ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the experiencing of and through images, encountering images, and imaginal individuation. It provides an aspect of the historical context of C. G. Jung's theories that parallels both the shift in criminology towards stranger murders as well as the emergence and transformations of the detective genre of fiction. From an archetypalist perspective, any image has multiple means of access and has many attributes. Images constitute perception because to experience is to interpret. Images may express themselves in the body through sensations or through somatic, proprioceptive, or kinetic self-perceptions. In an imaginal–versus psychoanalytic–context, perhaps the terms could be used to describe the degree and direction of the unconscious pull that the personifying image asserts. Many individuals, swamped in the images of modernity and hungering for a more meaningful existence, have turned to the seminars and writings of archetypalists and analytic psychologists alike. The synthesis is the product of exploring an analytic view of countertransference, active imagination, and archetypal psychology.
