JUNGIAN PSYCHOLOGY

ACTIVE IMAGINATION &

PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION

VOLUME 3-2
C.G. JUNG INNER
GUIDES & THE
TRANSFORMATIONAL
IMAGE
BY BRIAN DAMIEN DIETRICH
BRIAN DAMIEN DIETRICH
© Brian Damien Dietrich, 2021

Brian Damien Dietrich

1531 Purdue Avenue, #102 Los Angeles, CA 90025
[email protected]

2
Prologue 6
1 Introduction 7
2 Context and Characterization: Jung’s Confrontation
with the Unconscious 8
Philemon: King-Fisher, Wise Old Man, and Guru 12
Philemon: Antecedents, Associations, Attributions 14
Dialogues with Inner Gurus: Elijah/Philemon
[ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ] 18
Liber Primus 18
Liber Secundus 21
Scrutinies 24
The Bricolage Called Philemon 29
3 Intersections: Comparing Participants’ Experiences
with 31
Jung’s Descriptions of Inner Advisor Figures 31
Tonal Contrasts 31
4 unexpected Discoveries/surprises 45
Monotheistic Rigidity 45
Imaginal Monotheism vs. Polytheistic Multi-Modality
48
5 Liberation of the image and reclaimed Ancestry 57
The Liberation of the Image 57
Reclaimed Ancestry 65

4
5
PROLOGUE
This volume presents Interpretive Phenomenological
Analysis (IPA) research comparing research participants' Inner
Guide experiences with Jung's encounters with Philemon, his
inner guide. To compare participant experiences with Jung's
imaginal engagements, I reviewed Jung's experiments in
confrontation with the unconscious in Memories Dreams,
Reflections, and The Red Book (i.e., Liber Novus). Research
questions asked (1) "What themes and patterns emerge in
student descriptions of their inner guide imagery?" and (2)
"how do participant accounts relate to Jung's imaginal
engagement with personified archetypes?" The bricolage of
Philemon derived from these sources is a superannuated
white beard, a prophet, and sage who links and mediates the
relationship between the living (i.e., Jung's ego image) and
the dead (i.e., non-ego images). Philemon is communicative,
knowledgeable, and wise. He gave voice to Jung's
mythopoetic cosmology, which Jung conceptually elaborated
in his Collected Works. Whereas research participants
pursued imaginal beings to realize transpersonal dimensions
of consciousness, Imaginal beings and overwhelming
imagery pursued Jung relentlessly, as if the objective psyche
sought to enlist him as a medium to give voice to its radical
cultural imperative to restore a symbolic sensibility lost in the
shift from a religious to a scientific world view, and reinstate
humanity's place in the natural order. These seeker/sought
dynamics result in the distinction between participants'
experiences of Consonance and Calm vs. Jung's
Confrontation and Conflict with the unconscious. Shared
superordinate themes include (1) Positive Qualities of
Advisors, (2) Personal Transformation, (3) Positive Effects of
Imagery, (4) Parallel Methods, and (5) Transpersonal/Spiritual/
Numinous imagery.

6
1
INTRODUCTION
Research presented in this volume is relevant to the
field of depth psychology because it holds the
potential of establishing a correspondence between
Jungian and archetypal theory and the structured techniques
of relational forms of guided imagery (RGI). A wealth of
published research about guided imagery and its various
health benefits in mind-body medicine has been compiled
(Rossman, 2014; Sanzero-Eller, 1999). And there exists
sufficient research investigating Jung, Hillman, and Corbin’s
contributions to depth psychology, philosophy, and religious
studies. However, there is little published research
elaborating on the relationship between RGI with either
Jungian active imagination or Corbin’s idea of the imaginal
realm and its numinous possibilities. Mary Watkins’s
(1976/1984) contribution Waking Dreams is arguably one
exception to this lacuna. Her work, however, is more an
eclectic survey than an in-depth analysis of the intersection
between Jung’s technique of active imagination and
contemporary guided imagery practices. Moreover, besides
offering only cursory information about Corbin and Hillman,
Watkins does not contextualize Jung’s views concerning
images and imagination more broadly in the history of
Western philosophy. This research, therefore, offers an
original contribution to the field of depth psychology. More
clearly articulating the relationship between guided imagery
and Jung’s depth psychology holds the possibility of
providing active imagination with a well-established
methodology that sets the practice in a relational context and
offers it a more precise means of accessing the imaginal
realm and tapping its transformative potentials.

7
2
CONTEXT AND
CHARACTERIZATION: JUNG’S
CONFRONTATION WITH THE
UNCONSCIOUS
Before comparing inner advisor themes and subthemes
from participants’ narratives to Jung’s account of his work
with waking images and his interactions with personified
imaginal beings, it is helpful to revisit to the context in which
he began his deliberate and sustained rencontre with the
unconscious between 1913 and 1916. Jung documented his
unedited fantasies from this period in a series of seven
journals he called the Black Books. Later elaborated by Jung
into Liber Primus and Liber Secundus, the fantasy material he
recorded in them between November 1913 and April 1914,
arose prior to the onset of World War I. His subsequent
fantasies, from April 1914 to June 1916, occurred after the
outbreak of war and formed the basis of Scrutinies, which
Shamdasani (2009) contends may be regarded as “Liber
Tertius” (p. 207), to complete the final tripartite composition of
Liber Novus in toto.
Shamdasani (2009) traces Jung’s passionate engagement
with the unconscious to 1912, when Jung had two
confounding dreams that laid bare to him the inadequacy of
Freud’s conception of dreams as the disguised wish
fulfillments of repressed sexuality. Jung’s (1963) first beguiling
dream had to do with two apparitions of the undead: an old
Austrian Customs Guard and a knight from the 12th century.
He associated these figures to himself and Freud
respectively. In his second dream from December 1912, Jung
and his children encountered a white bird that transformed
8
into a small girl and cryptically spoke of “the twelve dead” (p.
172) as she returned to her avian form and took flight. This
dream suggested to Jung that there exists an objective level
of the psyche. However, he had no method by which to get at
the root meaning of his dreams at that time, and resigned
himself to going about his life and carefully attending to both
his dreams and fantasies (p. 172). One fantasy theme, Jung
asserts, was especially persistent: “there was something
dead present, but it was still alive” (p. 172). His fantasies—
thematized around animate cadavers—found their resolution
in a dream of entombed yet living corpses, which receded in
time from the 1830s to the 12th century. This dream, Jung
conjectured, pointed beyond Freud’s conception of the
unconscious as a repository of personal contents (i.e.,
forgotten memories, repressed emotions, and conflictual
desires) and hinted instead at the possibility that there exists
a deeper and more mysterious stratum of the psyche, the
nature of which is entirely impersonal. Jung’s psychological
speculations, though, did not alleviate his feelings of dreadful
disorientation and “constant inner pressure” (p. 173).
It is noteworthy that Freud is implicated in each of Jung’s
dreams, whether through symbolic association or, in
reference to the unconscious, as the chief exemplar of
theoretical inadequacy against which Jung’s burgeoning
insights were coming more clearly into focus. Freud was an
important paternal figure in Jung’s life. Thus, as it relates to
the commencement of Jung’s inner explorations, it is
significant that they coincide with the dramatic end of his
relationship with Freud in January 1913. This decisive
termination, which followed a period of escalating hostility
and mutual recrimination between them, left Jung (1963) in a
state of bewilderment, “inner uncertainty,” and psychic
“disorientation” (p. 170).
Between October and November that year, while traveling
by train, Jung (1963) experienced two apocalyptic visions that
began as waking fantasies. Lasting approximately an hour,
the first vision to seize him was of a “monstrous flood” (p. 175)
9
that engulfed Europe, reduced all traces of human civilization
to churning debris, and extinguished the flickering embers of
countless souls. Near the end of this intrusive fantasy, Jung
observed the water turn into a nauseating sea of viscous red
blood. The second vision, composed of the same disturbing
imagery, occurred two weeks later, only with an even greater
emphasis on overflowing swells of sanguine fluid. In this
second bloody vision, however, Jung heard an inner voice
say, “Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You
cannot doubt it” (p. 175). Because, as noted, he still lacked a
sufficient framework to plumb the depths of his inner
experiences, Jung initially believed that these catastrophic
scenes were of a personal nature and that they augured his
impending psychic disintegration and ruin.
During this period of psychic upheaval, Jung (1963)
withdrew his focus from outer world concerns (i.e., academic,
administrative and political commitments) and instead
channeled his libido into an introspective process of self-
examination, which he characterized as his “experiment in
confrontation with the unconscious” (p. 193.) It was only after
a stage of “endless resistance,” to fantasy thinking, feeling
painfully humiliated, and not knowing what else to do, that
Jung finally “submitted . . . to the impulses of the
unconscious” (pp. 173–174), and began documenting the raw
features of his fantasy experiences.
Although imaginal introspection as advanced by Galton
and Titchener was an established method of psychological
praxis and had been described in various ways by historical
figures and contemporaneous thinkers as diverse as St.
Ignatius of Loyola, Swedenborg, Herbert Silberer, and Ludwig
Staudenmaier, of whom Jung was aware (Shamdasani, 2009),
his own practice of inner exploration was straightforward if
not rudimentary. In his 1925 seminar, Jung (1925/1989)
described his “boring method” of engaging fantasy material
by imagining that he was “digging a hole and accepting [his]
fantasy as perfectly real” (p. 47). In early December 1913, Jung
realized that by using focused imagination he could elicit
10
visions, and dialogically interact with personified imaginal
beings. According to Shamdasani (2009), from December
1913 forward, Jung continued his procedure of “deliberately
evoking a fantasy in a waking state and then entering into it
as into a drama” (p. 200). The structure of Jung’s imaginal
process, which he would later call active imagination, entailed
(1) lowering of his threshold of consciousness, (2) engaging
emergent mythopoetic fantasy material and imaginal
personages from the unconscious, (3) and documenting his
fantasies, reflections, and varied states of mind as dated
journal entries in the Black Books.
It was over the course of Jung’s psychologically
oppressive though spiritually fecund interval that Jung first
encountered Philemon, who I contend was Jung’s primary
inner advisor and with whom, over time, he established a
spiritually rich and abiding relationship. Before delving into
the wise personification of Philemon, though, I will first trace
Jung’s “most difficult experiment” to its denouement in 1914.
That year, Jung had a “thrice repeated dream” (p. 176) of
freezing cold sweeping over the land and exterminating all
vegetal life. In the last of these parasomnias, however, there
remained one living tree, the leaves of which “transformed . . .
into sweet grapes full of healing juices” (p. 176). Then, like a
priest bestowing communion to his parishioners, Jung offered
the salubrious grapes to eager throngs waiting nearby. That
same year, on August 1, World War One erupted, which had
the seemingly paradoxical of effect of consoling Jung
(1952/1977), who realized with the violent onset of war that his
oppressive dreams and fantasies were not about him
personally, nor were they symptoms of a menacing psychosis.
Instead, he conjectured, these seemingly precognitive visions
and dreams emerged into his consciousness from “the
subsoil of the collective unconscious” (p. 234) and revealed
not what would befall him personally, but the European
continent as a whole (Shamdasani, 2009, p. 202). Henceforth,
Jung would interpret his dreams and fantasies not at the
subjective level, which is to say strictly in reference to himself,
11
but at the collective level to illuminate general psychological
principles and also symbolically reveal developments that
would occur in the world (Shamdasani, 2011, pp. 202–203).

PHILEMON: KING-FISHER, WISE OLD

MAN, AND GURU
According to Shamdasani (2009), who edited and oversaw
the publication of The Red Book, it was during this period that
Philemon first appeared to Jung in a dream. Jung would of
course stick with this image in his ensuing imaginal
explorations and, over time, Philemon became his companion
and guide. In his edited autobiography, Memories, Dreams,
Reflections, Jung (1963) recalls:
There was a blue sky, like the sea, covered not by
clouds but by flat brown clods of Earth. It looked as if
the clods were breaking apart and the Blue water of
the sea were becoming visible between them. But the
water was the blue sky. Suddenly there appeared from
the right a winged being sailing across the sky. I saw
that it was an old man with the horns of a bull. He held
a bunch of four keys, one of which he clutched as if it
were about to open a lock. He had the wings of the
Kingfisher with its characteristic colors — Since I did
not understand the dream imagery I painted it in order
to impress it upon my memory. (pp. 182–183)
A synchronistic discovery confirmed the importance of this
dream imagery for Jung, who happened upon the extra-local
body of a dead kingfisher bird in his garden. According to
Shamdasani (2009), although the date of Jung’s Kingfisher
dream is uncertain, Philemon appeared for the first time in the
Black Books on January 27, 1914. Omitted from Jung’s
description of Philemon there, however, are the phenotypical
12
aspects of the Kingfisher noted in his initial dream
(Shamdasani, 2009).
Philemon, according to Jung (1963), “represented a force
which was not himself” personified as an autonomous being
“who said things which [Jung] had not consciously thought.”
Through their dialogical interactions, the imaginal old man
impressed upon Jung, his objective nature and his autonomy
within Jung’s psyche. This is because, Jung asserts, in their
exchanges “it was clearly . . . he who spoke, not I.” In one of
their conversations, Jung avers, Philemon admonished him
for, what he viewed to be Jung’s egoistic and unconscious
assumption that he (Jung) was the creator of his thoughts. In
contradistinction, Philemon charged that thoughts are in fact,
“like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the
air,” which is to say that, like all psychic productions, including
ideas, images, and fantasies, thoughts are independent of the
ego’s volitional machinations. Instead, Philemon made the
case that if Jung “should see people in a room,” that he
would not presume he had “made those people, or [feel]
responsible for them.” Thus, Jung asserts, it was Philemon
“who taught me about psychic objectivity [and] the reality of
the psyche,” Moreover, Jung insists, it was through
Philemon’s illuminating example, guidance, and rhetorical
persuasiveness that “the distinction was clarified,” between
himself “and the object of [his] thought.” Because Philemon
confronted him “in an objective manner,” Jung states, he
came to realize “there is something in me which can say
things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may
even be directed against me” (p. 183). The “me” to which
Jung here refers is his identification with the “I” of ego-
conscious. Or, said differently, his ego image. Importantly,
Jung concedes that beyond ego, Philemon
“psychologically . . . represented superior insight.”
Additionally, Jung admits that Philemon “was a mysterious
figure” who nevertheless “seemed quite real, as if he were a
living personality.” In their relationship, Jung avers, Philemon
“was what the Indians call a guru,” which implies that before
13
this wise, guiding, and illuminating imaginal figure, Jung was
the chela or shishya, which means one who is eager to learn
and is typically understood as a spiritual disciple. In his book
Abhinavagupta: The Kula Ritual: As Elaborated in Chapter 29
of the Tantraloka, John Dupuche (2003) specifies that
bodiless gurus in the Hindu tradition, such as Jung’s, are
known as “Khecaī” or sky-travelers, which seems to coincide
meaningfully with Jung’s description of Philemon as “a
winged being sailing across the sky” (p. 182).

