Jung's Technique of Active Imagination and Desoille's Directed Waking Dream Method

Bridging the Divide

Laner Cassar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429845574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoterapia

Jung's Technique of Active Imagination and Desoille's Directed Waking Dream Method brings together Carl Jung's active imagination and Robert Desoille's "rêve éveillé dirigé/ directed waking dream" method (RED). It studies the historical development of these approaches in Central Europe in the first half of the 20th century and explores their theoretical similarities and differences, proposing an integrated framework of clinical practice.

The book aims to study the wider European context of the 1900s which influenced the development of both Jung's and Desoille's methods. This work compares the spatial metaphors of interiority used by both Jung and Desoille to describe the traditional concept of inner psychic space in the waking dreams of Jung's active imagination and Desoille's RED. It also attempts a broader theoretical comparison between the procedural aspects of both RED and active imagination by identifying commonalities and divergences between the two approaches.

This book is a unique contribution to analytical psychology and will be of great interest for academics, researchers and post-graduate students interested in the use of imagination and mental imagery in analysis, psychotherapy and counselling. The book's historical focus will be of particular relevance to Jungian and Desoillian scholars since it is the first of its kind to trace the connections between the two schools and it gives a detailed account of Desoille's early life and his first written works.

This book was a Gradiva Award nominee for 2021.

Part I

Active imagination and the directed waking dream

Chapter 1

Active imagination

Jung’s interest in the imaginal arose from his maternal side of the family who were into spiritualism, especially his mother. As a child, Jung sensed that he was in fact two different persons, called “Personality No. 1” (the young boy growing up in Klein Huningen near Basle) and “Personality No. 2” (the eternal and timeless side of himself, his own “other”). Moreover, in his childhood, Jung experienced several visual hallucinations. He appeared to have had the ability to evoke fantasies voluntarily. However, Jung in his youth did not always give so much weight to images as he did to the mental faculties of abstract thinking deeming them “thoroughly immoral from an intellectual viewpoint” (Jung, 1925/1989, p. 27). His conversion to holding images in positive regard had been so drastic that in his late life he attributed his creative work to the fantasies which he had in 1912: “Everything that I accomplished in later life was already contained in them, although at first only in the form of emotions and images” (Jung, 1963/1995, p. 217).

After his break-up with Freud in 1912, Jung went through “a period of inner uncertainty […] a state of disorientation” (Jung, 1963/1995, p. 194). Although Jung had established himself professionally in his psychiatric career as well as in the psychoanalytic movement of his time, he felt that he had lost his soul. This was a time of intense personal analysis for Jung. Jung put himself as the object of the experiment, while the unconscious is the subject carrying out the experiment (ibid., p. 202). Jung retreated to his study and allowed his mind to wander far in both fantasies and waking dreams unrestrained by convention, reason or conscious control.

Jung (2009) described his confrontations with his unconscious in The Red Book. This phase lasted more than four years, and he found himself again and again in danger of being overwhelmed by the unconscious and its numinous contents. Jung was not content with the contemplation of his visions; he followed up his reflections with a rational integration of his observations and experiences. Jung wrote down and drew his imaginary dialogues, dream explorations, pictures and thoughts, in notebooks which later became known as The Red Book. He wrote them down in a style similar to St. Augustine’s Confessions and Nietzche’s Zarathusra.

In The Red Book, Jung slowly acknowledged the other within him. Jung’s psyche chooses Elijah and Salome amongst others as personifications of his unconscious thoughts. Some of the fantastical figures are human, while others were divine or mythical. In Liber Primus, he met these figures accompanied by a guide while he is unattended in the Liber Secundus. These figures helped Jung look at and reflect on his own ugly side, his overdeveloped rationality and his underdeveloped feeling function. Jung engaged with these images by forming a dialogue with them. In these dialogues a common feature is the asking of the names of these imaginative figures. Jung met them with respect and did not revere them as gods, because they were not. He questioned them and challenged them. Furthermore, Jung did not identify with them and kept a distance from them.

As a result of this experience with interior images from his unconscious, Jung developed a waking dream technique which he later named “active imagination.” Gradually, he started recommending this practice to his analysands (Douglas, 1993; Swan 2007).

Fantasy thinking: the precursor of active imagination

Jung did not refer to his method as active imagination from the beginning of his writings or lectures. Jung used the term “active imagination” for the first time in public during the question time following the last of his lectures in London at the Tavistock Clinic in autumn of 1935. The lecture notes were circulated privately in mimeograph in 1936 but were not published during Jung’s life (Merkur, 1993).

Jung’s writings about his method of active imagination were preceded by many references to fantasy thinking of which he contrasts with directed thinking. For Jung, the former is like Freud’s primary process thinking, while the latter can be compared to Freud’s secondary process thinking. In Symbols of Transformation, Jung describes directed thinking as deliberate, organised and purposeful whilst fantasy thinking as spontaneous, associative and directionless. Fantasy thinking leads away from reality into fantasies of the past or future. By contrast, directed thinking turns outwards to the world and, like Freud, it operates through the reality principle. However, Jung differs from Freud on the notion of fantasy thinking. Freud argued that fantasy thinking operates by the pleasure principle, i.e., that fantasy is a wish-fulfilling activity that can arise when an instinctual wish is frustrated (Freud, 1908/1972, pp. 34–43). In The Structure of the Unconscious, Jung challenges the Freudian and Adlerian meaning of fantasy as a symbolic disguise for basic drives and describes it as:

the creative matrix of everything that has made progress possible for humanity. Fantasy […] is a psychic function that has its roots in the conscious and the unconscious alike, in the individual as much as in the collective.

