/1969) explained that, resulting from
this “union of conscious and unconscious contents” (p. 69
[CW 8, para. 131]), the transcendent function provides the
means of “coming to terms with the unconscious” (p, 87 [CW
8, para. 183)]. He further specified this method of synthetic
reckoning entails two phases: first, contents from the
unconscious are “given form and the meaning of the
formulation is understood” (p. 87 [CW 8, para. 181]) Next, and
even more importantly, the opposites are brought together
“for the production of a third: the transcendent function” (p.
87 [CW 8, para. 181]). This dialogical exchange back and forth
between the conscious and unconscious, Jung insisted,
“creates a living, third thing—not a logical stillbirth . . . but a
movement out of the suspension between opposites, a living
birth that leads to a new level of being, a new situation” (p. 90
[CW 8, para. 189]). In the opening pages of “The Transcendent
Function,” Jung also assessed the potential risks and benefits
of consciously engaging unconscious fantasy using what he
would later call active imagination. There are, Jung
(1958/1969) stressed, three potential dangers inherent to the
practice: (1) A patient may become “caught in the sterile circle
of his own complexes . . . from which [the patient is] unable to
escape.” (2) The patient may become aesthetically self-
absorbed and “consequently [remain] stuck in an all-
enveloping phantasmagoria, so that . . . nothing is gained.” Or,
most dangerously (3) “The subliminal contents . . . when
afforded an outlet by active imagination may overpower the
conscious mind and take possession of the personality.” This
domination of ego consciousness by enlivened imagery
arising from the unconscious, Jung cautioned, could provoke
the onset of a pathological condition that “cannot easily be
distinguished from Schizophrenia, and may even lead to a
genuine ‘psychotic interval’” (p. 68 [CW 8, para. 130)]). As
noted, Jung did not use the term active imagination in his
original version of the 1916 essay and only retrospectively
applied the term 40 years later in his prefatory note to the
second edition published in 1969. In it, Jung wrote:
The method of “active imagination,” . . . is the most
important auxiliary for the production of those contents
of the unconscious which lie, as it were, immediately
below the threshold of consciousness and when
intensified are the most likely to irrupt [sic]
spontaneously into the conscious mind. (1958/1969, p.
68 [CW 8, para. 130])
 This synthetic process of making the unconscious
conscious, Jung (1943/1966) averred, is “a true labour, a work
which involves both action and suffering.” Because the
transcendent function impelled by active imagination is
“based on [the interface of] real and ‘imaginary’ or rational
and irrational data,” it serves to bridge “the yawning gulf”
dividing the opposites “conscious and unconscious” (p. 80
[CW 7, para. 121]).
In his volume Psychological Types, Jung (1921/1971)
asserted that he originally used the term fantasy to describe
what he called “a vital process [and] continuously creative act
[that] . . . creates reality every day” (p. 52 [CW 6, para. 78]).
Active fantasies, according to Jung, are products of an
individual’s intuition tuned to perceive unconscious contents
in order to bring them into clear visual form. Passive fantasies,
in contrast, are basically idyll daydreams (p. 428 [CW 6, para.
712]). Regarding their diverging points of inception (i.e., from
whence these two kinds of fantasy arise), Jung (1921/1971)
wrote:
It is probable that passive fantasies always have their
origin in an unconscious process that is antithetical to
consciousness, but invested with approximately the
same amount of energy as the conscious attitude, and
therefore capable of breaking through the latter’s
resistance. Active fantasies, on the other hand, owe
their existence not so much to this unconscious
process as to a conscious propensity to assimilate
hints or fragments of lightly-toned unconscious
complexes. . . . Whereas passive fantasy not
infrequently bears a morbid stamp or at least shows
some trace of abnormality, active fantasy is one of the
highest forms of psychic activity. For here the
conscious and the unconscious personality of the
subject flow together into a common product in which
both are united. (p. 428 [CW 6, paras. 713-714])
To Jung (1921/1971), active fantasy seemed to be “the
clearest expression of the specific activity of the psyche.” It is,
he proclaimed, “the mother of all possibilities” (p. 52 [CW 6,
para. 78]), and represents the “highest unity of a man’s
individuality” (p. 428 [CW 6, para. 714]). In Jung’s view, the
relationship between the ego and the unconscious expressed
through active fantasy is of the greatest importance because
it constitutes a transformational link between the ego and the
Self—the archetypal image of psychic totality. It also provided
him with a foundational basis for active imagination, his
primary therapeutic technique for dealing directly with the
objective psyche’s autonomous images. Regarding the nature
of images Jung (1921/1971) asserted:
When I speak of “image” . . . [I mean] a concept
derived from poetic usage, namely, a figure of fancy or
fantasy-image, which is related only indirectly to the
perception of an external object. This image depends
much more on unconscious fantasy, and as the
product of such activity it appears more or less
abruptly in consciousness, somewhat in the manner of
a vision or hallucination, but without possessing the
morbid traits that are found in the clinical picture. (p.
442 [CW 6, para. 743])
Jung (1921/1971) went on to describe the image as a
“complex structure,” which is a “condensed expression of the
psychic situation as a whole.” The image, he specified, is
“primordial when it possesses an archaic character . . . with
familiar mythological motifs.” When this occurs, the “material
[is] primarily derived from the collective unconscious” rather
than the personal unconscious. “A personal image,” Jung
averred, lacks the archaic quality and collective importance of
the primordial image or archetype, and instead expresses the
“personally conditioned conscious situation” (p. 433 [CW 6,
paras. 745-746]).
