Published: Nov 10, 2025written by Maysara Kamal, BA Philosophy & Film

Imagination is one of the most fascinating aspects of human experience. We know it is the source of our creativity, but can it also be the key to our healing? Carl Jung believed imagination was the golden gateway to the unconscious. In 1913, he journeyed through the fantastical world of his mind, returning with a discovery that would change the course of his life and legacy. Jung uncovered, through self-experimentation, a method of bridging our conscious awareness with the mysterious planes of the unconscious. Today, this method, known as active imagination, is considered one of his most important contributions to psychology and humanity at large.

What Is Imagination?

The Daydream of Demeter, by Hans Zatzka, 1859-1945. Source: The Art Renewal Center

Imagination is our psyche’s inherent capacity for creating forms out of meanings and meanings out of forms. Whether we are aware of it or not, imagination is an indispensable part of our lives. We are always engaged in various imaginative activities, even in the most mundane aspects of our day. In our dreams, our imagination paints a rich world of intricate designs, scripts, and characters. When we leave our minds to wander, we imagine fantasies, scenarios, and ideas. Whenever we make plans, solve problems, or expect anything, we navigate through various imagined possibilities of a situation. Even language is a form of imagination, shaping meanings into signs.

Undoubtedly, we tend to underestimate the influence of imagination on our daily lives, mainly because we tend to limit its scope with our misconceptions. Imagination is more than just an image-making mechanism. We can imagine sounds, narratives, dialogues, bodily movements, somatic sensations, scents, and much more. The forms our imagination can assume are innumerable.

Untitled by Cy Twombly, 1954. Source: MoMA, New York

Broadly defined, imagination is a dynamic interplay of forms and meanings. Formless or abstract impulses, instincts, emotions, or patterns assume perceptible forms. The forms our imagination uses to clothe these meanings tend to be creative reformulations, distortions, or reproductions of the sensory forms we perceive in the physical world. For instance, we may imagine hope as a vast sunny sky or confusion as distorted sounds.

In this sense, imagination is the meeting place between our outer and inner worlds, where the sensory forms of our physical reality become raw material with which it paints the intangible meanings of our inner lives. In the same way an artist can use an endless variety of color combinations to create a painting, our imagination can alter and combine the forms of the physical world in infinite ways, often rendering them unrecognizable. Likewise, our imagination can attach numerous layers of meanings to a single form, transforming it into a symbol.

What is Active Imagination?

The Dream, Henri Rousseau, 1910. Source: MoMA

Active imagination is a method of making the unconscious conscious. By giving form to the formless phenomena of our psyche, imagination reveals the hidden and otherwise inaccessible aspects of our inner world. Think of what happens during dreams, where the unconscious expresses itself in rich and elaborate symbols that help us understand ourselves in ways we have not previously considered. Sigmund Freud considered dream interpretation “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (Freud, 1909). Carl Jung, however, argued that “dreams, compared with conscious material, are inferior expressions of unconscious contents” (Jung, 1916).

While there is no shortage of unconscious interferences in the waking state, most spontaneous expressions of the unconscious pass unnoticed. We are often lost in the contents continuously running through our stream of consciousness, giving them little to no attention. We take our thoughts, fantasies, and inner experiences at face value, allowing many valuable doors to a deeper understanding of ourselves to escape our awareness.

A picture of Carl Jung around 1935. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Jung distinguished between passive and active imagination. Passive imagination refers to our usual inattentive attitude toward the spontaneous imaginative activities we experience every day. Active imagination, however, is a method of intentionally inviting the unconscious to express itself through our imagination, typically on a particular theme of our choosing. The key to active imagination is completely withdrawing your conscious interference from the imaginative activity, allowing your unconscious free reign on your imagination. Once you set the intention, you want to create space for it to express itself. As Jung explained, imagination “must be allowed the freest possible play” (Jung, 1916). To completely give in to the spontaneity of imagination, surrendering your conscious control to the flow of images, sounds, and sensations it conjures, is like entering a dream wide awake.

“Beyond Reality” by Freydoon Rassouli. Source: rassouli.com

That said, Jung encouraged conscious interaction with the forms of the imagination, which must not be confused with interference. For instance, if your imagination created a personification of the feeling of anxiety, you can ask the figure questions, without, however, interfering with how it may respond. Active imagination is hence a nuanced interplay of passivity and activity from the part of our conscious mind. It starts with an active invitation, as it were, to the unconscious, then remains passive as the unconscious expresses itself through imagination, and returns active only when interacting with the spontaneous forms of imagination.

How Can Active Imagination Heal?

Joy of Union by Freydoon Rassouli. Source: rassouli.com

Active imagination can heal by bridging our conscious and unconscious minds, allowing for psychological integration and resolution. Early in his career, Jung discovered that the psyche consists of polarities that are driven by a natural process inclined toward unity or resolution. The tension of opposites is at the heart of his model of the psyche, polarized between the conscious and unconscious, the personal and collective, the feminine and masculine, the shadow and persona. Healing, according to Jung, lies in the synthesis of all the opposites between which we are torn. He discovered that there is a natural process that resolves the tension of opposites in the psyche, which he called the process of individuation.

An illustration of a mandala, symbol of the Self, by Carl Jung in The Red Book. Source: The C. G. Jung Foundation

Active imagination and individuation are really two sides of the same coin. Before coining the term ‘active imagination’, Jung described both the method of active imagination and individuation as ‘the transcendental function’ – “a movement out of the suspension between two opposites, a living birth that leads to a new level of being, a new situation” (Jung, 1916). Jungian analyst Joan Shodorow best described it as a process where an ‘either/or’ dichotomy becomes a ‘both/and’ synthesis (Shodorow, 1997). While the term ‘individuation’ describes the process in general, the term ‘active imagination’ describes a method of facilitating and magnifying that process.

By meeting the unconscious on the imaginal plane, encountering its magnificent world of personal content and collective archetypes, we take a step towards bridging the fragmented aspects of ourselves. To heal is to become whole, to realize the totality of oneself, where all estranged parts of who we are, the parts we have denied, disowned, and suppressed, find their way back home within us. To this aim, Jung believed that active imagination was the most effective method.