Welcome to this Jungian life.

Three good friends and Jungian analysts, Lisa Marciano, Deborah Stewart and Joseph Lee,

invite you to join them for an intimate and honest conversation that brings a psychological perspective to important issues of the day.

I'm Lisa Marciano and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia.

I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Philadelphia. I'm Joseph Lee and I'm a youngian analyst in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

I'm Deborah Stewart, a youngian analyst on Cape Cod.

And today we are going to try to call up a Jungian concept

active imagination. I'm aware that this is a core concept for Jung, hence very important for us to understand and perhaps

for listeners to engage in.

You know, it's interesting though, I mean I think a lot of people are very

familiar with the fact that Young was interested in dreams and that if you enter

into an analytic process that you'll probably work in with dreams, but I don't know that

there's as much sort of general knowledge about active imagination.

I think that it's the use of active imagination for some reason tumbled into the new age community and was used

spontaneously but not attributed to him in a lot of different environments. So active imagination was something that Jung felt was one of the most powerful tools that he happened upon and with the publication of the Red Book became the cornerstone or the way that he accessed

parts of his own internal wisdom which shaped his own psychology. Should we try to kind of define it?

Yes.

What act of imagination basically is,

as I understand it, is a conscious intention to engage the unconscious in waking life by focusing

on something and then letting that something have a life of its own.

Jung writes a letter at some point to a man he identifies as Mr. O who asked him about what is act of imagination and Jung says something like this

call up an image any image such as that yellow mass in your dream last week or at some time. Just attend to it, focus on it,

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