Weaver, Rix. The old wise woman. A study of active imagination. New York,  G. P. Putnam's Sons, for the C. G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, 1973. Pp.  176. $7.50.

Rix Weaver's The old wise woman, first published by Vincent Stuart Ltd., London, in 1964, has now been reissued by the C. G. Jung Foundation in New York. The text is unaltered; bibliographical references have been added to bring it up to date. Unfortunately the printing of the illustrations is inferior to that in the London edition.

The author assumes that her readers are ‘familiar with analysis’. Active imagination, she suggests, belongs to an advanced stage of analysis, when personal problems have been dealt with, and a viable ego is established. Active imagination aims at relating the ego to the suprapersonal hinterland of the psyche, the archetypes, culminating in the discovery of the self, and is thus a vehicle of individuation in the second half of life.

Various features of the technique of active imagination are discussed. The critical attitude of consciousness must be held at bay; there must be no hasty conscious intervention; yet the ego should play an active role in relation to the emerging fantasies in order not to be overwhelmed, or inflated, or compelled to act them out. If these conditions are not observed, the desired rapproachement between conscious and unconscious—which is the prerequisite for the formation of the self—-cannot take place.

The major part of the book, eight chapters in all, deals with one example of active imagination—a fantasy about a little mermaid's adventures on the road to self-realization. Pictures of clay models illustrating focal points in the story are added, as well as an extensive commentary relating to each stage in the development of the fantasy. One further chapter presents a sequence of active imagination stimulated by a recurrent dream; here the theme is the transformation of the negative animus into the psychopompos. The last chapter brings questions asked by an audience to whom the author lectured on her subject, and her replies.

Taken as a whole, the book is a brave attempt to make a difficult subject intelligible to pe