Following Swan’s (2005) historiographical organization,
we turn next to what came to be called Jung’s 1930-1934
“Visions Seminar,” which was based on the active imagination
experiences of his analysand Christiana Morgan and later
published in two volumes, Jung (1997a, 1997b). In his May 4,
1932 seminar, Jung described the concept “betrachten,”
which he claimed is crucial to his method. According to Jung
(1997a), this word suggests a sort of “psychological
looking . . . which brings about the activation of the [image].”
Through this enlivening gaze, Jung suggests, it is just as if
“something [was] emanating from one’s spiritual eye that
evokes or activates the object of one’s vision” (p. 661). Jung
(1977a) juxtaposed this exertive concept with merely
witnessing images and argued:
The English verb, to look at, does not convey this
meaning but the German “betrachtung,” which is
equivalent, means also to make pregnant. . . . So, to
look at or concentrate upon a thing, betrachtung, gives
the quality of being pregnant to the object. And if it is
pregnant, then something is due to come out of it; it is
alive, it produces, it multiplies. That is the case with
any fantasy image; one concentrates upon it, and then
finds that one has great difficulty in keeping the thing
quiet. It gets restless, it shifts, something is added, or it
multiplies itself; one fills it with living power, and it
becomes pregnant. (p. 661)
Through his imaginal dialogues with spiritually charged
personified figures arising from the objective psyche, Jung
(1963) realized, “There [are] things in the psyche [he did] not
produce, but which produce[d] themselves and [had] their
own life” (p. 183). Most crucial to Jung’s process of imaginal
discovery was the reclamation of his anima (i.e., soul). In
Jungian and archetypal psychology, the soul is thought to
serve as a mediating gateway between the conscious and
unconscious (Jung, 1963). Although Jung’s repressed anima,
personified as Salome, exhibited a seemingly harsh and
wrathful attitude toward him. One could argue that hers was a
commensurate and compensatory reaction, a dark mirror of
sorts that reflected Jung’s habitual conscious attitude of
disregard for her. Jung’s (2009) conscious attitude toward the
unconscious nevertheless did shift as is evidenced in this
passage from his The Red Book: “When the mystery [of the
soul] draws near to you . . . [your] heart awakens . . . things
happen around you like miracles . . . [and] your world begins
to become wonderful” (p. 264). This is because “man belongs
not only to an ordered world. He also belongs to the wonder-
world of his soul” (p. 264).
Returning to Jung’s (1959) technical notion of “active
phantasying,” in his Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule
(ETH) lectures he explained: “It is a question of allowing
phantasy to play freely.” The free play of imagination though
is just the beginning of the process, he specified, because to
increase consciousness, fantasy images must not only be
seen but understood. “Active phantasying,” Jung averred, can
be applied in a variety of ways. For instance, “it can be used
to discover complexes and contents of the unconscious and it
is especially useful to establish a connection with the
tendencies and possibilities which exist and will appear” (p.
208). Jung’s lecture attendees, Barbara Hannah and
Elizabeth Welsh, in what can arguably be described as their
overly reductive synopsis of this lecture, asserted,
“Phantasies are complexes trying to find a solution” (p. 89).
In addition to Swan’s (2005) two-part delineation between
Jung’s references to (1) working with unconscious fantasy
material prior to 1935, and (2) his references to active
imagination after that, she further classified Jung’s comments
about active imagination by theme. These thematic foci
include alchemy and active imagination (1937/1968);
archetypes and active imagination (1936-1937/1968,
1948/1968); psychological matters and active imagination;
(1951/1968a, 1946/1966, 1954/1969a, 1950/1968b); spiritual
and religious phenomena and active imagination (1936/1969,
1954/1969b, 1954/1969c, 1942/1967, 1948/1969b,
1955-1956/1970); and symbols and active imagination
(1950/1968a, 1954/1967).
Recall, Jung’s (1935/1976) first use of the term “active
imagination” (p. 6) and his detailed description of it by name
didn’t occur until his 1935 Tavistock Lectures for the Institute
of Medical Psychology in London. The crux of this discussion
took place during a question and answer session following
his final lecture on October 4th. Jung took this opportunity to
clarify his terms. He explained: “A fantasy is more or less your
own invention . . . [whereas] active imagination . . . means the
images have a life of their own and that symbolic events
develop according to their own logic” (p. 171 [CW 18, para.
397]). Jung opined, “I really prefer the term ‘imagination’ to
‘fantasy, because . . . fantasy is mere nonsense, a phantasm, a
fleeting impression; but imagination is active, purposeful
creation” (p. 171 [CW 18, para. 396]). Beyond clarifying his
terminology and further differentiating fantasy from
imagination, Jung also provided a procedural outline. He
instructed, “You begin by concentrating upon a starting point .
. . you concentrate on a mental picture [and] . . . the image
becomes enriched by details, it moves and develops” (p. 172
[CW 18, paras. 397-398]). Jung also warned of a common
tendency he observed among his analysands, to distrust their
imagery as self-concocted fabrications. Nevertheless, he
insisted, “you have to overcome that doubt because it is not
true.” Fantasy images are not solely produced by ego
consciousness, Jung argued. Instead, he specified, “We
depend entirely upon the benevolent co-operation of our
unconscious . . . if it does not cooperate we are completely
lost.” Thus, according to Jung, if one does not disrupt the
spontaneous flow of events, “the unconscious will produce a
series of images which make a complete story” (p. 172 [CW
18, para. 398]).
