This series of talks is a further exploration of the concept and practice of active imagination, a core aspect of analytical psychology.
This form of inner work, developed by Jung and elaborated in his work The Red Book, is a way of evoking dream states while awake, thus providing access to dream-like content as a practice. In contrast to meditation, in which images entering consciousness are released as they emerge, active imagination is a state of concentration in which emergent fantasies are followed and explored. They may be vivid images or narrative trails; they may involve vocal entities which enter into dialogue with the imaginer. In this way, Jung believed that the fantasy gives access to previously disconnected fragments of the psyche and bring these into the whole. Some practitioners also regard these visions as gateways to the divine or to archetypal wisdom.
What does this mean in practice? To induce a state of active imagination the psychoanalyst will invite the patient to enter into a fantasy and observe the evolving scene, letting it materialise as though autonomously, and encouraging the imaginer as fully as possible to engage in spontaneous dialogue with the imagined entities. Jung said, “You yourself must enter into the process with your personal reactions…as if the drama being enacted before your eyes were real.”
But why is active imagination attracting such interest at the moment? Please join the series and see what this means in terms of contemporary Jungian analysis and beyond.
FEES
Per seminar
Self-funded: £30
Confer member: £24
CPD:
1.5 hours per evening
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar
Monday 25 January 2021
Dr Murray Stein
The Use of Imagination in Jungian Psychoanalysis: Practice and Theory
In classical Jungian psychoanalysis, active imagination is one of the key instruments for contacting and working with the unconscious. It has summoned a wave of interest among Jungian practitioners since the publication of The Red Book by C.G. Jung in 2009, demonstrated by the recent publication of four volumes of essays by Jungian scholars in the series titled Jung’s Red Book for Our Time: Searching for Soul Under Postmodern Conditions. Today the role of imagination is taking a paramount position as a pillar of Jungian analytic practice, theory-making, and depth psychological response to issues in contemporary culture. We shall consider why it is making such a come-back and what active imagination brings to the therapy process.
TIME:
UK Greenwich Mean Time: 19.30 – 21.00hrs
US Eastern Time: 14.30 – 16.00hrs
US Pacific Time: 11.30 – 13.00hrs
CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar
FEES:
Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Wednesday 20 January.
Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).
Self-funded: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)
Confer member: £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)
Monday 1 February 2021
Maria Grazia Calzà
Over-Flowing: Women’s Mysticism and Imagination
To Jung, our imagination is the door to divinity: it serves as a symbolic intermediary allowing for the imaging of the imageless divine; images allow mystics to stand in relationship with the transcendent. This seminar will relate Jung’s idea to the numinous images of this “Imaginative Presence” which over-flowed medieval mystic women’s consciousness and was transmuted and grounded in the body. In their visualization, they envisioned Jesus as an “incarnational form” of divinity (Self) that was feminine in nature, a “continuum with” rather than as an “opposition to” their ordinary feminine experience of embodiment. We will connect these processes and see how they may relate to psychotherapy.
TIME:
UK Greenwich Mean Time: 19.30 – 21.00hrs
US Eastern Time: 14.30 – 16.00hrs
US Pacific Time: 11.30 – 13.00hrs
CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar
FEES:
Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Wednesday 27 January.
Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).
Self-funded: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)
Confer member: £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)
Monday 8 February 2021
Bayo Akomolafe
What if the Soul Were a More-Than-Human Village? Diffracting Active Imagination in a Post-Humanist World
Jung’s active imagination is believed to be the heart of his massive contributions to depth psychology and central to his psychotherapeutic enterprise. There are many guides on how to experiment with active imagination – the process of making dreamed images objectively intelligible in a process of healing and transformation. Lingering in many descriptions of this process, codified after Jung’s death, is a reflexive method that involves “going inward” to correspond with the images behind dream-induced emotions. However, in light of post-humanist insights to critical theory and the subsequent annulment of the coherent soul, where do we draw the line between what is “inward” and “outward”? Who is the dreamer? What roles do the non-human “furniture” around us play in the production of images, and how do we account for their work?
TIME:
UK Greenwich Mean Time: 19.30 – 21.00hrs
US Eastern Time: 14.30 – 16.00hrs
US Pacific Time: 11.30 – 13.00hrs
CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar
FEES:
Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Wednesday 3 February.
Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).
Self-funded: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)
Confer member: £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)
Monday 22 February 2021
Ashok Bedi
Imagination – An Act of Creation
Life is a series of road bumps, detours, and breakdowns. Most of the time, our consciousness can manage these crises with its default mode of operation. However, if our ego consciousness is overwhelmed by the trauma, then the deeper layers of our psyche are activated to master the situation. At such a juncture, our collective consciousness and the cumulative archetypal wisdom of our ancestors triggers the imagination to create a new image or a symbol to help us to navigate such overwhelming situations. However, when there is a collective imbalance, such as the one we are currently experiencing in the world, shamanic souls create a symbol to heal the cultural fault lines of the times. We will overview three such creations: Jung’s Red Book, Kandinsky’s Reciprocal Accord and Goethe’s Faust, concluding with a mandala exercise by the participants to demonstrate this creative act of imagination.
TIME:
UK Greenwich Mean Time: 19.30 – 21.00hrs
US Eastern Time: 14.30 – 16.00hrs
US Pacific Time: 11.30 – 13.00hrs
CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar
FEES:
Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Wednesday 17 February.
Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).
Self-funded: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)
Confer member: £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)
Monday 1 March 2021
Velimir B. Popović
Active Imagination: Monologue or Dialogue?
Jung’s encounters with the unconscious that he described in The Red Book were especially fruitful for his followers. He described his dialogues with various unconscious images and these developed into the concept of active imagination as a therapeutic technique. Yet, unfortunately, this process was never fully elaborated for future analytical psychologists. A probable reason is that the conversations Jung had with unconscious images were depicted in The Red Book as monologues. He used his own words to replace other voices thus, unfortunately, silencing them and denying the reader a sense of that rapport between the imaginer and the imagined. Velimir will suggest that formation of this ‘monological imagination’ hindered the shaping of the dialogical aspect of these experiences that is central to the process of active imagination. We will consider how to work with this gap in theory and practice and to listen to the voices of the imagined others.
TIME:
UK Greenwich Mean Time: 19.30 – 21.00hrs
US Eastern Time: 14.30 – 16.00hrs
US Pacific Time: 11.30 – 13.00hrs
CPD:
Certificates of Attendance will confirm that the participant joined the webinar
FEES:
Please note booking closes 5pm (GMT) Wednesday 24 February
Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event).
Self-funded: £30 (BOOKING CLOSED)
Confer member: £24 (BOOKING CLOSED)