PHILEMON: ANTECEDENTS,
ASSOCIATIONS, ATTRIBUTIONS
In Symbols of Transformation Jung (1952/1967) refers to
the fable of Philemon and Baucus in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
and also to the biblical Philemon presented in Paul’s Prayer of
Thanksgiving for Philemon (p. 60 [CW 5, para. 95f]).
In Book VIII of the Metamorphoses titled Impious Acts and
Exemplary Lives, Ovid (trans. 2004) portrays Philemon and
Baucis as an elderly pair of devoted peasants, whose humility
and hospitality wins the favor of the Gods (i.e., Jupiter/Zeus
and Mercury/Hermes). To reward their sacrifice and devotion,
the Deities spare Baucis and Philemon from the wrathful flood
sent by them to destroy the “thousand homes they came to,
seeking rest,” but found only “doors . . . bolted fast against
them” (880). In addition to sparing their lives, the gods
transform the elderly couple’s humble home into a
spectacular temple of gold, bronze, and marble, and they
elevate Philemon and Baucis to temple priests, who at the
end of their mortal lives, are transformed into trees and
granted immortality (970 -1010).
Jung’s (1952/1967, p. 60 [CW 5, para. 95f]) biblical
reference is to the epistle Philemon [ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ] (1:4-7) in

14
Paul’s Prayer of Thanksgiving for Philemon. In his prayer, Paul
rhapsodizes:
I thank my God always when I remember you
[Philemon] in my prayers, because I hear of your love
and of the faith that you have toward the Lord Jesus
and for all the saints, and I pray that the sharing of your
faith may become effective for the full knowledge of
every good thing that is in us for the sake of Christ. For
I have derived much joy and comfort from your love,
my brother, because the hearts of the saints have
been refreshed through you [emphasis added].
(“Philemon 4–7,” n.d.)
The composite figure drawn from these two sources
suggests that Philemon is generous, hospitable, loving, and
faithful. Additionally, once he is recast by the gods as a
temple priest, one could argue, Philemon assumes a
mediating and intercessory position between the gods and
man. Further, in Paul’s letter, it would appear that through
Philemon we may come to a comprehensive knowledge of all
that is within us. It is possible that these precursive
associations informed the nonego image of Philemon, Jung’s
inner guide and psychopomp.
Next, in his essay “After Catastrophe,” in Civilization in
Transition, Jung refers to a third antecedent source: Goethe’s
(1808/1994) rendition of Philemon and Baucis and the outrage
of their murder by the devil (Mephistopheles) in his
masterwork Faust. According to Jung (1945/1970), “Faust, in
his hunger ‘for the infinite’ born of contradiction and
dichotomy . . . sets up evil outside himself in the form of
Mephistopheles” (p. 206 [CW 10, para. 423]), so that through
the dual spells of his denial and projection Faust can
preserve the veneer of his false piety pasted over the rot of
his slavering self-aggrandizement and lethal envy of their
humble and initially unobtainable cottage. Jung (1937/1968)
again refers to Goethe’s portrayal of the murder of Baucis and
Philemon in the epilogue to his essay, “Religious Ideas in
Alchemy” (p. 480 [CW 12, para. 561]). In the same passage, he
15
also returns to Ovid’s characterization of the virtuous couple
whom the gods reward with hierophany and spiritual
transformation. Despite being victimized by Faust’s malignant
narcissism, Philemon is here again depicted as a humble and
virtuous person, who—for his humility—is capable of both
spiritual transformation and theophanic vision.
Regarding literary references, the style and structure of
Liber Novus was strongly influenced by Dante’s Divine
Comedy (trans. 2006) and Nietzsche’s (1891/1999) Thus
Spake Zarathustra (Casement, 2010; Shamdasani, 2009).
Similar to Nietzsche, Jung structured his work in a series of
books partitioned into brief chapters. But while Nietzsche
plainly refers to the death of god—which he had previously
announced through the voice of a “madman” in his 1882 book
The Gay Science—Jung instead proclaims the resurrection of
God in the individual soul (Shamdasani, 2009). In regard to
Dante’s Inferno, while Jung and Dante both descend into hell,
Dante monotheistically drew upon an and reaffirmed an
exclusively Christian cosmology which debatably
circumscribed his visions and the array of imaginal figures in
his fantasies. Jung meanwhile was inspired by a range of
diverse sources (i.e., mythology, religion, philosophy alchemy)
and arguably elaborated his fantasies in more polytheistic
terms, which, one could argue, more fittingly reflects the
psyche’s objective multiplicity. From this wellspring,
Shamdasani (2009) avers, Jung developed his personal
cosmology. Beyond being personally meaningful and
psychologically integrating for Jung, I contend that his
Weltanschauung has far-reaching transpersonal significance
and meaningful implications for healing the multiple and
enduring scissions of modernity (i.e., the disconnection from
self, others, and nature) to psychically balance the delicate
ecology between worlds.
In his introduction to Liber Novus, and in his 2010
interview with Ann Casement (2010), Shamdasani (2009)
emphasizes that Jung, in his Scrutinies, added commentaries
by Philemon for each of the seven sermons. He also stresses
16
that in the Fall of 1917, Jung realized his previous
compositions (i.e., Liber Primus and Liber Secundus) were
transmitted to him by Philemon. This prophetic old wise old
man residing autonomously within Jung, Shamdasani
contends, can thus be seen as the implicit narrator/author of
the first and second books of Liber Novus (p. 207). Jung’s
(1963b) relationship to Philemon the wise old “pagan . . . with
an Egypto-Hellenic” quality,” and a “Gnostic coloration” (pp.
207–208) cannot be overstated. Conceived as the font of
symbolic insight mythopoetically given by the unconscious
and dialogically coupled with Jung’s commentary,
conceptualization, and semantic elaboration of the material,
Jung’s opus the Collected Works can be seen not only to
express the essence of the psyche’s structure and dynamics
but to exist as an emergent artifact born of the transcendent
function constellated by Jung’s sustained engagement with
the opposites (the conscious and the unconscious). Simply
put, Jung’s Liber Novus, and by extension, his Collected
Works, can arguably be seen as the creative collaboration,
differentiation, and balance between the ego and the
archetypes that constitute its unconscious ground.
Whereas the Black Books were Jung’s attempts to capture
the raw symbolic material erupting from his unconscious and
were intended for his personal use, his draft of Liber Novus
constitutes the interpretive elaboration of his fantasies, which
was predicated on his fidelity to the images themselves.
Providing the first sustained example of his constructivist
method (Shamdasani, 2009), Jung’s fantasy elaborations and
interpretive commentaries instantiate his passionate efforts to
make sense of his experiences, which is of central concern to
interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA). In accord with
IPA’s double hermeneutic—in which the researcher attempts
to make sense of a person’s sense-making—it is to this
second level that I will primarily attend as it regards Jung’s
imaginal experiences in Liber Novus. For the IPA researcher
to “stick with the image” in this context means that the

17
researcher must stick with the image of Jung sticking to the
image in his process of meaning-making.

DIALOGUES WITH INNER GURUS:

ELIJAH/PHILEMON [ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ]
Recall that in Memories, Dreams, Reflections Jung (1963)
asserts that the figure Elijah is an antecedent prefiguration of
Philemon (p. 182) who, in Liber Novus, Jung meets in Chapter
9, titled Mysterium Encounter. Elaborated in his subsequent
fantasies, Jung depicts Philemon here as a wise though
seemingly ambivalent figure who is enigmatic, cagey, and at
times utterly confounding. Notwithstanding his equivocal
characterization, Jung nevertheless credits Philemon as a
significant contributor to the first two sections: Liber Primus
and Liber Secundus and also to Scrutinies, where Philemon,
as Jung’s collaborative alter-ego, provides elucidating
commentaries on each of the Seven Sermons to the Dead. In
the three sections comprising Liber Novus, Philemon
(including his prototypical inflection as Elijah) may be
characterized (1) as a Prophet and Teacher in Liber Primus
(The Way that is to Come), (2) as a Magician in Liber
Secundus (The Erring), and (3) as a Psychopomp, or
underworld guide, in Scrutinies.

LIBER PRIMUS
In his Mysterium Encounter (Chapter 9), Jung (2009)
happens upon an old man who looks like “one of the old
prophets,” with a black asp coiled at his feet. He is
accompanied by a young blind woman. The old prophet
claims he is Elijah (i.e., the Old Testament prophet who was
the bearer of Yahweh’s self-affirming message to Ahab) and
that the blind maiden, Salome, is his daughter (i.e., the step-
18
daughter of King Herod, who for the favor of her dance,
fulfilled her wish for the severed head of John the Baptist).
Elijah invites Jung (i.e., the subjective “I” of the dialogue) into
his home, which is “at the foot of the sheer wall of rock.” Elijah
leads Jung to “a high hall with glittering walls [with] a bright
stone the color of water lilies in the background.” In the
stone’s reflection, Jung sees “the images of Eve, the tree, and
the serpent,” and he catches a glimpse of “Odysseus and his
journey on the high seas” (p. 245). Next, a door opens leading
right to a bright, sunlit garden. Elijah explains to Jung that
Salome is his daughter, which horrifies him. In turn, Elijah
charges that Jung is judgmental and possibly a coward (p.
246). Jung rationally protests the irrationality of Salome’s
claim that he will love her. Scorned, Salome enticingly
declares that her father Elijah “knows the deepest
mysteries . . . and . . . see(s) the things of the future” (p. 246).
Jung observes that the prophet Elijah and the murderous
Salome are “the symbol of the most extreme contradiction,”
to which Elijah, heralding the reality of the psyche replies,
“We are real, and not symbols” (p. 246).
Jung’s encounter with this unlikely pair instantiates several
persistent themes, which like Wagnerian leitmotifs recur
throughout Liber Novus: (1) the coincidence of opposites (i.e.,
the coincidentia oppositorum), here between the sacred
(Elijah) and profane (Salome) and their respective archetypal
images: the wise old man and the anima (Drob, 2012); (2)
identifying and differentiating the archetypes, for instance, as
it relates to this vision, the shadow, and the anima; and (3) the
need to compensate rational thought (logos) with nonrational
or—more accurately—transrational, feeling (eros) to balance
the psyche.
Indeed, in Jung’s commentary on this vision, he explicitly
links the “old sage and the young maiden,” to the “spiritual
principle,” and the “unspiritual principle of feeling” (p. 365)
personified by Elijah and Salome, respectively. By Jung’s
account, within his psyche—which is arguably emblematic of
the modern collective psyche represented by the Spirit of the
19
Times more broadly—Elijah/logos is in a superior position to
the subordinate status of Salome/eros, whose blindness,
Jung says, exposes her deficiency (p. 365). These features
suggest to Jung that “logos has blinded and subjugated eros”
(p. 366), which is why Salome/eros turns to Jung’s ego image
for assistance. Monotheistic governance by logos and the
repression of its other (eros), leads to psychic stagnation, and
decline. Accordingly, Jung asserts, to free oneself from the
painful stasis of one-sidedness, one must “accept the
repressed part of his soul, he must love his inferiority [he
must love Salome] . . . so that what is denigrated can resume
development” (p. 366). In his Instruction (Chapter 10), Salome/
eros first achieves equipoise through Jung’s imaginal
synthesis of Eve (i.e., carnal motherhood and carnal
temptation) and Mary (i.e., spiritual motherhood and carnal
virginity). Ensuing from this first conjunction, eros (pleasure
and feeling) and logos (predetermination and thinking)
become reunited, Jung says, “as if they had overcome the
conflict between spirit and flesh,” their solution is a leftward
movement toward the unconscious and “greater darkness”
(367), which is nevertheless partly illuminated by the
reconciliation of these oppositive principles. At the
denouement of this protracted vision in Resolution (Chapter
11), Jung’s “I” envisions the “divine child, with the white
serpent in his right hand and the black serpent in his left,” and
sees Christ crucified on the cross at Golgotha with a coiled
snake wound about its base. Through his mimetic
identification with Christ, Jung’s ego image, with outstretched
arms and the face of a lion, finds the serpent encircling and
immobilizing him. Salome explains that “Mary was the mother
of Christ,” to which Jung’s ego image replies, “I see that a
terrible and incomprehensible power forces me to imitate the
Lord in his final torment. But how can I presume to call Mary
my mother?” Salome declares, “You are Christ” (p. 252). She
then wraps her hair around his feet and by so doing
miraculously regains her sight. Elijah meanwhile is
transformed into “a huge flame of white light” and tears fall
20
from the eyes of Jung’s ego image as he flees into the night
hovering over the ground as if he were “melting into air” (p.
198). By accepting and loving anima/eros/Salome, Jung
disidentifies from the fussy limitations of ego consciousness
in thrall to monotheistic logos and instead identifies with
Christ, whom he later links to the Self-archetype (i.e., the
center and circumference of the psyche and the image of
God in man). By so doing, Jung gives birth to a new image of
God within, which can be ceaselessly reborn in every
individuated soul. Jung’s “I" at the close of this mystery play is
not unlike the serpent he describes who writhes from “right to
left and from left to right” (p. 247). Through what may be
characterized as his holy longing, Jung’s ego image becomes
a linking bridge between the conscious and unconscious,
which results in the image of his profound psychospiritual
transformation.
To summarize: in Liber Primus, the prototypical expression
of Philemon (i.e., Elijah) is an enigmatic tutelary old man, and
prophet, whose pedagogical style may be characterized as
paradoxical, terse, and consistently challenging. Depicted as
communicative, knowledgeable, and wise, Elijah confronts
Jung’s “I” with “dreadful riddles” (p. 246), which debatably
serves to dim the blinding light of rationality and thus allow
the illuminating darkness and shadowy depths of
unconscious wisdom to emerge.