Jung (1954/1969a) described the various forms active
imagination could take in his essay “On the Nature of the
Psyche,” forms that include dramatic enactments, role-
playing, art, music, or dance (p. 202 [CW 8, para. 400]). He
correlated fantasies that ensued from these multimodal
expressions with the individuation process, which is a
transformative progression of psychological integration and
differentiation from the collective through conscious
assimilation of unconscious archetypal contents (i.e., the
transcendent function of opposites), which occurs naturally
through dreams or more deliberately through active
imagination. Based on his analysands’ accounts of their
experiences of spontaneously arising fantasy material—and
his experiments with the unconscious through active
imagination, Jung (1969/1954) formulated the novel
hypothesis that there exists “an impersonal, collective
unconscious” (p. 204 [CW 8, para. 403]). To Jung, the
fascinating dimension of active imagination is its synthetic
function which, although it could be said to occur naturally, is
nevertheless buttressed by the imaginer’s receptive and
participatory attitude, which results in the combined
synergistic effect of spontaneous archetypal amplification (pp.
204–205 [CW 8, para. 403).
Doctor Kristine Mann, described by Jung (1950/1968b) in
his essay “A Study in the Process of Individuation” (p. 290
[CW 9i]), is a striking exemplar of the painterly form of active
imagination. Mann had apparently stumbled upon the
salubrious effects of painting her fantasy material before
commencing her therapeutic relationship with Jung (Swan,
2005). Nevertheless, of particular importance to Jung were
Mann’s Mandala paintings which, aside from their significant
correlation to alchemical symbolism, reconfirmed for him
active imagination’s integrative power. According to Jung
(1955/1968), “A circular image . . . compensates the disorder
and confusion of the psychic state . . . through the
construction of a central point . . . to which everything is
related.” He understood the creation of a central nexus within
concentric patterns to be evidence of “an attempt at self-
healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring from
conscious reflection, but from an instinctive impulse.”
Representing “the archetype of wholeness” (p. 388 [CW 9i,
paras. 714-715]), Jung (1963) knew firsthand the healing power
of mandala imagery, which he understood as symbolic
cyphers that reflected not only his present state of mind but
the developmental progression of his “psychic
transformations from day to day” (p. 195). Jung documented
his confrontation with the unconscious and illustrated it with
mandala imagery in The Red Book. Shamdasani’s (1999)
dismissal of Memories, Dreams, Reflections notwithstanding,
regarding his mandala drawings, Jung (1963) concluded:
The Mandala is an archetypal image whose
occurrence is attested throughout the ages. It signifies
the wholeness of the Self. This circular image
 represents the wholeness of the psychic ground, or to
put it in mythical terms, the divinity incarnates in man.
(pp. 334–335)
Jung (1955-1956/1970) wrote extensively about the
relationship between active imagination and alchemy in his
Mysterium Coniunctionis (Swan, 2005). For example, in his
chapter titled “Rex and Regina,” he argued that the alchemist
unconsciously projected on to matter the same unconscious
contents that his method active imagination worked to make
conscious (p. 320 [CW 14, para. 446). In fact, he asserted,
“alchemical operations,” appear to be the “equivalent of the
psychological process of active imagination” (p. 526 [CW 14,
para. 526]). Jung further developed this correlation between
the ancient art and science of alchemy and his modern
method of active imagination (which he insisted was neither
art nor science) in his chapter “The Personification of the
Opposites.” He instantiated their correspondence in terms of
the psychic tension generated by the interdependent
antipodes “consciousness and unconsciousness,” the
alchemical symbolism for which is personified by the
contradictory pair “[King] Sol and [Queen] Luna” (i.e., the Sun
and Moon) (p. 106 [CW 14, para. 127). Inner conflict generated
from these inherently incompatible binaries, Jung
(1955-1956/1970) argued, is necessary for any psychological
development to occur. He further charged that these
“moments of violent collision between opposite points of
view” (pp. 123–124 [CW 14, paras. 146–147]), which the
alchemists seemed to mobilize unconsciously through their
material projections, could instead be consciously mitigated
by his method, active imagination.
In his Mysterium Conjunctionis in a chapter titled “The
Conjunction,” Jung (1955-1956/1970) reflected on his early
explorations with active imagination, which, he diffidently
remarked, provided “satisfactory results” (p. 530 [CW 14, para.
755)]. Irrespective of his seemingly subdued appraisal, Jung
nevertheless confirmed his method should not be carelessly
undertaken owing to its dangerousness and inherent
difficulty. In this chapter, too, Jung (1955-1956/1970)
described active imagination in metaphorical terms as a kind
of stage production. For example, he wrote:
These images are observed like scenes in the theatre.
In other words, you dream with open eyes. . . . What is
enacted on the stage still remains a background
process; it does not move the observer in any way,
and the less it moves him the smaller will be the
cathartic effect of this private theater. The piece that is
being played does not want merely to be watched
impartially, it wants to compel his participation. If the
observer understands that his own drama is being
performed on this inner stage, he cannot remain
indifferent to the plot and its dénouement. (p. 496 [CW
14, para. 706])
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung (1963) described
his method in arguably more self-revealing terms. Whereas
he initially relinquished conscious control, “plunged into dark
depths” (179), or “imagined a steep descent . . . into empty
space” (p. 181) to witness incomprehensible visions and
dialogue with imaginal beings, he (1958/1969) later articulated
his two-part procedure in greater detail. Active imagination,
he specified, entails inviting the unconscious to arise and
then “coming to terms with the unconscious” (p. 87 [CW 8,
para.183). According to Jung, unconscious activity is
encouraged through a suspension or relaxation of the
rational mind. Hence, in the first stage of active imagination,
the unconscious takes the lead while ego bears witness to
arising images. In the second stage, conversely,
consciousness leads, and the ego interacts with images and
emotions flowing from the creative unconscious (Jung,
1958/1969). Jung emphasized the second stage—coming to
terms with the unconscious, because it involved integrating
the imaginal experience, deriving meaning from it, and then
grounding the experience (i.e., transforming insight or wisdom
gained into committed action in the outer world). Forgoing
the second stage of the process, Jung (1963) warned,
“conjures up the negative effects of the unconscious” (p. 192),
namely: psychic, mental, or spiritual malaise. According to
Jung, “The images of the unconscious place a great
responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a
shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his
wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life”
(p. 193). Jung additionally maintained that coming to terms
with the unconscious also included the amplification of
symbols wherein the psyche’s images are associatively linked
to similar images or motifs appearing in myths, folklore and
fairy tales across cultures and throughout the human history
(Chodorow, 1997). Contextualizing symbolic imagery in this
way, Jung believed, can confer a greater sense of
dimensionality, richness, and depth. Most essential to the
process of active imagination though is that is the ego
surrenders having a plan and allows the process to unfold on
its own terms so that the unconscious can do what it wants to
do.
