Donfrancesco, Francesco. Soul-Making: Interweaving Art and Analysis. Ed. D. Finiello Zervas. London:  Karnac Books, 2009. Pp.  xvi + 183. Pbk. €20.99 / $31.50.

The activity of the ‘mind, absorbed’ delineated in Pessoa's poem is another name for the imagination, in and through which the fleeting and sometimes terrifying experience of the eternal — as raw, living, psychic material — momentarily breaks into our everyday immediate reality and may, if appropriately received and engaged, become aesthetic experience in the form of an image — not as an end in itself, but rather as a transitional form that can be related to, incarnated and fully lived out. Imagination mercurially partakes of and mediates between the unconscious realm and that of the ego, thereby functioning as and creating a third, which the alchemist Sendivogius called the ‘imaginative “faculty” of the soul’ (Jung 1953, para. 396).

These permutations of the imagination make up the central motif running through Francesco Donfrancesco's multifaceted collection of essays entitled Soul-Making: Interweaving Art and Analysis. Donfrancesco, following James Hillman, calls this imaginative faculty the ‘imaginal ego’, a term perhaps less felicitous than that of Sendivogius, as it seems to suggest a more egoic placement than is warranted. Nonetheless, he describes it, appropriately paradoxically, as both ‘a content of the imaginal’ realm and ‘that aspect of the ego complex that takes part in imaginal reality’ (p. 46), sharing in and mediating ‘the life of images’ (p. 1). Donfrancesco brings to vivid life the formation, structure and activity of this imaginal ego, fully embodying it through the fabric of classical and contemporary art and literature, as well as of his own felt and lived experience and clinical practice. Written and initially published in the Italian journal Anima between 1980 and 2005, the e