LIBER SECUNDUS
The perils of one-sided rationality are underscored in
different ways in the second section of Liber Novus through
the characters Ammonius and Izdubar. In the first case,
Ammonius cautions that de-personalized, one-sided logos,
reductively cast as word or concept, is a killing stroke. He
explains to Jung’s ego image that Philo Judeaus fatally
distorted the logos (ΛΟΓΟΣ), first articulated in human terms,
by John in his Gospel (1:4-7). By John’s account, the logos was
21
an illuminated man of flesh and blood. Philo instead de-
personified the logos and supplanted it with a denigrated
“dead concept that surpassed life, even the divine life.”
Through this “atrocious error” (i.e., the extirpation of eros/
mythos) Ammonius insists, what is “dead does not gain life,
and the living is killed” (p. 269). Recall the imagist vs.
propositionalist debate pronounced by Brann (1993) in
Chapter 2, which I contend continues in contemporary
Jungian studies. Forgoing the coincidence of opposites, the
atrocious error is now committed by Giegerich, whose
Hegelian distortion monotheistically casts logos in the
strictest conceptual terms, which devours, erases, and
cancels its eros other. Ammonius’s cautionary words are
subsequently born out in First Day (Chapter 8) in the narrative
arch of Izdubar’s affliction and salvation.
Upon learning of scientific rationalism’s deicidal
Newtonian cosmos and the disenchanted account of the
Sun’s rise and fall, Izdubar becomes sickened and nearly dies
for having “suckle(d) on [the] “poison” (p. 278) of Jung’s
Western science. Jung’s ego image, however, revives Izdubar
through the salvific powers of the mythopoetic imagination.
Differentiating ontological spheres, Jung’s “I” avers, “The
tangible and apparent world is one reality, but fantasy is the
other reality.” By negotiating Izdubar’s acceptance of his
being as fantasy (i.e., coaxing him to accept his fundamentally
imaginal nature), Jung effectively “resuscitated the image”
(Avens, 1982, p. 32). Izdubar shrinks to the size of an egg, and
Jung carries him to a welcoming abode where through
imagery and fantasy Izdubar finds healing.
Jung’s process of un-learning to gain the deeper wisdom
of the Self, obliquely prescribed by the example of Ammonius
above, is explicitly set forth in The Magician (Chapter 21),
where Jung—at least in the pages of Liber Novus—first
encounters Philemon [ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ]. In this Section at the end
of Liber Secundus, Jung describes Philemon through the
prism of Ovid’s portrayal of him in his Metamorphosis. Here
Jung describes Philemon as a passionless washed-up
22
magician who is incapacitated from age. In his dotage,
Philemon is content to putter about under the dull
disinterested gaze of his long-suffering wife and plant tulips
in his garden. According to Jung’s ego image, Philemon is a
hunched over, nearly deaf, and muttering dimwit. He has
palsied hands, a winter-white beard, and a weathered face
ravaged by time (p. 312). Jung beseeches the doddering
pensioner to instruct him in the black arts. Philemon,
however, demurs and proclaims, “There is nothing to tell” (p.
312). His reply provokes Jung’s ego image to charge
Philemon with being mean and ill natured. Despite these
misapprehensions, though, Philemon reveals to Jung’s ego
image the nature of magic, which is performed by
“compassionate . . . superstitious . . . [and] sympathetic
means” (p. 312). Although magic may be lost in the Age of
Reason, Philemon assures Jung’s ego image that it will be
forever rediscovered and continually reborn in man.
According to the perplexing sage, because the nature of
magic cannot be grasped rationally, magic cannot be taught.
Indeed, magic is the negative of what can be known. Further,
because it is inimical to reason, with magic there is nothing to
understand (p. 313). What this requires of Jung, the
apprentice magician, is precisely what Ammonius previously
suggested: that he “completely unlearn his reason” (p. 313) to
render “what is not understood understandable in an
incomprehensible manner” (p. 314). By this, what Jung
arguably means is that magic is born from a headlong
collision with the unconscious whereupon one recognizes
that although one has tried “ones best to steer the chariot,”
that in fact “a greater other is actually steering [emphasis
added].” According to Jung’s ego image, this is when “the
magical operation takes place” (p. 314). This magical
procedure (i.e., the reconciliation of the opposites), which
Jung would later term the transcendent function, is enacted
precisely by Jung in his preceding dialogue with Philemon
and indeed throughout Liber Novus. In short, Philemon’s
paradoxical words suggest to Jung’s ego image that the gulf
23
separating rationality and irrationality can only be bridged
transrationally, which is to say mythopoetically, by means of
images and symbols. Following his dialogue with Philemon,
Jung’s feelings about his magician interlocutor are mixed.
According to Jung’s “I” Philemon is the introverted lover of
his soul and is possessed of a chill saurian wisdom, which like
lethal venom can still cure in measured doses. Proclaiming
the magician, teacher, and prophet to be “the father of eternal
wisdom” (p. 315), Jung’s ego image avers that Philemon’s
sagacity is evidenced not by Christ-like rhetoric or relief but
by devilish reticence and restraint. Philemon, Jung’s avers, is
a “vessel of fables” and a “teacher and friend of the dead” (p.
316). For his lack of transparency, Philemon provokes Jung’s
transference and leaves his ego image bewildered and alone,
at once blessed and condemned to make his own way.

SCRUTINIES
That Philemon is both a teacher and friend of the dead is
born out in Jung’s 1917 draft, Scrutinies, which was the last
section of Liber Novus. Included in this section was Jung’s
fantasy material, which formed the basis of the Seven
Sermons of the Dead (Septem Sermones ad Mortuos). Written
by Jung—or as he professes, channeled by him from
Philemon—the Sermons were completed in early 1916 in just
9 days. They present Jung’s mythical cosmology as a
progressive series of emanations from an original source of
unfathomable totality called the Pleroma (Owens, 2010).
Upon the completion of his handwritten draft of Liber
Primus and Liber Secundus in early 1916, Jung (1963) and his
family experienced a sequence of uncanny events (i.e., his
eldest daughter espied a ghostly visage, his second daughter
had her blankets snatched away in the night, and his son was
beset by an anxious dream and fitful ravings that left him
oblivious of his parasomnia and completely exhausted (p.
190). These seemingly supernatural events were followed the
24
next evening by the frantic ringing of his doorbell with no
physically discernible cause. Because of these eerie
phenomena Jung exclaimed, “The atmosphere was thick,
believe me!” (190). Jung (2009) claims:
The whole house was as if there was a crowd present,
crammed full of spirits. They were packed deep right
up to the door and the air was so thick it was scarcely
possible to breathe. As for myself, I was all a-quiver
with the question: “For God’s sake, what in the world is
this?” Then they cried out in chorus, “We have come
back from Jerusalem where we found not what we
sought.” That is the beginning of the Septem
Sermones. (pp. 190–191)
The sermons begin with these words:
Behold, ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ [Philemon] came up to me dressed
in the white robes of a priest and lay his hand on my
shoulder. Then I said to the dark ones, ‘So speak, you
dead.’ And immediately they cried in many voices, “We
have come back from Jerusalem, where we did not
find what we sought. We implore you to let us in. You
have what we desire. Not your blood, but your light.
That is it.”
Then Philemon lifted his voice and taught them . . . (and
this is the first sermon to the dead). (Jung, 2009, p. 346)
Sermon 1. In the first sermon Philemon teaches the
grousing dead about the underlying sameness of
nothingness and fullness, which form the undifferentiated
totality called the Pleroma. Eternal and aimless the Pleroma
possesses no qualities. Qualities, in fact, are a created by
human thinking which strives to discern, distinguish, and
differentiate itself from the Pleroma. According to Philemon,
this is the “principium individuationis” wherein humans
struggle to distinguish qualities that consist of innumerable
oppositional pairs. Philemon cautions that humans, in their
movement toward greater consciousness must avoid the
countervailing prothanic draw to pleromatic dissipation. Here
again, in the foregoing sermon, Philemon provides
25
metaphoric terms which lay out—albeit in inchoate form—key
concepts of Jung’s later, more fully elaborated psychology
(i.e., Pleroma, Creature, the opposites and principium
individuationis (i.e. individuation). In addition, Jung here
demonstrates his dialogical method for linking the conscious
and unconscious, which he would later formulate in his 1916
essay “The Transcendent Function.”
Sermon 2. In his second sermon, Philemon explains that
God is a differentiated quality of the Pleroma. Philemon
presents the supreme antinomies: God (i.e., the sun, Helios,
and the supreme good) and the Devil (i.e., endless evil).
Whereas God represents relatedness, fullness, and
generativity, the Devil represents death, destruction, and
emptiness. Philemon avers a greater and more primordial
deity: Abraxas transcends this irreconcilable oppositive pair in
the created world (i.e., God and the devil). Though he exits in
the created world, Abraxas is nevertheless nearer to the
Pleroma. According to Philemon, “If the pleroma had an
essence, Abraxas would be its manifestation,” because he is
“effect in general . . . he is force, duration and change” (p.
349).
Sermon 3. In Philemon’s third sermon, he explains that
Abraxas contains, reconciles, and transcends the opposites.
Recognized as the source of generativity and renewal,
“Abraxas produces truth and lying, good and evil, light and
darkness, in the same world and the same action.” Owing to
his bivalence and absolute ambivalence, Philemon asserts,
“Abraxas is terrible” (p. 350). He is a merciless god who may
be characterized as unscrupulous, uncaring, and
unconcerned. Combined in him are the lower world of
instincts and the upper world of archetypal spirt. As such,
Philemon cautions that the dreadful deity must be respected
and feared. Once again, in this sermon, Philemon presents
nascent elements of Jung’s later psychology: libido and
libidinal striving, the differentiation and integration of the
opposites, and the assimilation of unconscious contents

26
mediated by images vis-à-vis the transcendent function—all
of which propel the individuation process.
Sermon 4. In sermon four Philemon proclaims, “I speak of
many Gods . . . since I know them” (p. 352). He expands on
the mystery of polytheistic divinity and further differentiates
divine personages. In addition to the God (i.e., Helos) and his
opposite the devil, Philemon avers that there are innumerable
gods and devils, among whom he distinguishes two: the
demonic gods “the Burning One” (i.e., eros) and “the Growing
One,” its logos counterpart (i.e., the Tree of Life). Philemon
asserts, “Good and evil unite in the flame,” at the same time,
he says, “Good and evil unite in the growth of the tree” (p.
351). These antinomial gods are thus shown to contain within
themselves the power of the opposites. The “Growing one”
(the tree) represents the spirit of civilization. The “Burning
one” (eros) seeks dynamism, creativity, and individual truth in
opposition to civilization’s dissolving uniformity.
Sermon 5. Here Philemon proclaims, “The world of the
Gods is made manifest in spirituality and in sexuality” (p. 352).
He characterizes the feminine as the celestial mother (i.e.,
Mater Coelestis) who manifests as a dove, and the masculine
as Phallos, the Earthly father who appears as a serpent.
Whereas men’s sexuality is earthy, he avers, women’s
sexuality is spiritual. The feminine dove represents spiritual
power that receives and comprehends. The masculine snake
represents the generative male principle, which must receive
that it may give. Thus, the masculine principle (i.e., logos)
includes eros qualities just as the feminine principle (i.e., eros)
includes logos qualities. Different gods preside over the male
and female psyche, and this anticipates Jung’s theory of the
contrasexual archetypal soul figures, anima and animus.
Whereas meaning presides over the spiritual in men,
Philemon claims that for women, sexuality and
connectedness govern the spiritual. Humans, according to
him, must differentiate themselves from both sexuality and
spirituality, and recognize both their subordination to and
governance by these chthonic and celestial daimons. Next,
27
Philemon turns to the question of community vs. individuality
and asserts that a balance must be struck between these
existential domains represented by the mother (community)
and the father (individuality), respectively.
Sermon 6. Philemon continues to sermonize on the
daimons of sexuality and spirituality. The former, he explains,
is symbolized by the chthonic serpent; the latter is
symbolized by the celestial white bird. Then, as if possessed
by the misogynistic Spirit of the Times, Philemon despairingly
claims that the feminine, symbolized by the serpent, is a
mischievous, lying, and punishing whore who not only cavorts
with the earthbound dead but is the friend of evil spirits and a
consort of the devil. He conversely maintains that the
masculine principle is monastic, wholesome, and a devoted
emissary of the mother. Spirituality (the virginal white dove)
soars above the soulful peaks and vales. It ascends to holy
solitude and transmits guiding messages from refined souls
who have previously departed. The lowly serpent, meanwhile,
afflicts and manipulates (emasculates and arouses) the phallic
god. She holds up the banner of wanton desirousness while
at the same time she shows the way beyond the limitations of
human guile. The dead contemptuously demand Philemon
stop talking about matters of which they claim to know
already.
Sermon 7. The dead return to ask Philemon a final
question regarding man. Philemon explains that man is a
gateway through which one traverses from the Macrocosm
(the outer realm of daimons, God, and multitudinous souls) to
the microcosm of his soul (psyche), wherein lies the “lonely
star” (p. 354) of his divinity. Jung would later call this luminous
inner star, which is simultaneously guide, goal, and God: The
Self-archetype (i.e., the god image within). It is the human task
to follow this inner light (i.e., to consciously participate in the
individuation process) and not be diverted by either seductive
materialism or spiritual bypass. This final sermon recapitulates
the central theme of Liber Novus: a balance must be

28
achieved between these and all unassimilable primordial
pairs.

