Embodied Imagination in the Intermediary Space Between Neuroscience and Perception

Jungian psychoanalyst Robert Bosnak has dedicated more than five decades to developing techniques for accessing embodied imagination and experiencing it in full bodily awareness. His approach draws on Francisco Varela's notion that cognition does not reflect a pre-given world but brings it into existence through bodily experience.

In his presentation, Bosnak will show examples of his work with dreams and symptoms to explore this creative space that emerges at the frontier between order and chaos, as described by complexity theory.

From this perspective, the body acts as an intelligent instrument, capable of perceiving both the controlled hallucination of waking life and the free imagination of dreams.

Robert Bosnak is a psychoanalyst trained at the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, where his training analysts were James Hillman, Aniela Jaffé, and Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig. He is on the psychiatry faculty of the State University of New York Upstate Medical University and researches the use of psilocybin for cancer patients at the University of Washington.

Creator of the Embodied Imagination method, now practised internationally, Bosnak applies his approach to psychotherapy, the arts, and creativity development. He is the author of several books, former president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, and currently chairs Attune Media Labs, a company dedicated to developing generative AI-based mental health support companions and non-verbal emotion recognition. Drawing on Carl Gustav Jung's pioneering biometric research, he collaborated with the MIT Media Lab on developing computational emotion recognition systems. He currently practises online in private practice and lives between Santa Barbara and Sydney.

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