Neither Jung’s (1963) method nor his theoretical
understanding of it resulted from a singularly rational process.
Rather, they emerged from his long-drawn-out and, at times,
painful series of experiences he called his “confrontation with
the unconscious” (p. 171). Based on those experiences—which
included dreams, immersive play, spontaneous visions,
dialogue with imaginal beings, and an almost unremitting
stream of fantasies—one could argue, Jung discovered
imagination’s epistemological significance (i.e., its ability to
produce knowledge). Indeed, Jung’s prolonged engagement
with spontaneously arising unconscious contents and
autonomous psychic figures formed the basis of his Liber
Novus (The Red Book), which he created to contain, honor,
and elaborate his numinous (i.e., spiritual) experiences. His
imaginal encounters also provided him with the prima materia
(i.e., the foundational building blocks) that became the basis
of his Collected Works. According to Jung (1963), “All my
works, all my creative activity has come from those initial
fantasies. . . . Everything that I accomplished in later life was
already contained in them . . . in the form of emotions and
images” (p. 192). A case can be made Jung’s discovery—that
dialogical interaction with archetypal images can produce
knowledge—valorizes those guided imagery techniques
which employ inner dialogue with personified wisdom figures
as a means of gaining insight and deeper understanding.
Jung’s (1939/1969) direct experience with objective others
within the psyche led to his foundational understanding that,
“every psychic process is an image and an imagining” (p. 544
[CW 11, para. 889]). And it is this understanding, arguably, that
forms the keystone to his entire psychology.
Before closing this section on Jung and active imagination
and turning to the work of Henry Corbin, it is important to
recall Jung’s notion of the soul. Previously discussed in the
context of his reclamation of it using active imagination,
Jung’s later conceptualization of soul far surpassed his first
antagonistic and gendered projections (i.e., his anima
personified as a maddeningly irrational and cunning
temptress). Jung came to realize the soul not only links and
mediates images between the conscious and unconscious.
Even more significant, arguably, is the fact that it functions as
tertium quid, which combines within the psyche both internal
ideas and external objects. In Chapter 2 under the heading
“Epistemological Influences: Plato, Aristotle, and Kant,” I
discuss Jung’s rejection of both Aristotelian nominalism and
objectivism, which posited universals exist in objective things
(i.e., esse in re, and Platonic realism which maintains
universals resided in eternal forms accessible only to reason
(i.e., esse in Intellectu). Instead, Jung advanced a form of
psychic realism (i.e., esse in anima), in which psychic images
are conceived as the essential link between subjective
consciousness and the unknown or unconscious object.
According to Jung, the only reality human beings can know is
psychic reality (i.e., the image), which is itself a composite link
between subjective consciousness and the objective (i.e.,
unconscious) object (Kotch, 2000). According to Jung
(1929/1967):
It is characteristic of Western man that he has split
apart the physical and the spiritual for epistemological
purposes. But these opposites exist together in the
psyche and psychology must recognize this fact.
 “Psychic” means physical and spiritual. The ideas in
our text all deal with this “intermediate” world which
seems unclear and confused because the concept of
psychic reality is not yet current among us, although it
expresses life as it actually is. Without soul, spirit is
dead as matter, because both are artificial
abstractions; whereas man originally regarded spirit as
volatile body, and matter as not lacking in soul. (p. 51
[CW 13, para. 76f])
Roberts Avens (1980) more broadly underscores that in
Jungian and archetypal psychology the “soul is [not] based
on matter . . . nor on mind or metaphysics, but is a ‘third
[psychic] reality’ between all these ‘entities.’” (p. 189). He
contends that this third psychic reality is “the creative realm
of emotions, fantasies, moods, visions, and dreams; and its
language is that of images, metaphors, and symbols” (p. 189).

HENRY CORBIN
In his essay “Towards a Chart of the Imaginal,” which is a
prelude to the second edition of Corps Spirituel et Terre
celeste de l’Iran Mazdeen a l’Iran Sh’ite (Spiritual body and
celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran), Henry
Corbin (1977/1989) further elaborates the idea of a third
distinct area of psychic reality “between sense perceptions
and the intuitions or categories of the intellect.” This third all-
but-forgotten ontological region, he argues, is neither the
intellectual world of conceptual abstraction nor the empirical
world of sensuality. Rather, he avers, it is a “suprasensual
world,” and can only be accessed by means of the mediating
power “Active Imagination,” or “agent imagination,” which in
the modern West, he laments, has “been left to the poets” (p.
vii). Whether imagination has indeed been lost or merely
trivialized by Western rationalism, to even speak of this
subtle, intermediate realm, Corbin insisted, required a
neologism to differentiate it from the frivolous sense of
unreality suggested by the debased word imaginary. Thus, he
coined the Latinate neologism mundus imaginalis (p. ix) (i.e.,
the imaginal realm), to describe this real but forgotten
dimension, and he provided a detailed explication of it in his
three major works translated to English: Avicenna and the
Visionary Recital (1960), Creative Imagination in the Sufism of
Ibn ‘Arabi (1969), and Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth
(1977/1989). In these hermeneutic exegeses, Corbin
elucidates the medieval Muslim philosophies of Avicenna
(981-1037), Suhrawardi (1155-1191), Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), and
Mulla Sadra (1571-1640).