THE BRICOLAGE CALLED PHILEMON

Having traced Philemon’s emergence from his inchoate
manifestation as Elijah and reviewed his shifting persona as it
was revealed in each section of Liber Novus, his composite
image is as vivid as it is varied. Through the translated pages
of calligraphic text and the painted images curated by Jung,
Philemon is shown to be a superannuated white-beard, a
revelatory prophet, a mystical sage, a washed-up magician, a
hybridized mediumistic shaman, and an underworld guide
who links and mediates relations between the living (i.e.,
Jung’s ego image) and the dead. Pedagogically, Philemon
provokes, mystifies, and confounds. By so doing, he
relativizes Jung’s rational ego and brings it into proper
relationship with its other—the Self-archetype—which in Liber
Novus is represented by the mandala-like image of a
luminous inner star. Philemon is additionally shown to be
communicative, knowledgeable, and tremendously wise—so
much so that it was he who gave voice to Jung’s intricate
mythopoetic cosmology, which itself served as the
antecedent mythos from which Jung conceptually elaborated
the logos of his magnum opus: The Collected Works. Beyond
possessing objective autonomy within Jung’s psyche,
Philemon is revealed to be both transforming and
transformational. The former is instantiated by Philemon’s
shape-shifting throughout Liber Novus. For example,
Philemon is variously depicted as a teacher and prophet, a
magician, and a psychopomp. The latter, meanwhile (i.e.,
Philemon’s transformational nature), is evinced first by the
crucial role he fulfills for Jung as teacher and inner guide,
who facilitates both Jung’s discovery—and his
circumambulation—of the psyche (i.e., his process of

29
individuation), and second for serving as midwife to Jung’s
reborn God image within.
As I argued in Volume 1, because Memories, Dreams,
Reflections (MDR) occupies a stylistic middle ground between
The Red Book’s bombastic tone (i.e., mythos) and the
restrained writing of Jung’s later theoretical work (i.e., logos),
MDR can be seen as an emergent symbolic third arising from
the transcendent function, which reconciles and balances
these interpenetrating though ultimately unassimilable
opposites. To this, I would add that Jung’s account in MDR
arguably presents his most integrated portrait of Philemon
and also the clearest example of Jung’s sense-making near
the end of his life. Said differently, MDR evinces Jung’s
unadorned reflections concerning his dreams visions and
fantasies and the essential meaning and value that Philemon
held for him. In MDR, for example, Jung (1963) avers:
Philemon . . . brought home to me the crucial insight
that there are things in the psyche which I do not
produce, but which produce themselves and have
their own life. Philemon represented a force which was
not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with
him, and he said things which I had not consciously
thought. For I observed clearly it was he who spoke,
not I. . . . Psychologically, Philemon represented
superior insight. He was a mysterious figure to me. At
times he seemed to me quite real, as if her were a
living personality. I went walking up and down the
garden with him, and to me he was what the Indians
call a guru . . . I could have wished for nothing better
than a real, live guru, someone possessing superior
knowledge and ability, who would have disentangled
for me the involuntary creations of my imagination.
This task was undertaken by the figure of Philemon,
whom . . . I had . . . to recognize as my psychagogue.
And the fact was that he conveyed to me many an
illuminating idea. (pp. 183–184)

30
3
INTERSECTIONS:
COMPARING PARTICIPANTS’
EXPERIENCES WITH
JUNG’S DESCRIPTIONS OF INNER
ADVISOR FIGURES

TONAL CONTRASTS
In this section, Jung’s account of Philemon as presented in
Liber Novus and Memories, Dreams, Reflections will be
viewed in light of the superordinate themes and subthemes
identified through my IPA analysis of participant interviews in
the previous chapter. Effectively, this chapter will answer the
second part of the central question of this IPA study: “What
themes and patterns emerge in student descriptions of their
inner guide imagery, and how do students’ accounts relate to
Jung’s imaginal engagement with personified archetypes?”
Contrasts and commonalities will be distinguished.
The first and most glaring dissimilarity between Jung and
this study’s participants has to do with the direction of
intentionality and the dynamics between the seeker and the
sought. For instance, whereas study participants pursued
imaginal beings to realize transpersonal dimensions of
consciousness, the unconscious—vis-à-vis overwhelming
imagery and personified figures—seemed to pursue Jung
31
relentlessly. It was as if the objective psyche sought to enlist
Jung as a kind of medium to give voice to its radical,
compensatory cultural imperative, to balance the spirit of the
depths with the spirit of the times. This state of equipoise
entailed linking higher and lower dimensions of the psyche,
restoring the symbolic sensibility lost in the paradigmatic shift
from a religious world-view to one based solely on scientific
rationalism, and resacralizing nature by reinstating humanity’s
place in the natural order and restoring to human
consciousness an ecopsychological connection to the living
world. Viewed in this context, Jung’s “nekyia” (i.e., his
Odysseus-like descent into the dark depths of the archetypal
unconscious) is of an entirely different order than that of the
participants of this study. This fundamental contrast is the
difference between confrontation and conflict (i.e., Jung) and
consonance and calm (i.e., participants).
Recall that Jung (1963) characterized the period of his
prolonged, tormenting fantasies as his “confrontation with the
unconscious” (p. 171). During this time, he was beset by
dreams, intrusive images, and morbid visions that nearly
broke him. It was only after a stage of “endless resistance,”
feeling at once bewildered and ashamed, that Jung finally
“submitted . . . to the impulses of the unconscious” (Jung,
1963, pp. 173–174). Throughout this tumultuous, arguably
parapsychotic interval, Jung (1963) claims he felt as if he was
“helpless before an alien world,” in which “everything . . .
seemed difficult and incomprehensible.” He further admits
that he was “living in a state of constant tension, and felt as
though “gigantic blocks of stone” were crumbling down on
him. Despite his account of persistent psychological torment,
Jung nevertheless claims that at the same time, he was
possessed of “a demonic strength” and filled with the
“unswerving conviction [that he] was obeying a higher will.”
Jung avers that his deferential submission to this greater
power stabilized him until he “mastered the task” (p. 177),
which is to say until he was able to “translate emotions into

32
images” and unearth the “images which were concealed in
the emotions” (p. 177).
Bearing all this in mind, contrast Jung’s account of his
early imaginal experiences with participants’ diametric
narratives wherein they collectively imagine themselves in
beautiful, tranquil, safe spaces where they feel calm,
protected, soothed, supported, and loved. Two closely
related variables arguably contribute to the discrepancy of
this tonal juxtaposition: First, Jung was a transpersonal
pioneer whose psychic explorations propelled him beyond
ordinary consciousness, to a strange and magical reality
where he was pulled into chthonic depths and raised to
celestial heights. To Jung, circa 1913, the imaginal world
seemed alien and menacing, and he lacked instruction to
help him make sense of its psychic objectivity (i.e., its
otherness), which appeared to him as a mysterium
tremendum et fascinans (i.e., a mystery that is both terrible
and fascinating). Jung’s resistance to his dreadful fantasies,
while certainly understandable, was nevertheless
problematic. Purposively deployed by the psyche to disabuse
Jung’s ego-complex of its false regency and bring it into
balance with the greater power of the Self, the more Jung
opposed his fantasies, the more ferocious and oppressive
they became.
One could argue that to respectfully establish oneself in
the Mundus Archetypalis (i.e., the archetypal realm) and
honorably interact with its uncanny inhabitants requires that
one possess an attitude of humility and open-hearted
receptivity, a capacity to tolerate irrationality, and the ability to
appreciate difference and ethically respond to otherness—all
of which, at the time of Jung’s preliminary explorations, he
seemed to lack. Along with the objective psyche’s ferocious
intrusions, these early deficiencies may account for Jung’s
initial confrontational posture and his debatably pedantic,
oppositional, and often suspicious interactions with imaginal
beings. When he began experiencing spontaneous visions
arising from the unconscious, Jung’s conscious attitude could
33
be characterized as a kind of egocentric rationalism, which is
perhaps most clearly instantiated by his negative appraisal of
Salome and by his derisive characterization of his anima, who
disturbingly insisted that Jung’s creative elaborations were
art. The image of a fastidious European on safari grousing
about the foreign climate, customs, and culture captures
Jung’s initial foppish resistance to his fantasy thinking, which
he alleged was feminine in character. Jung’s conscious
attitude toward the unconscious was still informed by the
psychoanalytic maxim, “Where the id is, there shall ego be”
(Freud, 1989/1933, p. 100). Pushed to its extreme, this attitude
is a colonizing form psychic hegemony that would annex the
imaginal realm to the ego’s sovereign rule. Colonization
invariably provokes a tumultuous backlash, which possibly
explains the archetypal psyche’s seemingly ferocious
compensatory hostility toward Jung.
In his essay “Aliens and Insects,” Glen Slater (2008)
underscores this second closely related variable, which may
account for Jung’s contentious attitude toward the archetypal
unconscious. Slater argues that “the compelling face of ‘the
other’ . . . provides a diagnostic window onto the modern
psyche,” which for my purposes can arguably be restated as
follows: the face of Jung’s personified interlocutors presents
a diagnostic portrait of Jung’s habitual conscious attitude.
Slater adds, “the qualitative state of ‘otherness’ is the defining
characteristic of unconscious material,” which arguably helps
to explain Jung’s portrayal of the other (i.e., the murky depths
of the unconscious in general and, more specifically, the
negative cast he projects onto the imaginal persons he
encounters). Distilled to its essence, Slater avers, “the face
you show the unconscious is the face it shows to you” (p.
168). One could, therefore, argue that Jung’s early
experiences of the imaginal world and its inhabitants at that
time reflected back to him the mirror image of his hostility,
intolerance, and fearful judgmentalism. This explanation
would partly account for his depiction of the psyche’s
inherent otherness in mainly confrontational terms.
34
The image of the Grand Canyon may help to explain the
diametric (i.e., egodystonic vs. egosyntonic) experiences
described by Jung and the participants of this study,
respectively. In this metaphoric example one can imagine that
in Jung’s solitude he happened upon—or was pulled into—
this natural wonder in all of its unspoiled majesty; that he
explored its perilous depths and lofty vistas and documented
his discoveries in journals filled with drawings of indigenous
flora and fauna, descriptions of native peoples, and—what to
him seemed to be—their strange and unfamiliar practices. To
locate himself, Jung also sketched maps (i.e., mandalas) in his
journals that would, one day, help others to find their way.
Whereas Jung forged his path into the primeval chasm and
descended alone into its instinctual wilds, imagery
practitioners today benefit from Jung’s groundbreaking
discoveries. Now, to prevent one from falling over the edge,
there are protective railings that punctuate the canyon’s
numinous panoramas, and forestry guides to rescue those
who stray from well-worn trails and become lost. In this
example, two very different canyons become apparent, which
can be distinguished by time and degrees of familiarity. The
first version (i.e., Jung’s) is the undiscovered canyon in all of
its pristine glory and menacing strangeness. The second
version (i.e., described by study participants’), meanwhile, can
be likened to a curated national park where one can be near
to nature’s mystery though perhaps not of it. Peaks and vales
are deeper and higher when one is alone in the distant wilds.
Whereas Jung allied himself with Apollo in his contest to
remain separate from what he perceived was the devouring
Dionysian gorge of the unconscious, more peaceable
relations—which he later modeled—continue to inform
nondirective imagery practitioners today, who like psychic
conservationists venture into and venerate imaginal nature
and by so doing honor the delicate ecology between worlds.
Thematic Commonalities

35
Recall from Chapter 3, the superordinate themes identified
from participant interviews include (1) Positive Qualities of
Inner Advisors, (2) Parallel Methods, (3) Personal
Transformation, (4) Positive Effects of Imagery, and (5)
Transpersonal/Spiritual Numinous. All of these superordinate
themes are evinced by Jung’s in descriptions of his imaginal
experiences described in Memories, Dreams, Reflections and
Liber Novus. Hermeneutic examples drawn from these texts
are provided for applicable subthemes, which are nested in
and constitute these superordinate themes.
Positive qualities of inner advisors. Recall that this
superordinate theme refers to an imaginer’s affirming
perceptions, attributions, and experiences of inner advisors.
Subthemes that instantiate this superordinate theme include
the qualities Communicative, Assuring/Reassuring, Wise,
Protective, Loving, and Objective/Autonomous. Whereas
students described their inner advisors in decidedly favorable
terms, Jung presents a more ambivalent portrait of Philemon
which, as I described, may have had to do with the
destabilizing novelty of his pioneering explorations and the
fact that his conscious attitude toward the unconscious at that
time was puffed-up, inhospitable, and distrustful.
Notwithstanding Jung’s initial psychic provincialism (i.e., his
habitual state of consciousness), over time he associated
more positive qualities to Philemon. Referenced above, these
qualities (i.e., Communicative, Assuring/Reassuring, Wise,
Protective, Loving and Objective/Autonomous) are apparent
in Jung’s various references, interactions, and dialogues with
Philemon and are perhaps most clearly expressed in his later
reflections about him in Memories, Dreams, Reflections.
That Philemon is Communicative, Wise, Objective/
Autonomous goes without saying. It was Philemon, after all,
who taught Jung (1963) about “the reality of the psyche” and
who clarified for him the distinction “between [himself] and
the objects of [his] thought” (p. 183). Jung states that
“Philemon represented superior insight” (pp. 207–208), and
he calls him, “the father of eternal wisdom” (2009, p. 315).
36
That Philemon possesses these positive qualities is further
evidenced by Jung’s attribution to him, all three sections of
Liber Novus (p. 333), in which several of his key psychological
ideas were set forth. These include the collective
unconscious; the archetypes, including the contrasexual
archetypes the anima and animus; the ego-complex or “I”;
the conjunction of opposites; the principium individuationis;
and the Self. Indeed, Liber Primus (The Way of What is to
Come) can be read as a prospective harbinger of Jung’s later
psychological writing in the Collected Works. Jung (2009)
himself avers, “The mystery showed me in images what I
should afterwards live” (p. 254). That Philemon served as a
ghostly guide and guru to Jung (1963), walked with him in the
garden and shared with him “many an illuminating idea” (p.
184), in itself, arguably shows Philemon to be Loving and
Assuring/Reassuring, as does the fact that Philemon
accompanied, instructed, and guided Jung through the
tumultuous odyssey of his transformation. Philemon, Jung
avers, is the lover of the gods (p. 315) who loves his own soul
“for the sake of men” (p. 316).
Parallel methods. The next superordinate theme, Parallel
Methods pertains to specific techniques and structural
features common across different imagery approaches.
Different Inner Advisor Types constitutes an important
subtheme of this broad theme. Jung’s inner advisor,
Philemon, described in detail above, is an anthropomorphic
advisor figure with mythic accents. According to Jung (1963),
“he brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a
Gnostic Coloration,” and he first appeared to Jung as “winged
being sailing across the sky” (p. 189). As presented in The
Red Book and described above under the heading: The
Bricolage Called Philemon, a case can also be made that
Philemon is a shifting form of underlying archetypal energy
which constellates in various guises and through subtle
inflections of character (i.e., Elijah the Prophet, a wise old
man, a magician and Psychopomp).