(Jung, 1916/1966, p. 290 [CW7, para. 490])

From phantasia to imagination

In Psychological Types, Jung deepens his reflections on fantasy thinking by differentiating two types of fantasy thinking, namely “passive fantasy” and “active fantasy” (Jung, 1921/1971, p. 428 [CW6, para. 712]). Passive fantasy is a subjective figment of the mind whilst active fantasy is an image-making, form-creative activity. In his distinction of terms, he seemed to have been following the medieval alchemists who emphasised the difference between daydreams and creative imagination or phantasia and imaginatio. In fact, in The Tavistock Lectures he equated “active fantasy” with imagination proper “per veram imaginationem et non phantastica” and explained that fantasy is “mere nonsense” while imagination is “active purposeful creation” (Jung, 1935/1976, p. 171 [CW18, para. 396]). He further maintained that whereas “active fantasy” is “evoked by an attitude directed to the perception of unconscious contents, as a result of which the libido immediately invests all of the elements emerging from the unconscious,” in the case of “passive fantasy,” this does not occur (Jung, 1921/1971, p. 428 [CW6, para. 712]).

Fantasy: from the realms of infancy and mental illness to the dead

Jung did not relegate unconscious fantasies to an infantile imaginative activity although they are “apparently infantile reminiscences […] they are not themselves infantile” (Jung, 1912/1967, pp. 28–29 [CW5, para. 38]). Yet, fantasies allow man to be playful and in Psychological Types, he stated that the “dynamic principle of fantasy is play, a characteristic of the child” (Jung, 1921/1971, [CW6, para. 93]). In The Aims of Psychotherapy, pre-empting Winnicott, Jung added that the creative ability to imagine “frees man from his bondage to the ‘nothing but’ and raises him the status of one who plays. As Schiller said, man is completely human only when he is at play” (Jung, 1931/1966, p. 46 [CW16, para. 98]).

Moreover, Jung in Answer to Job did not conceptualise fantasies as a sign of psychopathology. He believed that “Visions, like dreams, are unusual but quite natural occurrences which can be designated as ‘pathological’ only when their morbid nature has been proved” (Jung, 1952/1969, p. 420 [CW11, para. 665]).¹

For Jung fantasies can also act like a portal to the dead who are still speaking to us (Hillman and Shamdasani, 2013). During Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious he had numerous encounters with different figures – amongst them were the persistent appearance of those he called the “dead.” In Part III of The Red Book – Scrutinies, Jung hears the dead who had “returned from Jerusalem.” He gives their concerns meaning when he takes up their incomplete projects as subjects of his own psychology (Stephens, 2020).

A ballad of image dependency – Jung’s statements about active imagination

Jung references to his technique of engaging actively with waking fantasies later known as active imagination, centred around a number of points which he repeated and expanded upon in several writings. The key points deal with the “why,” “when,” “what,” “where” and “how” of this technique. I grouped these theoretical points into eight different themes which Jung repeatedly developed throughout his writings, both before he called the technique active imagination, and when he referred to his method by this name. I will present and discuss a selection of Jung’s writings in chronological order on these areas. The eight points are the following:

• 1 Definitions and aims.
• 2 Similarities and differences to other methods.
• 3 Stilling and emptying the mind.
• 4 Giving form to the images.
• 5 The push and pull to stay with images.
• 6 From philosophical and artistic temptations to ethical obligations.
• 7 Positive effects of active imagination.
• 8 Negative effects of active imagination.

Definitions and aims

Throughout his works, Jung gave various definitions of active imagination, which described a spontaneous or induced meditative process of dreaming with eyes open aimed to foster a dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious mind for the integration of the personality.

In the prefatory note to the essay The Transcendent Function, he argued that the method of active imagination:

[…] is the most 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 spontaneously into the conscious mind.

(Jung, 1916/1960, p. 68 [CW8])

The union of conscious and unconscious contents will give rise to a psychological function “the transcendent function.” In Yoga and the West, Jung stated that the method of active imagination: “[…] consists in a special training for switching off consciousness, at least to a relative extent, thus giving the unconscious contents a chance to develop” (Jung, 1936/1969, pp. 536–537 [CW11, para. 875]). The phrase “consists of a special training” is interesting since Jung is saying that some form of direction is required (like in RED) even though he does not say what this training includes.

In lecture I of the E.T.H. lectures, given on November 3, 1939, Jung explained how “...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword by Christian Gaillard
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Active imagination and the directed waking dream
• Part II Jung and Desoille – a historical investigation
• Part III Comparing RED and active imagination
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Appendix: biographical details of Robert Desoille
• Index