Corbin maintained that the mundus imaginalis is
synonymous with several Arabic and Persian phrases,
including “malakût (the subtle world of the souls), the
barzakh (the interworld), hurqalya (the world of the celestial
Earth), na koja abad (the land of nowhere), and ‘alam al-
mithal (the world of images and archetypal ideas)” (Mahmoud,
2005, p. 1). Though he coined the term mundus imaginalis, he
attributed the idea of the intermediate imaginal realm to
Suhrawardi, the founder of the Illuminationist School of
Persian mysticism, who provided an ontological foundation
for the imaginal realm in his “Book of Conversations.” In
keeping with Suhwardi’s spiritual cosmology, Corbin
(1972/1995) specifies, there exists a hierarchy of three worlds,
each of which expresses a distinct level of reality. At the
lowest level is Molk, which is the earthly plane of existence
(i.e., the physical world of the senses and material objects).
The next, median level is the Malakût, the land of souls,
images, and archetypal ideas, which is synonymous with
Corbin’s (1989/1997) mundus imaginalis. The highest level,
meanwhile, is Jabarut, which is the world of candescent
beings, “pure Intellectual forms” (p. 3), and “pure archangelic
Intelligences” (Corbin, 1972/1995, p. 8). Corresponding to
Suhwardi’s tripartite structure, Corbin (1972/1995) specifies,
are “three organs of knowledge: the senses, the imagination,
and the intellect,” and these in turn correspond to “the triad of
anthropology,” which is to say the three levels human being:
“body, soul, spirit” (p. 8). Pursuant to Suhwardi’s cosmology,
between the dualistic Cartesian worlds of abstract
understanding and the empirical sensation and indeed,
seamlessly conjoining them, is “an intermediate world . . . of
the Image, mundus imaginalis: a world as ontologically real as
the world of the senses and the world of the intellect” (p. 9).
Corbin (1989/1997) emphasizes, “the mundus imaginalis and
the Imaginal Forms [are] . . . defined by their median and
mediation situation,” in between these other two discrete and
mutually abstracted ontological and epistemological modes.
Regarding the function of the mundus imaginalis, he avers,
“On the one hand [the imaginal realm] immaterialises the
Sensible Forms, on the other it ‘imaginalises’ the Intellectual
Forms to which it gives shape and dimension” (p. 2), which
essentially means that the imagination and images link,
mediate, and synthesize ideas of the intellect and percepts of
the senses.
This idea of an intermediate, mediating, and synthesizing
dimension is further explained by the “great master” of
Sufism Ibn al-’Arabi (1165-1240), who, William Chittick (1989)
asserts, “considered imagination as the underlying stuff of
both the universe and the human soul and insisted upon
placing imaginal perception on equal footing with rational
understanding” (p. 99). A century after Suhwardi, Ibn ‘Arabi
more fully elaborated the implications of the in-between
realm of the mundus imaginalis, which is at once spiritual,
intelligible, and unseen and corporeal, sensible, and visible.
This median dimension, he proclaimed, is the place where
spiritual beings are corporealized and corporeal beings are
spiritualized. In the hierarchy of being, al-’Arabi considered
the imaginal realm to be more real than the physical realm,
but less real than spiritual realm, which possessed the
highest ontological status. He insisted that the existence of
this median and mediating realm is the only way to account
for prophetic revelations, theophanic visions, or the existence
angelic and demonic beings—all of which are nonphysical
and therefore dismissed by philosophers, while nevertheless
being sensory experiences (i.e., disclosed to the subtle
imaginal senses).
 Ibn al- ‘Arabi differentiated the ontological dimensions of
imaginal perception and rational cognition. Whereas rational
ideas are thought about in the form of abstract concepts,
images rather are sensually experienced through the
imagination, so that one tastes, smells, hears, sees, and
touches the inner world. Whereas the thinker reflects on
abstract ideas disengaged from sensual attributes, the poet
instead experiences various “loci of vision” (p. 103), which are
inwardly perceived and sensually disclosed. Poetry, properly
conceived, Chittick (1989) insists, is not thought about; rather
it is “something which is seen with the inward eye, and heard
with the inward ear and only then described” (p. 103). In al-
‘Arabi’s, hierarchy of existences, God represents the ultimate
metaphysical reality, which humans can never fully know
because God in his absolute essence is utterly invisible and
indefinable. However, in a way similar to the relationship
between Jung’s archetypes and archetypal images, Chittick
(1989) asserts, humans can apprehend manifestations of
God’s through God’s own self-revealing, which “takes place
within a form, which is the locus . . . in which spiritual vision
occurs.” These “loci of vision” (i.e., manifestations of God’s
self-disclosure) are variously designated as “‘imaginal form’ . .
. ‘locus of witnessing’. . . [or] ‘locus of manifestation’” (p. 102).
Although Ibn al-Arabi outlined imagination in terms of four
interrelated cosmological modes: (1) as the entire universe; (2)
the realm situated between bodies and spirits; (3) the mortal
soul; or (4) the soul’s native function (Chittick, 1989)—all of
which must be understood in relationship to the sacred reality
from which they issue—of particular relevance to my own
study are al-’Arabi’s last three forms (i.e., imagination as the
realm between body and spirit, the human soul itself which is
an intermediary between luminous divine spirit and dense
bodily physicality, and imagination as a faculty of the soul).