37
Personal transformation. This superordinate theme
relates to a person’s growth, development, or evolution
related to image work and includes the subthemes: (1)
Increased Insight/Understanding, (2) Broader Perspective,
and (3) Identity Transformation. All of these subthemes are
abundantly clear in Liber Novus, which is Jung’s edited
presentation of his active imaginations coupled with his
efforts to make sense of his images and fantasies. Through
his active imaginations, documented in Liber Novus Jung
identifies, differentiates, and integrates the different aspects
of his personality and that of the collective writ large. He
discovers the proper relationship between himself (i.e., the
individual), society (i.e., others) and the vast assembly of the
dead, he recovers his soul, heals from the brutalizing
scissions of modern alienation, and rebirths the image of god
within. Said differently, in Liber Novus, Jung outlines the arch
of own transformative process—individuation—by which he
links the upper and lower worlds, cosmos and psyche,
archetypes and instincts and regains his connection to
himself, others, and the natural world.
Positive effects of imagery. Positive Effects of Imagery
relate to favorable experiences or outcomes associated with
image work. Subthemes include (1) Nonrational Knowing, (2)
Discloses Greater Reality, (3) Increased Awareness, (4) Insight,
(5) Receive Care/Comfort/Soothing, (6) Salubrious Physical
Effects, (7) Reveals What is Hidden, (8) Deepens Feelings and
Emotions, (9) Greater Discernment, (10) Inner Guidance, (11)
Promotes/Deepens Spirituality, (12) Restores/Increases Sense
of Connection to Self/Others/Natural World, and (13) Somatic
Signaling.
As described in the preceding, one could argue that Jung
experienced all of these salubrious effects over the epic
course of his underworld pilgrimage, perhaps even more so
in his subsequent efforts to make sense of his experience of
it. All of Jung’s imaginal dialogues and the insights gained
from them instantiate Nonrational-Knowing, which is arguably
the epistemological foundation of Jungian and archetypal
38
psychology. The Greater reality disclosed to Jung by
Philemon is psychic reality (i.e., esse in anima) in which the
psyche’s images are understood as the crucial bridge that
links subjective consciousness and the unknown (i.e.,
unconscious) other. Through his radical imaginal
investigations Jung realized that for humans, the only
accessible reality is psychic reality (i.e., the image), which is a
merged nexus between subjective consciousness and the
objective (i.e., unconscious) object. According to Jung
(1929/1967), “‘Psychic’ means physical and spiritual . . . this
‘intermediate’ world . . . seems unclear and confused
because the concept of psychic reality is not yet current
among us, although it expresses life as it actually is” (p. 51
[CW 13, para. 76]). The subthemes Increased Awareness,
Insight, Reveals What is Hidden, and Greater Discernment are
all implied in Jung’s comprehensive vision of greater (psychic)
reality can be further understood in terms of his varied
revelations—both great and small—that constitute the nested
elements of his later psychology, annunciated in his Red
Book in nascent form like so many acorns that became the
mighty Oak grove of his Collected Works. Jung’s account of
his experiences with imaginal beings in Liber Novus is
marked by trial, tribulation, temptation, and torment. All of his
experience, as if by design, facilitated his continued imaginal
exploration, discovery and psychospiritual transformation.
One might liken Jung’s dark night of prolonged suffering to
the medical trauma that ensues from a medical or surgical
team’s heroic interventions to save a patient’s life, which
nevertheless inflicts great suffering, or the “tough love”
approach to addiction wherein limit-setting and rigid
boundaries are thought to promote maturation and
independence through the icy love of necessity. One could
argue that Jung’s experiences demonstrate care—albeit a
relatively severe expression of it. Comfort and Soothing,
meanwhile, although seemingly in short supply in The Red
Book, are nevertheless alluded to by Jung in his afore-noted
description of his garden walks with Philemon, where
39
consolation and comfort come to him in the form of
illumination, integrated understanding, and companionship.
Next, Salubrious Physical Effects and Somatic Signaling
associated with imagery, in reference to Jung, may more
accurately be described as therapeutic psycho-somatic
effects, which are by no means factitious. Imagery rather
bridges the Cartesian divide and expresses the nuanced,
psychoid nature of human experience. This fact is instantiated
by Jung’s prodromal and acute phase of unconscious conflict,
which found resolution and relief once he translated his
affects into images and extracted the images concealed by
his emotions (p. 177). That imagery Deepens Feelings and
Emotions for Jung is evinced by his reunification and
integration of his disavowed eros (i.e., pleasure and feeling)
and logos (thinking) in Chapter 9 of Liber Novus, titled
“Instruction.” From this synthesis, the next subtheme
Promotes/Deepens Spirituality subsequently instantiated. By
accepting and integrating eros (feeling) with the logos
(thought), Jung surpasses the limitations of ego
consciousness identifies with the greater psychic wholeness
represented by the Self and rebirths within himself the new
image of God in man. Finally, as noted in the subtheme
Personal Transformation, Jung discerns, differentiates, and
integrates the various aspects of his personality using his
hermeneutic-phenomenological method of active
imagination. He finds his soul, rebirths the indwelling image
of God, and restores his connection to Self, community, and
nature.
Transpersonal/spiritual/numinous. The final
superordinate theme, Transpersonal/Spiritual/Numinous
refers to a range of ineffable phenomena and includes
experiences of sacrality and holiness, paranormal
experiences, and nonordinary states of consciousness.
Nested subthemes which instantiate this superordinate
theme identified in my study include (1) Personal Spiritual
Practice, (2) Connects with Spirit/Sacred/Divine, (2) Trans-

40
egoic Communication, (3) Synchronicity, (4) Channeling/
Hosting Spirits, and (5) Communing with the Dead.
Recall that Rudolf Otto (1917/1950) coined the term
numinous to describe the essential quality underlying all
religious experience which he characterized as a “mysterium
tremendum et fascinans” (i.e., an experience that is both
tremendous and fascinating) (p. 12). Completely beyond the
realm of ordinary consciousness and experienced as wholly
other, numinous experience can be described as stunning,
astonishing, and wonderful, yet overwhelming, dreadful, and
frightening. Thus, one could argue, there is no better term to
describe Jung’s phenomenological account of his fantasies,
visions, and paranormal experiences from 1913-1916, which he
creatively elaborated in his The Red Book. Jung (2009/1957)
says as much in the epigraph to Liber Novus:
The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I
pursued the inner images, were the most important
time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from
this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly
matter any more. My entire life consisted in
elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious
and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and
threatened to break me. That was the stuff and
material for more than only one life. Everything later
was merely the outer classification, the scientific
elaboration, and the integration into life. But the
numinous beginning, which contained everything, was
then [emphasis added]. (p. vii)
The subthemes Personal Spiritual Practice, Trans-egoic
Communication, and Connects with Spirit, Sacred, Divine are
all obviously evinced by Jung’s account of the numinosum set
forth by him in Memories, Dreams, Reflections and Liber
Novus. Jung’s Spiritual Practice, one could argue, was one of
direct engagement, and dialogical interaction (i.e., Trans-
egoic communication) with numinous personified figures from
the archetypal unconscious vis-à-vis active fantasy, which he
later called Active Imagination. Differentiation from these
41
imaginal figures, Jung realized, propelled the life-long
process of individuation (i.e., balance, harmonization, and
transformation of the psyche), which he rendered
mythopoetically in The Red Book. In schematic terms, this
imaginal process may be characterized as the ego’s
developmental transit from pre-egoic, original embedment in
the unconscious, to its differentiation and resulting alienation
from it at mid-life, leading ultimately to the ego’s subordinate
return and reintegration with its dynamic ground: the creative
unconscious (Washburn, 1995).
Jung’s personal experiences of the numinosum include his
overwhelming portentous fantasies of bloody catastrophe, his
descent into the imaginal realm, his encounter with the Spirit
of the Depths, the recovery of his soul, and his communion
with personified archetypal beings who presented
themselves to Jung’s ego image as wholly other. These
imaginal persons include biblical figures such as Elijah,
Salome, the devil, and Philemon; mythic forms, such as
Siegfried, the heroic Germanic dragon slayer, and Izdubar
(i.e., Gilgamesh), the Babylonian demi-god; and supernatural
entities such as the teaming throngs of the dead. When one
encounters objective archetypal personifications within the
subjective psyche, they present themselves as numinous,
which is to say as essential experiences of profound
importance. This is borne out in Jung’s imaginal portrait of his
process of individuation, which, although framed by him as a
personal cosmology, nevertheless suggests universal,
transformative possibilities. On the rough swells of his mythic
Night-Sea Journey, Jung participates in the ecstasy and
agony of Christ’s mysterium, bears the tension of manifold
opposites, experiences the mystery of their interpenetration,
and their ultimate reconciliation in the reborn, integrated
image of God within his soul.
The subtheme Synchronicity and its transpersonal
significance meanwhile is repeatedly evidenced by Jung in
the form of prophetic psychic images and dreams that are
acausally though meaningfully supported, corroborated by, or
42
prospectively realized by him in the external world. Examples
include Jung’s nightmarish fantasies of Europe engulfed by a
waxing sanguine tides, which he later actualized in the
physical world with the outbreak of war; his first numinous
encounter with Philemon in a dream, which was
synchronistically underscored by his discovery of a rare King
Fisher bird; and the strange outer world occurrences of
poltergeist-like phenomena experienced by Jung and his
children, which signaled the assembling throng of the dead in
his imaginal inner-landscape and culminated in the Septem
Sermones ad Mortuos. Synchronicities, like imaginal dragons
on ancient maps swimming at the edges of the known world,
by their serpentine movements, through air and water weave
together the mutually alienated spheres of consciousness so
that, as if by magic (i.e., nonrationally), the ego comes to
terms and achieves balance with its numinous other within
the psyche.
Next, the subthemes Channeling/Hosting Spirits and
Communion with the Dead are perhaps first evidenced by
Jung (1902/1970) in his doctoral investigations of spiritualistic
and occult phenomena, which focused on the mediumistic
trance states of his unnamed 13-year-old cousin, Hélène
Preiswerk. Through séances, it seemed that “Helly” was able
to channel disembodied spirits of the dead and, in perfect
high German, give voice to and adopt the manner of
predeceased ancestors and other more numinously charged
figures from the great beyond. Channeled by his cousin, one
particularly intriguing spiritual manifestation (i.e., archetypal
image) to Jung (1902/1970) was the wise woman Ivenes,
whom he described as “a serious, mature person, devout and
right-minded, full of womanly tenderness and very modest.”
Regarding Ivenes’s character, Jung added that she was
“soulful and elegiac with an air of melancholy resignation.”
She was, Jung insisted, “a great lady [who] comforts others,
succors those in distress, warns and protects them from
dangers to body and soul” (p. 36 [CW 1, para. 62]) According
to Helly, Ivenes had lived multiple lifetimes in relationship to
43
Jung, sometimes as his lover, and at other times his mother
(p. 37 [CW 1, para. 63]). Recapitulating the modern era’s deep
ambivalence toward the feminine, Jung’s (1963) idealizing
thrall and subsequent devaluation of his cousin’s para-
psychological abilities, can be framed as his earliest deeply
conflicted apprehension of his anima—the personal face of
modernity’s repressed goddess—who later challenged the
sovereignty of his rational ego through the feminine voice of
a hysterical female patient. In this instance, Jung himself
became a medium and channeler. One could, in fact, argue
that in the pages of Liber Novus Jung was initiated by the
Goddess into the mysteries of the creative unconscious and
he was accompanied by her in the form of Salome through
the uncanny terrain of his inner world. The clearest example
of Jung’s (2009) Communion with the Dead meanwhile is
arguably presented in Scrutinies in the Seven Sermons where
Jung along with Philemon encounters an assembly of shades
returning from Jerusalem unfulfilled. That is when Philemon,
“the teacher and friend of the dead” (p. 316), lectures them
about the sameness and difference of the Pleroma (p. 348);
God, the Devil, and the terrible Abraxas (p. 349); the nature of
this ambivalent god, his containment, and reconciliation of
the opposites (pp. 350–351); various lesser gods and
daimons and the nature of polytheistic divinity; the
relationship between Spirituality/logos/masculinity/
individuality and Sexuality/eros/feminine/community; and
finally, the nature of men (p. 354).
The answer to the guiding research question of this IPA
study is provided in the following summary: Subordinate to
the fundamental qualitative difference between study
participants and Jung’s experiences of the imaginal realm
generally and inner advisor figures specifically—which I
characterized as the difference between consonance and
calm on the one hand and confrontation and conflict on the
other—there remains a consistent alignment of superordinate
themes and subthemes. Superordinate themes outlined in the
foregoing, like the empty formal potentials of unknowable
44
archetypes, become instantiated and are discernible only
through nuanced, subjective moments of concrete specificity
(i.e., images). Although there is tremendous variation
constituting subthemes, they are nevertheless simultaneously
contained, and instantiated by, what is arguably the
archetypal nature of identified superordinate themes.

