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In 1916 Jung first wrote about active imagination. Since then a considerable literature has grown up on this topic and a number of volumes and essays have shown that it features in the lives of patients undergoing psychotherapy, in the visions of mystics, in artists, alchemists and that something very much like it can also be observed in children. However, until recently no attempt has been made to arrive at a concise definition, and so it is difficult to decide where the dividing line between it and other forms of imaginative life can be drawn. Weaver (1964) in reply to my discussion (Fordham, 1958a) was the first to define it with any degree of precision and the following criteria, arrived at independently from hers, correspond rather closely with the ones she advances in her book:
For active imagination to occur the subject's conscious attitude must be such that archetypal images can be felt to have an autonomous or objective character when they emerge into the field of consciousness.
The ego must then react so that the images become a valued experience which can lead to creative work.
There are several corollaries to these criteria: (a) the sequence of images can occupy a short or a long period of time; (b) they need not have a numinous or magical quality attached to them; (c) though understood theoretically as belonging to the inner world they do not necessarily carry with them the feeling of being ‘inner’; (d) for active imagination to take place it is not necessary for the subject to consider the psychological significance of the image sequences.
In 1958 (b, p. 125) I suggested that active imagination could be understood