According to Chittick (1989), because imagination is
positioned between the spiritual and physical worlds,
imagination is thought to bring spiritual beings into
relationships with corporeal creatures. Thus envisioned,
imagination makes possible human apprehension of real
spiritual entities who represent a higher order of existence.
And this metaphysical interpretation is one way of
understanding the nature of imaginal persons such as Jung’s
psychopomp Philemon, or the various imaginal wisdom
figures experienced by subjects through RGI. In addition,
Chittick (1989) avers, the soul was created by God to serve as
an “interworld between spirit and body.” Situated in this
middle ground, the soul is “both one and many, luminous and
dark, subtle and dense, high and low, visible and invisible,”
which means residing between duality, “the soul [itself] . . . is
built of imagination” (p. 106). Meanwhile, as a faculty of the
soul, imagination “spiritualizes the corporeal things perceived
by the senses and stores them in memory . . . [and] it
‘corporalizes’ the spiritual things perceived in the heart by
giving them shape and form” (p. 107). Corbin (1977/1989)
described the function of the mundus imaginalis in similar
terms which is to create symbols from sensible and
intellectual forms (p. ix).
One could argue that in its “median and mediating
situation between the intellectual and sensible worlds”
(Corbin, 1977/1989, p. ix), the mundus imaginalis is like Jung’s
(1953/1969) psychoid archetype postulate, which may be
thought of as an interpenetrating, liminal space and point of
convergence between matter and mind. One could further
argue that Corbin’s account on the imaginal realm, along with
Jung’s idea there exists a third median area where, “psyche
and matter are two different aspects of one and the same
thing” (p. 215 [CW 8, para. 418]), provide guided imagery with
both an imaginal locus and an explanatory principle for its
mechanism of healing in mind/body medicine.
It is in the imaginal world that all theophanic visions and
alchemical transformations occur; where “the events of
sacred history are perceived by means of [imagination] that
open onto this world and its myriad beings of light”
(Cheetham, 2005, p. 65).
By reinforcing an imaginal ontology and providing a
phenomenology of the subtle realm, Corbin’s (1977/1989)
work arguably adds weight and scholarly dimension to
guided imagery’s interior explorations and its foundational
safe space technique, which may be understood as a vehicle
providing access to the intermediary world of archetypal
imagination the Sufis call “Malakût, the world of the Soul” (p.
ix).
In his book Avicenna and the Visionary Recital, Corbin
(1960) describes the archetypal transformation of the Persian
mystics Avicenna and Suhrawardi as revealed in their
dramaturgical récits—each verse of which represents their
ever-widening theophanic vision of God’s self-revealing in the
imaginal world. According to Mahmoud (2005), “the visionary
recital is the visionary’s account of his soul’s voyage into the
mundus imaginalis under the guidance of [his] Angel-guide”
(p. 1). Corbin (1960) writes that the personal figure of the
angel, “symbolize[ing] the soul’s most intimate depths,” is in
fact, the soul’s counterpart, with whom “it forms a totality that
is dual in structure . . . and may be called ego and Self” (p.
20). According to Corbin, “the event [of their meeting] will
take place, in a mental vision [or] a waking dream” (p. 20).
The parallel to Jung’s psychology is clear: through the
process of individuation, the ego encounters the archetypes
mediated by images and is brought into subordinate
relationship to the Self, which Jung (1954/1969a) described as
the “Imago Dei” (p. 193 [CW 8, para. 390]), or the image of
God in man. Less obvious is the similarity the angelic
encounter shares with RGI inner guide technique, wherein
one enters an altered state of consciousness characterized
by a relaxed and inward focus and interacts with a loving and
wise inner being to gain insight and understanding. One
could argue that RGI is a core spiritual technology that
facilitates direct experiences of the numinosum, which Jung
(1940/1969) described as a “dynamic agency . . . independent
of . . . will . . . that causes a peculiar alteration of
consciousness” (p. 7 [CW 11, para. 6]) Jung understood all
spiritual experience as an expression of the Self archetype.
Though the Self archetype can neither be directly known nor
fully understood, one can nevertheless discern whether or
not one is in contact with the archetypal unconscious, or
transpersonal Self by a specific quality of experience Rudolf
Otto (1917/1950) described as numinous, meaning:
A state of mind which is . . . perfectly sui generis and
irreducible to any other [mental state] . . . Like every
absolutely primary and elementary datum [that] . . .
cannot be strictly defined . . . it can only be evoked [or]
awakened in the mind; as everything that comes ‘of
the spirit’ must be awakened. (p. 7)
Otto (1917/1950) characterized the numinous as a
“mysterium tremendum et facinans” (p. 12), which means a
mystery that is both tremendous and fascinating. And
because numinous experience has been linked to
metaphysical and religious ideas from ancient times, Jung
(1973a) argued in all attempts to understand it, “use must be
made of certain parallel religious or metaphysical ideas . . . to
formulate and elucidate it” (p. 547). RGI offers a way of living
a spiritually rich and meaningful life without embracing any
particular creed or dogma, and it offers an experiential form
of spirituality that refuses to dictate what form the divine
should take. Given RGI’s numinous potentials, Students’
accounts of their guided imagery experiences with safe
space and inner guide imagery may share some features with
Persian mystical récits that documented their personal
transformations. This is not to say every RGI experience
results in a direct experience of the divine, or that the
imaginal experiences of disciplined Sufi masters are not of an
entirely different order, than students’ preliminary
explorations of the imaginal realm. It only suggests RGI holds
the potential of providing such experiences. An analogy may
prove helpful here: On a grand piano, one can play “chop-
sticks,” or through practice, discipline, and passionate
devotion develop enough skill to play Chopin’s Etudes, or
even compose a sonata of one’s own.

