ABSTRACT
The topic of this third lecture at the 2011 Conference of the Moscow Association for Analytical Psychology is active imagination and the mythological unconscious. What does Jung say about active imagination? He says that, as a method, it is the “most important auxiliary” for evoking and engaging images that are the most immediately accessible and the most probable to “irrupt spontaneously” from the unconscious. Jung also, however, cautions that active imagination may, “in certain circumstances,” be a dangerous method. He says that the images that emerge from the unconscious may induce “a condition which — temporarily, at least — cannot easily be distinguished from schizophrenia, and may even lead to a genuine ‘psychotic interval’” ([1916]/1957, CW 8: 68).