4
UNEXPECTED DISCOVERIES/
SURPRISES

MONOTHEISTIC RIGIDITY
In his 1971 essay “Psychology, Monotheistic or
Polytheistic?” Hillman, in his typical pugilistic style,
championed psychological polytheism over and against
monotheistic conceptions of the psyche. Associated with
Classical Greek and Roman thought, Hillman argued that the
psyche is metaphorically best reflected by a diverse
pantheon of gods, not the monotheistic “[one and] only true
God” (John 17:3), of the Abrahamic religions (i.e., Judaism,
Christianity and Islam). Said differently, instead of Western
psychology’s emphasis on psychic unity and singularity,
Hillman favored a view of the psyche that was variegated,
multiple, and diverse. The great monotheistic religions, he
averred, degraded human imagination and viewed images in
strictly representational terms, not world-making creative
expressions of the Soul’s poesies, which was Hillman’s belief.
Hillman directed his critique against what he believed was a
choking form of literalism that had taken root in some circles
of classical Jungian thought. Rigidly held, this unimaginative
perspective emphasized the singular notion of a unified self
45
as the exclusive model for psychological health. In Hillman’s
view, monotheistic literalism superimposed onto the psyche’s
inherent multiplicity confined the psyche (i.e., the soul) in a
genie’s bottle of stultifying singularity. Hillman, therefore,
insisted that psychology must not sacrifice the adequacy of
dismembered Dionysus for the coherence of orderly Apollo.
Instead, he argued, psychology (i.e., the study of the soul),
must honor the psyche’s mythopoetic multiplicity in which
many Gods represent the numerous and diverse aspects of
psychic life.
In Hillman’s (1996) later self-reflexive critique, “Psychology
—Monotheistic or Polytheistic: Twenty-Five Years Later,” he
acknowledged that in his former essay, he had unwittingly
fallen into a monotheistic stance of one-sided, pagan
polytheism. More specifically, Hillman recognized that his
vehement advocacy for psychological polytheism in his first
essay was, in fact, fanatically monotheistic! Regarding
psychological monotheism vs. polytheism, Hillman later
averred that one must carefully attend to these two
imaginative styles to discern the frequently covert operation
of the other in each.
I refer to Hillman’s insightful though surprising self-
discovery because over the course of my study, I too was
confronted by the specter of my monotheistic rigidity
especially in reference to what I believed was the correct way
to access the imaginal world and interact with personified
archetypal beings, namely: Relational Guided Imagery. This
became starkly apparent to me at two different points in my
writing: the first was in my literature review when I juxtaposed
Hillman’s and Jung’s respective methods for working with
psychic images and adjudged Hillman’s perspective to be
problematic, and second when I identified the diverse
approaches to image work that study participants had
adopted subsequent to (and deviating from!) their training in
Relational Guided Imagery at IHH.
In the first instance, I charged that Hillman did not stick
with the image so much as derange and deconstruct it via
46
word play. There I aligned myself with Jung, who engaged
the personified archetypal beings of the psyche dialogically. I
criticized Hillman’s (1977) emphasis on deconstructive world
play, which he conceived as “talking with the image and
letting it talk” (p. 81). Hillman maintained that by using
semantic iteratio and metaphoric analogy that the image itself
was allowed to speak, and by so doing, reveal its mysterious
connections (p. 83). Opposing Hillman, I initially argued that
resorting to word play as a means to open the image and
extract more meaning, emotion, and possibility from it does
not honor the image so much as it manipulates, deranges,
and deconstructs it. A more direct approach, I argued—one
that honors the delicate ecology between worlds—would and
should trust the nonego image enough to ask it directly what
it means, feels, needs, wants, and has to offer. I provocatively
wondered, “who or what but the ego, is playing semantic
strip-poker with the image?” RGI, which is an heir to Jung’s
active imagination, I charged, instead of subjecting the image
to word games, dialogically engages (i.e., listens to and talks
with) archetypal others, deepens affective engagement with
them, and fully honors images as persons. Although I
acknowledged there is wealth of material to metaphorically
unpack in an image, I nevertheless maintained that before
playing deconstructive games with the image that one must
first ask the nonego image (i.e., the other) if the image wants
to play. It was only after my dissertation chair, Dr. Glen Slater
pointed out the fastidious rigidity of my monotheistic
perspective regarding what I semiconsciously believed was
the only appropriate way to undertake image work or engage
the imaginal that I could see that Hillman’s approach was not
an intellectual move, nor was it an example of a thinking type
trying to have an intuition. Rather, it was Hillman’s manner of
phenomenologically exploring the different ways the
concrete image as other stirs the imagination, leaps beyond
the enclosed subjective sphere of inner, spiritual reality, and
brings the psyche into life. Thus conceived, communicative
rapport with the image becomes an inspired volley, a call and
47
response in which image meets image in a way that is
spontaneous, intuitive, and above all, poetic.

IMAGINAL MONOTHEISM VS.

POLYTHEISTIC MULTI-MODALITY
The next acute flair-up of my tendency toward
monotheism regarding images arose when I identified the
various approaches to image work employed by study
participants. These different approaches constitute the
various subthematic expressions of the superordinate theme:
Multi-Modal Approaches. Recall that purposive sampling was
employed in my selection of participants for this IPA study,
and that all participants were graduates of the Integrative
Medicine Education Program which I—along with two co-
faculty supervisors (i.e., Juanita de Sanz and Leslie
Davenport)—supervised and taught at the California Pacific
Medical Center’s Institute for Health and Healing. Developed
by Davenport (n.d.), the year-long training curriculum for the
Guided Imagery and Expressive Arts track offered courses
including Inductions and Safe Space Imagery; Hospital-based
Expressive Arts; Finding an Inner Advisor; Imagery
Approaches for Symptom Exploration and Relief; Imagery for
Parts Work, Polarities, and Resolving Inner Conflict; and
Imagery for Psycho-Oncology. All participants in my study had
previously demonstrated competency in RGI as identified by
both supervised clinical practice and fishbowl assessments of
their work.
To say that I was surprised to discover that none of my
former students still practiced Relational Guided Imagery
specifically or followed its tripartite structure (Foresight,
Insight, and Hindsight) would be an understatement. Study
participants instead exhibited what may be characterized as a
broad eclecticism regarding their various approaches to

48
image work, including their practices and clinical applications
of guided imagery. Over the course of my IPA study,
subthematic variants of Multi-Modal Approaches were
distilled from 25 to 13. Only those subthemes instantiated by
at least fifty percent of participants (3 of 6) were considered in
my final analysis. These include Dream Work, Embodied
Imagination, Continue Working Images in the Outer-World,
Expressive Arts, Felt Sense, Meditation, The Natural World as
Image, Personal Guided Imagery, Prayer, Professional
Applications, Entheogens, and Shamanism. Of all the
subthematic varieties, the last two related approaches—
Shamanism and Entheogens were especially surprising
insofar as they were framed by participants as a
developmental step beyond RGI in the elaboration of a
broader psychospiritual matrix. To situate these practices in
the context of my study, findings from my auxiliary research
are provided below.
Shamanism. Contemporary, Western shamanism, as
practiced by study participants, traces its ancestry from Anna
Dorian and Sandra Ingerman back to Michael Harner’s (1980)
syncretic system of neo-shamanism outlined in his book, The
Way of the Shaman. In it, Harner advanced his notion of “core
. . . shamanism” (p xiv), and a healing technique he called
“guardian spirit retrieval” (p. 93). This technique was
embraced more broadly as “Soul Retrieval” by students he
trained at the Foundation for Shamanic Studies (FSS), which
he established in 1970. As described on the FSS website:
Core shamanism consists of the universal, near-
universal, and common features of shamanism,
together with journeys to other worlds, a distinguishing
feature of shamanism. As . . . developed by Michael
Harner, the principles of core shamanism are not
bound to any specific cultural group or perspective. . . .
The Foundation’s programs in core shamanism are
particularly intended for Westerners to reacquire
access to their rightful spiritual heritage through

49
quality workshops and training courses (“Foundation
for Shamanic Studies: Core Shamanism,” 2017).
Harner’s arguably most prominent student, Sandra
Ingerman (2011), titled her book Soul Retrieval: Mending the
Fragmented Self, and it is this name—soul retrieval—that has
been widely adopted by contemporary neo-shamanic
practitioners. Ingerman’s (2011) method of soul retrieval,
employed by study participants entails (1) the creation of ritual
space with dim-lighting, candles, and crystals; (2) the use of a
drum or drum recording to induce an altered state of
consciousness, or trance state; and (3) an imaginal journey
wherein she may experience the original traumatic scene, the
image of a wounded child, or directly receive information and
guidance from her spirt animal (i.e., inner advisor).
Subsequent stages also include (4) the discovery and
reclamation of the lost soul shard; and (5) and a return to
ordinary reality. Upon returning from her imaginal journey—
Ingerman (6) blows the recovered soul fragment into her
patient’s heart chakra, which is characteristic of the aboriginal
Australian shamanic tradition and the shamanic practices of
North American tribes (Cline, 1938, p. 133; Elkin, 1945, p. 133;
Harner, 1990, p. 92). Finally, (7) Ingerman blows the remainder
of the recovered soul into the fontanel at the top of a
patient’s head, which according to her, is a natural point of
the soul’s entry and egress (pp. 26–38). In Ingerman’s
approach, the imaginal experience is undertaking by her on
her patient’s behalf. Participants in this IPA study, however,
also embark on personal soul retrieval journeys, which, in a
way that is similar to guided imagery and active imagination,
seems to entail direct experience of the objective psyche
including dialogue with imaginal beings (i.e., inner advisors).
The significance, meaning, power, and potency of this form of
shamanic spiritual healing described by study participants are
without question, which does not, however, mean that
scholarly debate concerning neo-shamanism is without
conflict.

