Jung on Active Imagination

C. G. Jung, Joan Chodorow

Jung on Active Imagination © book cover courtesy Bookshop.org

While Memories, Dreams, Reflections and The Red Book offer examples of Carl Jung’s personal practice of active imagination, this text — Jung on Active Imagination, edited by Joan Chodorow — tends to focus more on the theory behind active imagination and its use in the psychotherapeutic setting. It will be of special interest to clinicians, as well as to more advanced practitioners of active imagination.

Drawn from Jung’s Collected Works and letters, this anthology also contains an excerpt from Memories Dream Reflections. It spends significant time on the use of painting as a form of active imagination, in contrast to the dialogic approach emphasized in books like Inner Work.

Chodorow’s introduction to the text serves as a good overview of active imagination, generally, and her bibliography may be helpful to clinicians and other researchers.