Psyche said:I told Eros that I needed him to console me through me, not in fantasies that have no bear with reality, but I needed to integrate him in me so I could reclaim my Self. After all, Eros represented a part of me that I never reclaim in myself because of my inner traumas and the childhood I was brought in.
I'm reading Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales by Marie-Louise von Franz where she describes in more detail the difference of passive and active imagination, the later making a real and significant difference. It's pretty much like the process I described above, but here are some quotes that add some context, it has some Jungian lingo, but it can be interpreted from what we have discussed about psychology and the Work:
Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales said:The theme is archetypal, and the idea of a beautiful girl who in some way has been bewitched, or has a poisonous body which kills anyone who comes near her unless he knows how to exorcise her, seems to be a common element in Oriental legends. In northern European countries the poison in the bride often comes because she has a secret affair with a pagan demon living in the woods, and through this affair she becomes a destroyer of men; and until the king can cut the connection or kill the demon or evil spirit behind the anima, he cannot win her. [...]
The modern psychological parallel would be active imagination, through which one can literally attract the contents of the unconscious. If you succeed in producing the right kind of symbol, either by drawing, or writing a fantasy, or by actual active imagination, you can, to a certain extent, constellate your own unconscious. Otherwise the achievement of the connection be-tween conscious and unconscious is a relatively slow process. For instance, an individual with a certain conscious attitude has a dream which we interpret and, if the interpretation is correct, there is a reaction and the conscious changes its attitude or ideas. The fact that consciousness has changed affects the next dream, and in that way there results a slow interconnection. [...]
I had a patient who drank and was in a dangerous situation inwardly and outwardly. He dreamt again and again of a dead school friend, whom he described as a man who had been very intelligent but neurotic, if not schizophrenic—the type of schizophrenia which you could describe as moral insanity. His mental functions were not affected, but the ethical personality was destroyed. He got into difficulties with the law and tried to commit suicide, and after internment succeeded. Since this fig¬ure appeared almost every night in the patient's dreams, I said that he must somewhere have such a figure within him (for he also did not believe in life), that it must have to do with his drinking, and that he should confront the shadow figure. The man agreed, but did nothing. When we counted up the number of times he had dreamt of this same man, it averaged about three times a week.
After some time of this I had enough and said that the patient must have it out with the figure in active imagination, and, being naive and gifted in that way, he succeeded. He asked his friend why he was annoying and disturbing him, and the friend replied that the whole psychological treatment was a fake, that the pa-tient was afraid of cancer of the liver and wanted to save his skin, there was nothing else behind it, he was just a coward. The patient defended himself, but he was not nearly as intelligent as his friend and after a time did not know how to argue and gave it up and said the friend was right. That was about five o'clock in the afternoon. He went to bed that night and about eight A.M. woke up with a horrible heart pain. He telephoned a doctor but nearly died. The doctor looked after him and a cardiogram was made, but it was a purely psychological attack which nearly killed him!
We went through the active imagination again, and I said that he had forgotten the arguments of the heart. The friend had got him through arguing on an intellectual basis in which there are but there is the possibility of choice, and that implies the heart, or feeling. I said he should begin again. He did so and said to the friend, "Look here, I have thought it over." "Oh, no," said the friend, "you have talked it over with your soul governess in Zurich!" The friend had this kind of destructive wit. But the patient said that the heart trouble was his own, in spite of the discussion in Zurich, and that it was the conversation with his friend that his heart had not been able to stand. So this time the friend was on the spot, and the conversa¬tion ended by the other not having anything more to say. The same night the man dreamt that he was at the friend's funeral.
In the ensuing analysis, which lasted a year and a half, this figure appeared only once, instead of three times a week, the previous average. Thus active imagination, if done in the right way, really has an impact on the unconscious. It has a much stronger effect than only dream interpretation, and the above case shows how creating the right symbolic figure in a symbolic dialogue caught the cynical shadow and exerted an actual influ-ence on the unconscious. Naturally, this is on the same level as age-old magic which has always been used to influence the psychological situation—it is really the same practice, but magic has an outer purpose. If this man had been a person of medieval mentality, I would have said that to dream so much about this cynical friend meant that his specter was haunting him; but as he was a modern man, he had it from within.
We draw a distinction between white and black magic, which would be that the latter is used for egotistical purposes. A woman in love uses a love potion, but that is the ego trying to push through its egotistical demands. There is also white magic in the form of exorcism, but that serves an ecclesiastical pur¬pose. Active imagination is produced entirely from within and is looked at in the same way, though it has sometimes an outer effect; indeed, one should only do it for one's own inner sake.
Jung has experienced that if it is done with living people, the other person is actually affected, though he could not explain how it works, but that is why it is dangerous, and we try to keep away from it. You can talk to your projection on the living person, but not directly to the living person. If you hate someone very intensely and want to work on that, you have to personify your hate and talk to it and not the living person.
I had an analysand who had a kind of admiration transference for a couple with whom she was first friendly, but then began to hate intensely. She always went to see them and always returned poisoned and upset. It was clearly a projection: they had a lot of shadow in common. Then she heard vaguely about active imagination, but what she thought was active imagination was to imagine that the man was there and then to insult and fight and in the end kill him. Afterward she felt quite relieved and went to bed and then dreamt that a witch had caught and imprisoned her. I asked her what she had done and said that something must have happened during the day, and she told me of her pseudo active imagination; her dream showed clearly that she had practiced witchcraft and not active imagination. She could have personified her hate or affect, and then it would have been all right, for she would have had the two figures of herself and "a woman who hates," and she could have asked the latter why she wanted to kill the man, and that would have worked. To deal with the image of the outer person is a mistake which has bad results and can act like a boomerang. The analysand did not rid herself of her hate, but fell into the archetype of the witch and even deeper into the unconscious. If you wish to work on a relationship with a real person and don't want to fall into magic, then talk to your own personified affect; but you must keep it within the vessel of your own personality and not draw in the outer person.
In cases where you can watch the effect of witchcraft, you can see that there are exteriorized destructive effects, but more than that, it harms the person who does it, making him even more unconscious, and it has no curative effect. In active imagi-nation the ego must empty itself and be an objective onlooker. The ego should say, "Now, let's look at my affect," so the first step is that of disidentification when the ego becomes an objec-tive onlooker. The analysand identified with her hatred where she should have disidentified. That is what we call an Auseinand-ersetzung, namely "sitting apart and having it out with each other," and the first thing is to "sit apart." That is a wonderful description of active imagination. I "sit apart" from my hatred, or my great love, and then I discuss with that factor, but I leave out the object because otherwise I am practicing black magic. The object of your hatred or love is something on which your unconscious greed fastens, and by that you produce wishful thinking, just the opposite of active imagination. People think of what they love, or what they would like to do, and believe that that is active imagination, but it is magic, and has all the effects of an abaissement du niveau mental; it can even release a psychosis.
If we are upset about something, a discussion goes on all the time within us, but that is passive imagination and completely different from the difficult art of sitting apart and disidentifying and looking at something objectively. If people can do active imagination for hours, then it is wrong; if it is done rightly, one is exhausted after ten minutes, for it is a real effort and not a "letting go."
Yes I would but here is unknown people so I don't have that confidence. Ok I'm going to try it, I thought I just was creative haha, but I see that the archetypes or essence of some characters in my fantasies/imaginations appear on other people heads, in their own stories, as explained in this thread.
It looks very interesting the synchronicities. Thanks for the last post, it helps me to understand better my actual situation, and that phrase about creativity rolling on facebook ;)