50
It is far beyond the scope of this dissertation to delve
deeply into the many complexities and controversies
surrounding culturally contextualized indigenous healing
practices as compared to the many brands of neo-shamanism
that Berman (2008, pp. 7–8) and Wallis (2003, p. i) contend
find their source in the writings of Mircea Eliade (1964),
historian of religion and author of Shamanism Archaic
Techniques of Ecstasy; Carlos Castaneda (1964) in his
hybridized blend of anthropological scholarship and fiction,
The Teachings of Don Juan: A Jaqui Way of Knowledge; and
perhaps most influentially by anthropologist Michael Harner
(Berman, 2008, p. 7). Harner’s shamanic syncretism, in
particular (i.e., his essentialist formulation of a bleached,
culturally de-contextualized “core-shamanism”), arguably
accounts for the proliferation of many new age shaman-like
practices embraced by contemporary, white Westerners
today. It goes without saying that anthropologists and native
peoples alike have mounted harsh critiques of neo-
shamanism in general and Harner’s core shamanism in
particular—which some authors view in terms of perfidious
neocolonialism and harmful cultural appropriation (Aldred,
2000; Churchill, 2003; Cruden, 1995; Geertz, 1993; Johnson,
1995; Noel, 1997; Rose, 2001; Wallis, 2003). More sympathetic
treatments of Harner’s core shamanism can be found in
Berman’s Soul Loss and the Shamanic Story, and Smith’s
Jung and Shamanism in Dialogue: Retrieving the Soul,
Retrieving the Sacred. Berman, for example, defends Harner
from Johnson’s (1995) dismissive conflation of what he claims
is Harner’s dubious authority—for his system’s lack of
embedment in a specific tradition or tribal culture—with what
Berman (2008) sees as Harner’s legitimate “academically
endorsed ‘authority’” (p. 17). Smith, meanwhile, without any
reference to the aforenoted controversy concerning Harner’s
approach, seems to uncritically accept Harner’s status as a
leading expert on shamanism and shamanic practice. Smith’s
(2007) deferential appeal to Harner’s perceived authority is
evidenced by his frequent references to Harner (pp. 17–18,
51
24, 97, 114, 186, 214, 238), whom he describes as a “white
shaman” (p. 186) and an “anthropologist and shamanic
scholar” (p. 18). In her article “Bringing the Soul Back to the
Self,” Galina Lindquist (2004)—a social anthropologist—
arguably provides one of the more trenchant analyses of neo-
shamanism and soul-retrieval. Lindquist critically evaluates
soul-retrieval and neo-shamanism on the one hand, while on
the other she frames new-age ontologies of self-
consciousness—which posit an inner authentic essence or
immutable I over and against a sick, compromised social self
—as a form of reconciliation and forgiveness presently
occluded in the post-Protestant secular West. This, according
to her, constitutes a sound first step in a person’s emergence
from implosive narcissism to reengagement with the social
world (p. 158).
Academic controversy and swirling scholarly debate
notwithstanding, it is the position of this paper—despite my
own initial monotheistic pique over study participants’
seeming abandonment of RGI, and my reflexive view of White
Western shamanism as New Age cultural appropriation—that
the psychospiritual practice of neo-shamanism is, in fact, a
valid imaginal technology that possesses intrinsic spiritual
value when it is undertaken with conviction, openness, and
sincerity. This religious attitude can be likened to Jung’s
frame of mind when he pursued the numinous images of the
psyche on his own soul-retrieval journey, which, as he
demonstrates in The Red Book, he undertook with sincere
religious devotion (i.e., religare), personal sacrifice, and
supplication to the divine.
Based on conversations with study participants, I realized
that neo-shamanic journeying not only provides a structure
for practitioners to surpass the confines of ideational and
material reality and permit access to the imaginal realm (i.e.,
the center and source of all theophany), it taps the archetypal
fundament of the creative unconscious and constellates
these powerful psychic energies in community. Even more
than RGI, which set the practice of image work in a dyadic
52
relationship, the neo-shamanic framework situates
practitioners in a communal context mediated by imaginal
linkages to shared traditions, ancestors, and lands. One could
argue that these transtemporal and transpersonal bonds are
forged in the deep imagination through a commingling of
conscious intention and the objective psyche’s mythopoesis,
which together re-awaken an eco-mythological awareness of
one’s connection to self, others, and the natural world.
Following the mytheme of Sleeping Beauty, one could argue,
the bridge spanning indigenous forms of healing and neo-
shamanism is imaginally real, and it is the kiss and creative
spark between the conscious and unconscious that catalyzes
psycho-spiritual resurrection. Mythopoesis preserves an
imaginal veracity that honors and unites historical facticity
with inspired psychological reality. No appeal to the outer
world of concrete actualities is necessary. Indeed, many of
the controversies surrounding neo-shamanism arguably have
to do with conflating Corbin’s (1980) “eyes of flesh” with the
imaginal seers “eyes of fire” (i.e., describing imaginal reality in
terms of outer world materiality) (p. 1). The phenomenon of
neo-shamanism and its discoveries possess imaginal reality
that beyond mere facts, Jungian and archetypal psychology
maintains is as ontologically real as sense perceptions and
ideas of the intellect.
Entheogens. My next unexpected, monotheistic reaction
relates to the subthematic variant Entheogens. My initial
thoughts on using a psychedelic substance to induce imagery
were dismissive if not condemning. This had nothing to do
with a parsimonious attitude opposed to substance use, so
much as it clashed with my initial bias that RGI’s permissive,
nondirective, and relational approach—including its
framework entailing a foresight stage of induction, insight (i.e.,
the imaginal experience), and hindsight grounding,
integration and processing of the imaginal experience—was a
holistic and natural approach that required neither
embellishment (i.e., props, affectations, or supplementation of
any kind). In dialogue with study participants, however, I came
53
to appreciate not only the sacramental reverence of
entheogens they described but the deep spiritual
significance entheogen-enhanced imaginal experiences held
for them. This eye-opening and polytheism-promoting
discovery led me to embark on a somewhat tangential
though amplifying line of research into psychedelia and
Jungian psychology which, without straying too far afield, I
will summarize below.
The terms entheogens and psychedelics are most often
used interchangeably. These terms, though, refer more to
peoples’ subjective experience of their substance-induced
nonordinary state of consciousness than to the classification
of the substances themselves (Becker, 2015). The etymology
of the two terms reveals their subtly different subjective
inflections. Psychedelic comes from the Greek roots, psyche
(soul), and dēlon (to reveal or make visible). Combined, the
word may be understood as soul-revealing. Because in the
modern West the concept mind has supplanted that of soul,
the term psychedelic has come to mean mind-expanding or
consciousness expanding. The word entheogen meanwhile is
derived from the Greek roots en (within), theo (god), gen (to
birth or produce) which may be understood as birthing the
divine within (Becker, 2015). The question of which term one
uses to describe one’s nonordinary experience thus
becomes: Is the nonordinary experience more soul-
expanding—or more revelatory of an indwelling divinity? This
question, of course, can only be answered subjectively.
Use of psychedelics in controlled psychological
experiments didn’t begin until the 1940s, when they were
seen as a means to induce and study discrete psychotic
episodes (Hill, 2013). From that point on, as researchers
began identifying the salubrious effects of psychedelics, two
parallel and at times overlapping currents arose in the
nascent subdisciplinary field of psychedelic-
psychotherapeutic practice: (1) the use of low dose
(psycholytic therapy) to enhance ordinary psychotherapy, and
(2) the use of high dose (psychedelic psychotherapy) to
54
evoke quasi-mystical or peek experiences (Hill, 2013). In his
book, Confrontation with the Unconscious: Jungian Depth
Psychology and Psychedelic Experience, Hill (2013) clears a
path through the coppice of diverse theoretical approaches
to psychedelic psychotherapy that flourished in the 1960s
and 1970s and presents the three “the most prevalent
existing frameworks” (p. 21), which he contends are
Psychoanalytic, Grofian (i.e., from the work of the
transpersonal psychologist Stanislaus Grof), and Shamanic.
Hill’s presentation of the Shamanic framework is drawn
primarily from anthropologist Michael Winkelman’s (2007)
work in Psychedelics Medicine: New Evidence for
Psychedelic Substances as Treatments. Notably absent from
Hill’s list of prominent frameworks is Jungian and archetypal
psychology. Although Hill credits two Jungian researchers
whose clinical work informed the development of his Jungian
theoretical framework (i.e., British psychiatrist Ronald
Sandison and Jungian analyst Margot Cutner), he asserts that
“Jungians as a rule categorically reject . . . that
psychedelic[s] . . . advance psychological growth and
transformation” (p. 13). Their refusal, he says, is evidenced by
the paucity of references to induced entheogenic/
psychedelic-imagery in the Jungian and archetypal
psychological literature. Hill attributes this lacuna to legal
barriers imposed on psychedelic research in the 1960s and
1970s, but most importantly to Jung’s disapprobation and
pointed criticism of psychedelics (Hill, 2013, p. 13). In terms of
future research, based on the accounts of study participants
and their various approaches to image work, this an area that
must be addressed more openly by Jungian and archetypal
psychology.
Aside from one personal letter from 1954 in which Jung
mentioned LSD, his knowledge of psychedelic drugs was
limited to early research on mescaline. Thus, he always spoke
of “mescaline or [used] phrases like Mescaline and related
drugs” (Hill, 2013, p. 8). Regarding the psychotherapeutic use
of psychedelics, Jung (1973b) admitted in his February 15,
55
1955, letter to A. M. Hubbard that he had “certain doubts and
hesitations,” and asserted that “the analytical methods of
psychotherapy (e.g., ‘active imagination’) yield very similar
results” (p. 222). More pointedly, in his letter to Father Victor
White dated April 10, 1954, Jung (1973b) likened psychedelics
(LSD) to poison. He wrote:
It is quite awful that the alienists have caught hold of a
new poison to play with, without the faintest
knowledge or feeling of responsibility. It is just as if a
surgeon had never learned further than to cut open his
patient’s belly and to leave things there. (p. 173)
It seems Jung supposed that clinicians were, by “playing”
with psychedelics, abruptly tearing away the protective veil
between the conscious and unconscious and exposing their
patients to overwhelming unconscious contents for which
neither they nor their doctors were psychically prepared.
Although this devil-may-care attitude, Jung suggests, may
have characterized early psychological investigations of
psychedelics, it seems fortunately to be the case that many
contemporary psychological researchers of psychedelia—
including Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (Ram Das), James
Fadiman, Ralph Metzner, and Stanislaus Grof, among others—
followed Jung’s somewhat sardonic advice and “fed
themselves thoroughly with mescalin [sic], the alkaloid of
divine grace [and other psychedelic substances more
broadly] so that they learn[ed] for themselves its marvelous
effects” (p. 173). One could argue that it is only through their
direct psychedelic experience that these pioneering
psychologists qualified themselves to guide patients into and
out of these powerful, image-saturated, and often sublime
states of nonordinary consciousness. Although the
participants in this study never specified this, they all seem to
have had preparatory training and skilled guidance in their
respective forays into their various entheogenic/psychedelic
experiences.
To summarize, despite my self-perception as broad-
minded, accepting, and inclusive, I discovered over the
56
course of this IPA study my tendency to fall into a posture of
psychological monotheism as it regards imaginal praxis. What
this means is that in order to release the constriction of my
psychic rigidity, I will need to let loose upon the old Senex
dog a litter of Puer pups to make it feel young again and stir
its dormant impulse to play. Said differently, part of my own
imaginal practice will have to include conscious oscillations
between Chronos and Hermes to balance within my psyche
steadfast stricture with playful poiesis (i.e., my own Senex and
Puer tendencies).

5
LIBERATION OF THE IMAGE
AND RECLAIMED ANCESTRY

THE LIBERATION OF THE IMAGE

Although Volume 2 provided a comprehensive overview
of the various ways imagination has been imagined in the
history of Western philosophy—leading to Schelling’s
renomination of human imagination as a superordinate,
world-making power—it emphasized epistemological and
ontological concerns. Although this valorized the Jungian and
archetypal view that images and imagination are a legitimate
means of producing knowledge, it did not explore the ethical
implications of imaginal work. This lacuna will be addressed
now by returning to the status of imagery, images, and
imagination in the postmodern era.
Whereas the premodern paradigm of imagination located
the original source of creativity outside of man (i.e., Platonic
Ideas, immanent nature, or God) and the modern paradigm
situated the power of original creation inside man (i.e.,
57
productive imagination), the postmodern paradigm
conversely deconstructs not only the category of imagination
but also that of origin presupposed by it (Kearney, 1988, pp.
251–253). In regard to images, postmodern thinkers eschew
spacializing language, such as “inner” or “outer,” which
attempts to locate the source of images in situ (p. 291).
Nevertheless, despite Kearney’s account of the postmodern
rejection of the imaginary as a contrivance of self-identity
(Lacan), or the falsification of imagination as the mere
perception of ideology (Althusser), postmodern reflections on
images appear to coalesce around art, art-making, and
rendered graphical images. These depersonalized external
representations, like the manufactured images of consumer
advertising, are thought to colonize the psyche and eclipse
reality. Though postmodern thought denies to materialism or
spiritualism foundational status, it seems to negate their
dualism using deconstructive denial rather than by offering a
creative solution to either synthesize or transcend their
oppositional duality. Jung’s esse in anima, alternately, by
positing a third psychic reality between these and all
oppositional pairs, avoids this sort of diametric
disqualification. In accord with the soul’s image-making
activity, inner and outer—ephemeral idea and material thing—
come together and they are held in balance in the psychic
image. Because the image is thought to lack any fixed
original referent in either the external world of material things
or the internal world or human consciousness,
postmodernists insist that the image can be neither unique
nor authentic. The image is thus reduced to a parody, which
refers to nothing besides other foundationless images in an
endless circle of floating signifiers (Kearney, 1988, p. 252).
Rejecting all metaphysical explanations including premodern
and modern paradigms of the imaginary as (1) a copy of an
original (onto-theology) or (2) the original of a copy (romantic
idealism), through the lens of postmodernism, the very idea of
creative imagination is seen as an ideological humanistic
fraud (Kearney, 1988, p. 388). How, one may wonder, in this
58
context of deconstructive epistemological nihilism, is it
possible to move beyond postmodernity’s bleak view of both
images and imagination? Jungian psychoanalyst Paul Kugler
(2008) and philosopher Richard Kearny (1988) propose two
different albeit related ways forward.
First, Kugler (2008) links Derrida’s semantically sealed and
groundless representational theory to Hume’s radical
empiricism, which rejected transcendental foundationalism.
By dismantling the metaphysical armature supporting
referential language, Kugler avers, Derrida—like Hume before
him—becomes mired in solipsism. Also, Kugler insists, once
universal truths are stripped of their metaphysical scaffolding
and recast as fictions, the existence of shared human
intersubjective experience (relatedness, meaning,
communication) becomes dubious. Hence, Kugler (2008)
argues, Derrida’s radical deconstruction—like Hume’s
arbitrary fictionalism—recapitulates the nominalist vs. realist
debate (see Chapter 2) that characterized medieval onto-
theology. Deconstruction is accordingly interpreted by him as
a form of nominalism—one that nevertheless inclines to
universalize its primary metaphors which include “‘the
social,’ ‘the historical, ‘or ‘the inter-subjective’” (p. 89). Kugler
argues Jungian psychology’s understanding of imagination as
median and mediator located between deconstructive
nominalism and universalizing essentialism links and resolves
these—and arguably all—antinomies through psychic images
which transcend subjectivity, signify unknown depth, and
ultimately surpass consciousness (Kugler, 2008, p. 89). This
depth of psychic images, Kugler argues, exists equally in the
worlds of both objects and the ideas. Although the image
does not constitute a priori knowledge, it nevertheless impels
consciousness to surpass itself and to think beyond what it
already knows. In short, Kugler (2008) asserts that the soul
itself will see through postmodernity’s linguistic closure and
reimagine its liberation through images that point beyond the
ordinary toward something unknown (p. 90). Said differently,
born of the collision of opposites, the image, as a
59
transcendent third, provides a bridge beyond subjectivity to
the sublime (Kugler, 2008, p. 90).
Next, Kearney’s response to deconstructive Nihilism
employs a method of hermeneutic reclamation to preserve
for imagination both creative power and the activity of
narrative identity in what he calls “a poetics of the possible”
(p. 32). Kearny’s (1988) poetics is founded on the “inventive
making and creating” (p. 366) suggested by the Greek word
poiesis. “Poiesis,” of course, was also a signature term of
James Hillman (2007), a term he used in reference to the
protean generativity of the poetical psyche (p. 332). What
Kearny (1998) means by “poiesis” is “an event of creative
imagination” (p. 52) which expresses an amalgam of divine
and human power to reveal and transform (p. 243). In
Schellingian terms, Kearney avers, poiesis is “the
unconscious poetry of being,” (p. 53), which is “the human
power to make . . . a world where we may poetically dwell” (p.
8). For a suitably human imagination to emerge from the
epistemological emptiness of postmodern deconstruction,
Kearny insists, requires a synthetic balance between
premodern poetics and modern ethics. Poetics here pertains
to novel ways of imagining self, others, and the world. By
presenting novelty, freshness, and zest, the image makes it
possible for consciousness to unearth new dimensions of
itself and learn alternative ways of interpreting the world.
Moreover, by using imaginal poiesis, inventive modes can be
explored and unorthodox relational potentials for being with
and among others discovered (Kearney, 1998, p. 33).
According to Kearney, for imagination to be ethical requires
that it (1) envision alternate utopian possibilities for existence,
(2) discern fact from fiction through the testimony of narrative
identity, and (3) permit the “Other to be imagined otherwise”
(Steeves, 2000, p. 146). By this, he means in a way that is
different from the image in which they are held to evade the
limits of representation.
Western imagination has always been characterized by
the interplay of ethics (i.e., the relationship between virtue
60
and the pursuit of individual happiness) and imagination
(Kearny, 1988, p. 366). And each has achieved primacy and
has been subordinated by the other at different times. Both
Platonic philosophy and Christianity, for example, stressed
ethical concerns and distrusted poiesis, whereas the
romantics gave priority to poetical genius and subordinated
morality to art. Kearny argues these opposing tendencies find
a balance in—and through—the uniquely human capacity of
imaginative play, which is capable of transcending
egocentricity and exploring alternate possibilities of
existence. Kearny here follows Jung (1931/1966), who wrote,
“The creative activity of imagination . . . raises man to the
status of one who plays” (p. 46 [CW 16, para. 98]) And,
referencing Schiller (Schiller & Willoughby, 1967), who wrote
that “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the
word a human being, and he is only fully a human being
when he plays” (p. 107), Jung (1931/1966) offered this concise
précis: “Man is completely human only when he is at play” (p.
46 [CW 16, para. 98]).
By “play” Kearney (1998) is not referring to the postmodern
paradigm of parodic play and hollow imitation but to an
ethically tempered form of play that corresponds to the
rediscovery of poiesis in the world (p. 367). The hybridized
post-postmodern play paradigm that Kearney (1998) proposes
specifically refers to the poetic power of imagination to
transcend the either/or logic of ego-consciousness and draw
instead from the both/and “playground” of unconscious
symbols and images, which defy logic’s formal laws (p. 368).
Imaginative playfulness (i.e., opening to spontaneous images
arising from the unconscious), Kearney insists, is both tolerant
and inclusive. It permits the coexistence of seemingly
irreconcilable opposites, and it refuses to disregard the
claims of one side of a contradictory pair for its other.
Synthesizing poetics and ethics, Kearney proposes, the
playful imagination ensures apprehension of alternative
existential modes, safeguards sovereign space for the other,
engenders ethical respect for alterity, and makes knowledge
61
of the other possible by means of empathy (p. 368). In a way
similar to Kugler, who finds salvation from postmodern
nihilism in the middle-ground tertium quid between
antinomies, where the image, in its self-surpassing, reaches
the sublime, so Kearney, too, finds the solution to nihilism at
the pivot-point between poiesis and ethos, where images
arising from the unconscious defy binary dilemmas and
instead provide both/and possibilities for the imagination to
surpass self-centered subjectivity and open to the plural
dimensional otherness of the other. Kearney correctly insists
that only the poiesis of the ethical imagination can constrain
postmodern epistemological deconstruction. And in this light,
his Mercurial hermeneutic reclamation can be understood in
Hillmanian terms as soul-making.
Borrowing from the Romantic poets Blake and Keats,
Hillman would arguably have considered Kearney’s process
of seeing through and imagining beyond the stultifying
literalisms of postmodernism, “soul-making,” which is both the
process of imagining and the coextensive deepening and
widening of the Soul’s imaginal world. For Hillman, “soul” is
the central metaphor for psychology. Noting that
etymologically, the word psychology means “to study the
soul,” Hillman argued that it falls to the discipline of
psychology to provide the soul with a suitable account of
itself. Of equal importance though, he charged, is the
psychological restoration of the Neoplatonic insight that the
world is not only the vale of human soul-making but is itself
ensouled, and fully alive. Images are psyche, and because
they constitute a way of seeing (i.e., a perspective rather than
some visual datum), Hillman (1975) insists, “the making of soul
. . . calls for dreaming, fantasying, [and] imagining.” He
rhapsodizes:
To live psychologically is to imagine . . . to be in touch
with soul means to live in sensuous connection with
fantasy. To be in soul is to experience the fantasy in all
realities and the basic reality of fantasy. (p. 23)