JAMES HILLMAN
 James Hillman (1975) was a reformer and revolutionary
whose psychological revisioning sought to return soul to
psychology by seeing through its enshrined dogmas and
doctrinal literalism. Noting that Enlightenment positivism and
secularism had banished “soul” from psychological discourse,
Hillman advanced a “poetic basis of mind,” and argued for a
“psychology of soul based on a psychology of image” (p. xvii)
grounded not in brain physiology, linguistic structures, social
organization, or behaviorism, but the very process of
imagining itself (p. xvii). Hillman’s major works include The
Myth of Analysis (1960), Suicide and the Soul (1965/2011),
Revisioning Psychology (1975), and Archetypal Psychology: A
Brief Account (1983). And in each of these books, he
sustained his career-spanning deconstructive critique of
psychological literalism, his emphasis on myth, imagination,
soul, and soul-making.
Soul—Hillman’s (1965/2011) root metaphor for depth
psychology (p. 47)—is a perspective whose primary activity is
imagining. Comprised of its own autochthonic images,
Hillman believed that soul is revealed, understood, and
created by venturing into the depths the poet John Keats
(1819) called, “the vale of soul-making” (para. 4). By adding
depth and turning events into experience, Hillman (1975)
contends that it is soul that makes all meaning possible (p.
xvi), and it is the image we experience directly that itself
confers meaning. Hillman claimed:
Images [are] the basic givens of psychic life, self-
originating, inventive, spontaneous, complete and
organized in archetypal patterns…[they] are the raw
materials and finished products of psyche, and they
are the privileged mode of access to knowledge of
soul. Nothing is more primary. (p. xvii)
According to Hillman (1975), fantasy images are the
ultimate facts of the psyche upon which consciousness
depends. Ideas, sensations, perception of the physical world,
emotions, beliefs, and desires must all first present
themselves to consciousness as images in order to be
experienced (p. 23). For Hillman, images are not symbols,
signs, allegories, or representations. Images are rather the
irreducible facts of psychic reality and are thus the sine qua
non of archetypal psychology. Disclosed to subtle inner
senses that apprehend the median dimension of psyche and
soul, Hillman, following Corbin believed images—unlike
concepts—must be intimately experienced, relationally
engaged, and felt rather than interpreted, explained or simply
thought about.
Although Hillman (1983) maintained that images constitute
the essential data of archetypal psychology (p. 14), it was
Jung (1929/1967) who first expressed, “Image is psyche” (p.
50 [CW 13, para. 75]) and explicitly underscored their
equivalency. Noting that “psyche consists essentially of
images” (Jung, 1926/1969, p. 325 [CW 8, para. 618]), and that
“every psychic process is an image and an imagining” (Jung,
1939/1969, p. 544 [CW 11, para. 889]), Jung effectively
“resuscitated images” (Avens, 1980, p. 89), which had been
deprecated and compressed into icons by the church fathers
at the Counsel of Nicaea, who treated images as re-
presentations or allegories instead of numinous presences of
the divine (p. 189). While Jung spoke of images and symbols
interchangeably, in actual practice, especially among Jung’s
orthodox heirs, symbols nevertheless came to be viewed as
“abstractions from images” (Hillman, 1977, p. 65), or
conceptual proxies. Straying from the image’s
phenomenological presentation (i.e., its particular mood, tone,
and context), the symbol instead came to suggest “a higher
order, a metaphysical archetype or noumena, outside or
beyond the presenting phenomena” (Butler, 2014, p. 39).
Instead of drawing one’s attention to the image’s concrete
particularity, the symbol served as a bridge or pointer to
something over and above the image itself. Thus, in a way
dissimilar to orthodox Jungians who moved away from the
image itself to a larger collective reality through symbolic
amplification to glean supplemental meaning from cross-
cultural and cross-temporal comparisons, Hillman’s (1975,
1977) imagistic approach more vehemently insisted on the
experience-near process of sticking with the
phenomenological presence of the image itself. Hillman’s
critical realignment demands that images not be reified or
reduced to formulaic tropes. Symbols, according to Hillman,
only “become images when they are particularized by a
specific context, mood, and scene” (p. 62). By the same
token, he averred, “symbols . . . only can appear in images
and as images” (p. 65).
The philosopher Edward Casey has specified, “The image
is not what you see but the way you see” (as cited in Hillman,
1979b, p. 176). It is a mode of perception, an “operation of
insight” (p. 176), or a subtle sensing…of relations among
events” (p. 176). Neither pictures, nor visualizations, images
are specific “mood[s], scene[s], and context[s]” (p. 175)
apprehended through a “sensing…intuition” (p. 177), which
may be understood as de-literalized, subtle (imaginal) senses.
Hillman’s (1975) soul-making procedural moves:
personifying—or imagining things, pathologizing—or falling
apart, psychologizing—or seeing through, and dehumanizing
—or soul-making all serve to free depth psychology from
literalism, absolutism, and staid orthodoxy. Hillman was
especially critical of the orthodoxy exhibited by Jung’s
classical heirs, which in his view theologized Jung’s
psychology. The lionization of Jung by his followers,
conversion of his theories to sanctioned doctrine, and
institute driven apostolic succession are all problematic,
Hillman (1971) argued, because they end up “producing
dogmas, propitiatory rites, priesthoods and worship” (p. 197).
Hillman found Jung’s monotheistic temperament and
seemingly unconscious enactment of the Christian mythos in
his psychology especially disconcerting, and he attacked one
idol of worship in particular—Jung’s monotheistic notion of
the Self, which prized “Unity, integration and individuation,”
over and against psychic “multiplicity and diversity” (p. 194).
