ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the imagination and its role within the arts and the practice of analytical psychology. The Sesame training, which was founded on the principles of depth psychology, refers to the art forms of drama and movement as a key that can unlock otherwise closed doors. The image immediately evokes a mythical context, coming from the password “Open Sesame” in the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. A respect for the symbolic language of the psyche is what underpins both the arts and a Jungian analysis. Both depth psychology and the arts seek to redeem this lack of symbolic attitude by evoking the language of metaphor and providing that important moment to pause and to reflect. The imagination is quite a foreign entity, and people often complain that the arts education they received at school alienated them from their imaginative faculties.