62
Soul-making includes the differentiation and expansion of
imaginal reality, which is an ontologically real dimension
discernible by means of subtle imaginal senses which see
through particular events to their underlying images. Soul-
making also involves movement from ordinary facts and
surface concerns to deeper, murkier, metaphorical, and
mythic dimensions. Thus, to image is to release events from
literalism to mythopoetic expansiveness. And this, arguably, is
what Kearney achieves through the imaginative play of his
hermeneutic reclamation.
Jungian and archetypal psychology’s consonance with
Kearney’s philosophical hermeneutics—which recognizes the
poetical and ethical imagination as salvific—is further
evidenced by Michael Vannoy Adams, who arguably extends
Kearney’s post-postmodern ethical and empathic concern for
the otherness of the other to the images themselves.
Following Jung (1929/1967), who proclaimed that “image is
psyche” (p. 50 [CW 13, para. 75]), and Hillman (1979a), who
specified that the ego itself “is [also] an image” (p. 102),
Adams (2008) more precisely spells out that the psyche is
comprised of “ego images” and “nonego images” (p. 7), which
may be understood as spontaneous images of the other in its
multifarious self-presentation. Adams’s terminology
acknowledges their similitude (i.e., both are images) but also
accentuates the phenomenology of their difference. And it is
this qualitative distinction between ego images and nonego
images—their difference, not their opposition—that Adams
contends accounts for both their dynamic dialogical interplay
but also the ego image’s anxiety and defensive hostility
toward the otherness of the nonego image. Adams’s move
personifies the ego as image-agent. So, for instance, the
conceptual abstraction “the unconscious” becomes in
Adams’s schema everything of which the ego image is
unaware. And until they intrude on upon the ego image and
present their uncanny otherness, what the ego images are
unconscious of are nonego images. The ego image, Adams
avers, is the “I” image or how one images oneself in waking
63
life, dreams, and fantasy. Recall, nonego images are
manifestations of that multiplicity of imaginal persons, places,
and things to which Jung referred under the hypernym “the
other.” Adams rightly observes that the ego image, under the
grandiose delusionary fantasy of its singularity, autonomy,
and control, seldom acknowledges much less seeks out the
otherness of nonego images. Indeed, it is typically the case
that nonego images pursue and disrupt the ego image, which
has the effect of transforming the habitual conscious attitude.
Because the ego image tends to operate from a neurotically
defensive and paranoid position in relationship to nonego
images, psychologists have become heirs to a veritable
arsenal of ways to kill the image (Watkins, 1976/1984). To kill
an image, all the ego image has to do is interpret it,
conceptualize it, or abstract some generality from its
particularity. Failing to stick with the nonego image forecloses
the living process of not knowing (i.e., wonder). And, as the
poacher saws off a rhino’s horn and leaves its carcass to rot,
by embracing generality over specificity, so too does the ego
image cleave concepts from the nonego image. The ego
image’s conclusory judgments, after all, have the effect on
the nonego image of the abattoir’s captive bolt-pistol. For an
ethical “imaginology,” Adams contends, the ego image must
become more inquisitive, curious, and diplomatic. It must be
interactive, communicative, and engaged with the nonego
image; reciprocally affected by it, and allow itself along with
the nonego image to be mutually transformed. All of this can
be achieved, he rightly argues, through active imagination
generally—to which I would add the methods of RGI—and
more specifically by means of imaginal dialogue of the kind
Jung transcribed in his The Red Book and recalled in his
memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. The respectful tone
for the interactive imaginal process, Adams suggests, is
similar to the attitude of open-hearted receptivity toward
images that I described in my essay “C. G. Jung: Champion of
the Imagination” (Dietrich, 2016). In the essay, I argued for the
sovereignty of the objective other (i.e., nonego images) within
64
the psyche and advised that one related to the other—or in
Adam’s terms, that the ego image related to the nonego
image—not as a thing to be colonized or exploited but as a
sentient form of living indigenous wisdom.
To truly honor the “delicate ecology between worlds” (p.
132) requires humility, a capacity to tolerate irrational
processes, and an ability to ask for humbly and receive
guidance from some other psychic source (i.e., nonego
images) that lies beyond ordinary consciousness. This
synthetic balance achieved through imaginal poiesis and the
creative interplay between consciousness and the
unconscious liberates the soul from the stasis of pitiable self-
irony, empty literalism, and semantic closure. By generating
novel images, Kugler, Kearney, Jung, Hillman, and Adams all
seem to agree that the soul’s mythopoetic and ethical
imagination holds soteriological potential; that like the ferry-
man Charon, it can provide passage beyond postmodern
epistemological oblivion to a more differentiated, ever-
widening, and deepening imaginal underworld of
particularized images that speak in many voices and different
tongues, and say what they mean and mean what they say.
Said differently, the soul’s poiesis brings the ego image into a
relationship with the nonego image and presents to
consciousness the face of the other personified, whose
countenance mirrors the wounding and longing of our hearts.
One could argue that soulful poiesis also resists
deconstructive nihilism by awakening conscience, which is
love ethically informed.

RECLAIMED ANCESTRY
Concerning the psychological understanding of imagery,
images, and imagination, my research traced three lines of
intellectual development: The first plotted the historical
progression of therapeutic applications of guided imagery in
the West, which arguably culminated in its most permissive
65
and nondirective form in Jung’s active imagination. A second,
far more directive approach based on Jung’s theorizing was
advanced by Robert Desoille (1890-1966), whose own method
of image work was arguably predicated on provider authority,
directivity, and control. Jung’s initial ambivalence concerning
publication of his findings derived from his experiments in
confrontation with the unconscious, coupled with his failure to
operationalize procedures to engage archetypal images,
arguably contributed to Desoille’s prominent rise and the
widespread dissemination of his ideas, which dominated the
development of mental imagery techniques in Europe (Singer,
1974). This paper contends that Desoille’s rêve éveillé dirigée
(the directed waking dream) amounted to an intellectual
clade divergence in the theoretical and methodological
development of imagery as a therapeutic modality. These two
divergent strands are represented on the one hand by the
directive and authoritative approaches of Happich, Caslant,
Desoille, Leuner—and to a lesser degree, Assagioli—and, on
the other hand, the permissive, nondirective approaches
developed by Binet, Guillerey, Jung, and the research team
Virel and Frétigny. These divergent lines re-converged in
Martha Crampton’s Dialogical Imagery and Mary Watkins’s
theorizing on Waking Dreams. Together, their theoretical and
methodological consonance arguably signified
rapprochement between the directive and nondirective
approaches exemplified by Desoille and Jung, respectively.
This reconciliation debatably had the added effect of
relocating guided imagery’s ancestry in the tradition of
Jungian psychology, which Desoille—the latter-day Pavlovian
—had disavowed and effectively obscured.
The second developmental line outlined in my literature
review surveyed the emergence of the depth psychologies of
the unconscious in general, and Jungian and archetypal
psychology in particular, which venerate the imaginative
psyche’s spontaneous imagery as a valid means of producing
knowledge. This section presented Jung’s epistemological
innovations concerning the archetypal psyche; Corbin’s
66
ontological valorization of the imaginal world based on the
mystical récits of Avicenna (980-1037), Suhrawardi (1154-1191),
Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), and Mulla Sadra (c. 1572-1640); and
finally, Hillman’s synthesis of their work in his own archetypal
psychology which imagines the image in perspectival terms
(i.e., not what we see, but how).
The third intellectual strand tracked the evolution of the
various ways imagination has been imagined in the history of
Western philosophy as either (1) a low-level subordinate
function (i.e., Plato), (2) a mid-level mediating function
between thinking and senses (i.e., Aristotle), or (3) a
superordinate faculty (i.e., the Romantic Philosophers Kant,
Fichte, and Schelling) (Casey, 2000). An enduring oppositive
tension was identified in this comprehensive survey, which
Brann (1993) characterized as the imagist vs. propositionalist
debate in philosophy. These diverging philosophical camps
recapitulate the primordial tension between mythos (i.e.,
myth, imagination, poetry and emotional consciousness) and
logos (i.e., discursive logic, conceptualization, and rational
consciousness). This debate arguably persists in
contemporary Jung studies, with Jungian and archetypal
psychology representing a polytheistic balance between
these primordial and unassimilable pairs on the one hand and
Giegerich’s monotheistic, cosmophagic system of semantic
closure on the other. Affirming Schellingian philosophy, which
upholds the principles of Jungian and archetypal psychology,
this study rejects Giegerich’s neo-Hegelian logical absolutism
and instead reaffirms Jungian and archetypal psychology’s
arguably romantic epistemological, ontological, and
axiological values.
Acclaimed contemporary guided imagery practitioners
whose work accords with the permissive nondirectivity of
Jung’s active imagination—who nevertheless still provide
minimal structure to support a person’s imaginal explorations
—include Davenport (2016), Remen (2016), and Rappaport
(2016). In alignment with these theorists, this study reaffirms
that permissive and nondirective forms of unscripted imagery
67
such as RGI ensure that a person’s imaginal experience will
be meaningful and emotionally valuable. This is born out in
my IPA study, which shows:
1. Participants’ imaginal interactions with personified
beings are of great significance to them.
2. Inner advisor figures are affirmatively described as
reassuring, communicative, loving, protective, and wise.
3. Images serve a bridging, connecting, and mediating
function between dimensions, and various imaginal
realms, including the veil between life and death.
4. Imagery, images, and imagination are healing of mind,
body, and spirit.
5. Participants experience various kinds of imagery (dream
imagery, fantasy imagery, somatic imagery, etc.) through
some or all of the subtle imaginal senses (vision,
olfaction, audition, gustation, and somatosensation).
6. In contrast to Jung’s preference that patients undertake
their imaginal experiences outside the frame of the
therapeutic encounter, participants prefer multimodal
relational approaches to imagery. These approaches
combine nondirectivity and permissiveness with a
modicum of structure wherein a provider “holds space”
and offers gentle encouragement that enlivens and
deepens the imaginal experience.
7. Participants are partial to communal modes of image
work. For example, neo-shamanism, which casts the
imaginal experience as a form of ritual performance and
mythically enframes their imaginal work.
8. Various approaches to imagery facilitate finding,
interacting, and establishing relationships with
personified beings, the most important of which is an
inner guide who is both knowledgeable and loving (i.e.,
wise and compassionate).
9. Imagery, images, and imagination are related to
participant experiences of personal transformation
characterized by increased insight and understanding,

68
greater awareness, and an increased capacity for
openness, trust, vulnerability, and love.
10. Participants describe a variety of salubrious effects
related to imagery, some of which include tapping an
inner source of strength and wisdom, deepening
feelings and emotions, and disclosing to consciousness
a greater reality.
11. Imagery, images, and imagination are related to
transpersonal experience, which is to say, experiences
of sacrality and holiness, nonordinary experiences, and
altered states of consciousness, such as awareness of
multiple dimensions, channeling and hosting spirits,
connecting with the divine, and synchronicity.
12. Imagery, images, and imagination have a special
relationship to death; they permeate and mediate the
boundary between the living and the dead, and they
make possible experiences of communion with the
dead.
Similar to Jung, who professed his most important
experiences in life were when he was in pursuit of the images
(i.e., that they were of an imaginal nature), participants also
affirm the profound meaning that imagery experiences hold
for them—especially when they describe their deep and
abiding relationships with their inner advisors. These imaginal
personifications appeared to study participants as objective
and autonomous beings, which is to say—as precisely who
and what they are—without an external authority’s,
prescription nor any preformulated direction concerning who
or what their inner advisors should be.
As presented in my research findings, all study
participants affirmed the crucial ontological and
epistemological significance of the imagination championed
by Jungian and archetypal psychology. This is evidenced by
the afore-noted fact that advisors are objective and
autonomous, which is to say they possess their own being.
Their ontological and epistemological value is further
instantiated by the fact that all participants report that
69
imagery discloses a greater reality; it is a means of
nonrational knowing; it increases awareness, insight, and
greater discernment; and it provides an inner source of
guidance beyond ego. Based on my research findings, it
would appear that among study participants, the reality of the
psyche and the epistemological value of imagination and
images are axiomatic, which one could argue has everything
to do with Jung’s groundbreaking imaginal investigations.

70
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Dietrich, Ph.D. , LMFT is a licensed
psychotherapist, certified guided imagery
practitioner, clinical supervisor, teacher and
author. Brian was a clinical faculty member and
training supervisor for the California Pacific
Medical Center's Integrative Medicine Education
Program where he taught expressive arts therapy
and interactive guided imagery. He served as
adjunct faculty and clinical supervisor for the
71
California Institute of Integral Studies, Integral
Counseling Psychology Program. Brian is an
adjunct professor for John F. Kennedy
University’s Deep Imagination Certification
Program and a psychotherapist in private practice.
He is also an analytic candidate at the C. G. Jung
Institute of Los Angeles.

72