Whereas Jung favored “the self of psychological wholeness
[which] more clearly reflects the God of monotheism and the
Senex archetype,” Hillman instead championed psychological
polytheism in which “the soul [may] serve in its time many
Gods” (p. 201). According to Hillman (1983), “the soul is
constituted of images…[and] is primarily an imagining activity”
(p. 14). It cannot, therefore, be limited to an ideology of
psychic monotheism, which views the many persons of the
psyche as pathological expressions in need of either cure or
excision. By insisting that the soul is polytheistic and above all
imaginative, Hillman recognized that all perspectives,
including medical and scientific dogmas, are products of
imagination. And he argued that myth, rather than medicine
or science, provides a superior reflection of the polyvalent
soul and its poesies.
Hillman (1983) described Jung and Corbin as the first and
second “immediate father[s] of archetypal psychology” (p. 10),
respectively. He credited Jung with providing him with the
idea that “the fundamental structure of the psyche, its formal
patterns and relational configurations, are archetypal . . .
[which] like psychic organs . . . are given with the psyche
itself” (p. 10). He credited Corbin for recognizing that
archetypes present themselves as images, whose essential
nature is first discernible by means of imagination. For
Hillman, Corbin’s ontological placement of the archetypes in
the imagination means “the entire procedure of archetypal
psychology as a method is imaginative” (p. 12). By situating
Jung’s work in the venerable tradition of imaginative
psychology and embracing him as archetypal psychology’s
first father (Hillman, 1983, p. 10), Hillman refined and
deepened Jung’s thought (Avens, 1980), and he affirmed
imaginal knowing and soul as the “primary and…ultimate
realities” (p. 187).
Hillman (1983) chose the term archetypal instead of Jung’s
term analytical to describe his own psychological re-visioning
because it de-emphasized the stultifying language of
scientific rationalism, and instead accentuated the humanities
(i.e., that discipline which addresses the question of what it
means to be human imaginatively through literature, arts,
language, and music) (p. 9). Diverging from Jung’s
conceptually abstract view of archetypes which inclines to
metaphysical and philosophical speculation, Hillman (1983)
argues archetypes are images that disclose meaning, depth,
and value phenomenologically and his psychology sticks with
the image by staying firmly rooted in the imagination (p 18).
Whereas Jung created active imagination to engage the
persons of the psyche as images, Hillman’s (1977) approach
emphasized poesies, the angelic function of words as
transmitters of images, and imaginative metaphoric play,
which he described in his essay “An Inquiry into Image,” as
“talking with the image and letting it talk” (p. 81). Working with
dream images using rhetorical iteratio and metaphorical
analogy, Hillman averred, allowed the image itself to speak,
and in speaking reveal its “hidden connections” (p. 83).
Whereas Jung’s main concern was relating to the image,
Hillman’s emphasis was protecting the polysemous potential
of the image by not interpreting it or drawing any singular
conclusion from it. A case can be made that Hillman’s (1977)
method contributes a form of imaginative amplification that
complements active imagination through “iteratio of the
prima materia” (p. 74). Taken together, Hillman and Jung’s
methods inform an approach to image work that honors the
delicate ecology between worlds. This approach applies to
images spontaneously arising from the unconscious or
recalled images from dreams, and it allows the image as
subject situated in the imaginal world to weave its poetry. The
method in question, arguably originated by Jung and
adopted by RGI, entails communicating with the image as a
sentient other. This means, as Hillman described, talking with
and listening to the image, deepening affective engagement
with it, and fully honoring its person by directly asking the
image (1) What it wants, (2) what it needs, (3) and what it has
to offer. Identifying (4) how one feels talking with the image,
(5) expressing one’s feelings to the image, (6) allowing the
image to respond, (7) engaging in open dialogue with the
image, (8) asking permission to touch the image, and finally,
(9) becoming the image itself.
What Corbin called the mundus imaginalis, Hillman
(1965/2011) alternatively called soul. Though he remarked that
soul is a purposely vague concept that defies definition (p.
46), he formulated the following description nevertheless: “By
soul, I mean the imaginative possibility in our natures, the
experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image
and fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as
primarily symbolic or metaphorical” (Hillman, 1975, p. xvi). By
arguing that “human existence even at its basic vital level is a
metaphor” (Hillman, 1972/2007, p. 30), Hillman asserted the
primacy of images and the imagination for psychology—the
logos of the soul—which for him is a psychic perspective
which precedes all other domains of knowledge. According
to Hillman (1975):
To live psychologically is to imagine things. . . . To be in
soul is to experience the fantasy in all realities and the
basic reality of fantasy . . . man is primarily an image
maker and our psychic substance consists of images;
our experience is imagination. We are indeed such
stuff as dreams are made on. (p. 23)
Although Jung (2012b) wrote that “the [psyche] is no
longer a content in us . . . we [are] contents of it” (p. 57), one
could argue that he still sought acceptance from the wider
scientific community, and because of his lingering allegiance
to scientific rationalism, his work often straddled an
uncomfortable borderland between science and spirituality
(Cheetham, 2012). In contradistinction, Hillman’s re-visioning
liberates the soul from the vestigial limitations of the natural
sciences, which reductively understand the psyche as a
function of brain encased in human skulls.
According to archetypal psychology, image is the primary
irreducible datum. “In the beginning is image; first imagination
then perception; first fantasy then reality” (Hillman, 1975, p.
23). Fantasy images are disclosed immediately, viscerally, and
directly, and from them people fashion their basic sense of
reality. Consciousness itself, Hillman argues, is mediated by
images. Everything else—ideas of the intellect, physical
sensations, and perceptual experiences of the world “must
present themselves [first] as images in order to become
experienced” (p.23).
Archetypal psychology’s imaginal ontology and its
epistemology based on images, integrating the work of Jung
and Corbin, provides the imaginal lens through which I will
analyze the imagery experiences of research participants in
the third and final volume of this series.