Active imagination is a practice within psychiatrist Carl Jung’s analytical psychology in which you engage with an inner image or figure and allow an exchange to develop.
You aren’t simply decorating an outcome you’ve already chosen. You attend to the image, your response and what happens between them. Writing, drawing, movement or dialogue may give that exchange a form.
What happens when the figure won’t cooperate?
An imagined guard refuses to move. You could make the guard vanish. Or you could become curious about what it is protecting.
Perhaps your first interpretation becomes less certain. Perhaps the guard seems exhausted rather than hostile. The details matter because the encounter is more than an illustration of the explanation you brought with you.
I AWAKE’s guided imaginal experiences have their own writing and guidance. They aren’t a substitute name for Jung’s clinical practice. The shared interest is in meeting an image, not immediately reducing it to an answer.
Carl Jung introduces the thinker behind the practice. Imaginal practice explains what a guided encounter looks like within I AWAKE.
Jungian analyst Chiara Tozzi describes the practice in Active Imagination, published by the International Association for Analytical Psychology. Her account is useful when you want to understand the original approach rather than use the name for any visualisation.