Active imagination (n.) is one of the highest forms of psychic activity: conscious and unconscious flow together into one product — and it may even create the individuality it expresses.
Active imagination (n.) is not a plaything for children: it can stall in sterile free association, dissolve into mere aesthetic phantasmagoria, or flood the mind into a psychotic interval.
Active imagination (n.) is contemplating one fragment of fantasy until its context grows around it — not free association, but letting the fantasy add to itself.
Active imagination (n.) dismisses the objection “it's all made up” as the anxiety of an ego that brooks no master besides itself in its own house.
Active imagination (n.) uses the fact that unconscious contents, concentrated on, become charged and lit from within until they are a kind of substitute reality, as in Loyola's Exercises.
Active imagination (n.) and alchemy are the same irrigation of the conscious mind by the unconscious — ultimately the process of individuation.
Active imagination (n.) is what the alchemical rite amounted to, individuation pictured through substances; it arises when analysis has set the opposites against each other so sharply that a synthesis of the personality becomes imperative.
Active imagination (n.) came to a stuck young artist through a railway poster: he walked into the picture, over the hill, into a chapel, and saw something with pointed ears vanish behind the Madonna — and it did so again the next time.