Comment

Dieckmann's work ‘Symbols of active imagination’ raises the question of the relationship which exists between active imagination and the transcendent function. Jung (1916, pp. 85-7) postulates this association when he compares the principle of comprehension (of the senses) to the principle of aesthetic configuration.

These two principles stand in a compensatory relationship to each other. They mutually regulate themselves and thus prevent the danger of going off along byways and pursuing erroneous ideas, which occurs in the partiality or exclusivity of one of the two presentations. Because the aesthetic approach requires the understanding of the senses and the principle of comprehension, in comparison, requires the aesthetic sense, ‘the two supplement each other to form the transcendent function’. This means, simply, that these two principles converge in the transcendent function.

An exactly conceptualized description of active imagination and the transcendent function appears all the more necessary since Adler (1967) refers to the fact that Jung had originally named ‘transcendent function’ the method of active imagination, and had used the two terms synonymously. This use, however, is unjustified for the reason that active imagination for its part presents only a possibility of narrowing the distance between consciousness and the unconscious, resulting in the close approach of two previously contrary positions. A relationship to the unconscious is therefore produced in a positive manner—more exactly, a relationship to a content of the unconscious. Active imagination is in this way one of the possible ways of obtaining access to the unconscious whereby more especially the emotional constituent of this unconscious content is experienced and then integrated.

The transcendent function, for its part, is at once strictly or formally defined as the ability of the psyche to counteract the state of repression, and perhaps in the organization of the symbol to elucidate the cont