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The Ideas in this paper are based on my having become aware of a certain type of counter-transference activity which, in turn, has led me to the central idea that during analysis a hitherto unconscious drama in which the patient has been held a prisoner is enacted in the here and now; he finds himself repeating the same type of relationship, or non-relationship, like ‘a stuck gramophone record’, as one patient put it. The record can become unstuck if the enacting of the drama has been, so to speak, realized by being lived through and worked through within the transference. The patient is then freed to possess and use his own emotions and imagery instead of being compulsively driven by the unconscious drama within him. It is in this sense that I think a successful analysis can be thought of as a lived-through active imagination.
Jung described active imagination as follows:
‘By [active imagination] I mean a sequence of fantasies produced by deliberate concentration. I have found that the existence of unrealized, unconscious fantasies increases the frequency and intensity of dreams, and that when these fantasies are made conscious the dreams change their character and become weaker and less frequent. From this I have drawn the conclusion that dreams often contain fantasies which “want” to become conscious. The sources of dreams are often repressed instincts which have a natural tendency to influence the conscious mind.
‘In cases of this sort, the patient is simply given the task of contemplating any one fragment of fantasy that seems significant to him—a chance idea, perhaps, or something he has become conscious of in a dream—until its context becomes visible; that is to say the relevant associative material in which it is embedded. It is not a question of the “free association” recommended by Freud for the purpose of dream analysis, but of elaborating the fantasy by observing the further fantasy material that adds itself to the fragment in a natural manner.
‘This is not