Up: [[Active Imagination]] Created: 2025-05-13 Updated: 2025-12-06 [[C. G. Jung]] is credited with developing the process of Active Imagination during the time period that was referred to by Jungians as his “creative illness,” and by non-Jungians as his “psychotic break.” Jung personally denied having invented active imagination, claiming it was what man had done from the dawn of time as a way of knowing his gods. That’s a nice idea but it’s tough to prove! More compelling is Ken James’s thought that Jung wasn’t so much ‘doing’ active imagination as active imagination was doing him. Images came to him from his unconscious and he just did the best he could with them, recording them first in his Black Books (journals) and then, beautifully with art and text, in [[Jung's Red Book]]. Ken suggests that Jung’s big contribution in active imagination was recognizing that it had therapeutic value in bringing important unconscious material to consciousness. Jung was the pioneer who endured the [[Challenges of Active Imagination]] so that it’s now a safe, or at least safer, therapeutic process.