A Method Jung Discovered on Himself

Active imagination is a technique the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung developed within his own school of analytical psychology, and its origin is unusually well documented because Jung first tried the method on himself rather than devising it purely in theory. Following his personal and professional break with Sigmund Freud around 1913, Jung went through a period of intense inner turmoil, and he found that when he deliberately translated the moods, images, and bodily sensations that troubled him into deliberate acts of imagination, painting them, writing them down, or holding an inner dialogue with them, he felt calmed and reassured rather than overwhelmed. He recorded these encounters in a private journal, later published long after his death as The Red Book, in which recurring inner figures, including one he called Philemon, appeared repeatedly and, in Jung's own account, seemed at times to teach him rather than simply being imagined by him. He worked out the method more fully between 1913 and 1916, and his 1916 paper on what he called the transcendent function is generally regarded as his first formal account of the approach, later developed at length in writings collected and published after his death. What began as a private tool for Jung's own self-understanding during a genuinely difficult period of his life became, over the following decades, a standard technique taught within Jungian analytic training.