JUNG & IMAGES

In spite of the difficulty of some of Blake's poetry, he was not trying to hide from us the truth that had been revealed to him, but to make it known. Like us, Blake lived in the world of generation, with all its distractions, distortions, oppressions and disappointments. But the Eternal world of the Imagination he knew to be the real world. He wanted us to know as he knew, that the real world in which nothing is worthless or can be lost, was open for us to enter. He felt with all his being that if each individual could know that Eternal Reality, it would assist in renewing the earthly world we inhabit. Not that we could create a better world, but we may create the conditions for God's transforming power to be manifest.

Vision of the Last Judgment, Page 90, (E562)

"Here they are no longer talking of what is Good &
Evil or of what is Right or Wrong & puzzling themselves in Satans
[Maze] Labyrinth But are Conversing with Eternal
Realities as they Exist in the Human Imagination   We are in a
World of Generation & death & this world we must cast off if we
would be Painters [P 91] Such as Rafa[e]l Mich Angelo & the
Ancient Sculptors. if we do not cast off this world we shall be
only Venetian Painters who will be cast off & Lost from Art"

The following passage is from an article by Michael Vannoy Adams which is the first chapter in Joseph Reppen (ed.), Why I Became a Psychotherapist (Northvale, NJ, and London: Jason Aronson, 1998), pp. 1-14.

"For Jung, the purpose of psychoanalysis is, as Blake says, 'Conversing with Eternal Realities as they Exist in the Human Imagination' (1810, p. 613) - or, in Jungian terminology, dialoguing with archetypal realities that exist in fantasy. According to Jung, the images in a dream - or in active imagination - are exactly what they seem to be or seem to mean. He proposes a precision theory of the imagination. 'Precision means whatever is actually presented,' Hillman says. 'Simply: the actual qualities of the image' (1977, p. 69). The unconscious, Jung argues, is incredibly precise in the selection of qualitatively apt images to epitomize psychical reality. It is difficult to interpret psychical reality not because some censor distorts, or encrypts, reality in a code that we then have to decipher, but simply because the unconscious, like some poet, communicates in images with which we are only more or less familiar. We do not have to translate these images; we have to define them. We have to explicate all that a specific image implies. The imagination is, in this sense, what the philosopher of science Michael Polanyi (1966) (who also befriended me in Texas and later in England) calls a 'tacit dimension,' or what the physicist David Bohm (1981) calls an 'implicate order.' Jungian analysis employs a phenomenological (or 'essentialist') method. It inquires into the essential being or meaning of images, the fundamental phenomena of psychical reality. From a Jungian perspective, the unconscious does not so much conceal as it reveals. What an image is or means is not hidden from us, as if there were some deceptive intent; it is simply unknown to us, because we have not mastered the poetic, or imagistic, language that the unconscious employs."

Engaging in Activities of the Imagination