Presentation at the BJAA Summer Gathering: ‘Fantasy, Imagination and the emergence of Analytical Psychology as a distinct discipline of psychotherapy’

Jung’s understanding of the nature of fantasy and imagination is one of his most original contributions to the field of psychology. Yet Jung references the subject only sparingly in the Collected Works. His own self-experimentation with the imaginal realm as documented in the Black Books took the form of entering into waking fantasies and dialoguing with the characters that appeared. The development of this approach as a systematic way of engaging with the inner world made analytical psychology a distinct discipline of psychotherapy beyond the cure of neuroses and had substantial implications for the analytic relationship and the analytic attitude. This talk will explore Jung’s notion of fantasy and imagination as this is elucidated in the Red Book and Black Books, its implications for the nature of the psyche, and its role in individuation and in analysis.