ABSTRACT
For Jung, psyche and imagination are not two different things — they are one and the same thing. When Jungians analyze the psyche, they analyze the imagination. What most interest Jungians are images. “Every psychic process,” Jung says, “is an image and an ‘imagining’” (1939, CW 11: par. 889). As a process, imagining is a continuous, spontaneous, autonomous, purposive emerging of images. Jung says that “the psyche consists essentially of images” (1926, CW 8: par. 618). The very essence of psyche is imagination. Jung says, emphatically, that “image is psyche” (1929, CW 13: par. 75). From this perspective, the theme of the First Conference of the International Association for Jungian Studies in 2006 should have been not “Psyche and Imagination” but “Psyche as Imagination.”
