JUNG'S PRACTICE OF ACTIVE IMAGINATION
We humans have been using the arts for eons, to express ourselves, for comfort, and to make meaning in our world, but C.G. Jung was the first psychologist to incorporate the creative arts into his work. His process of active imagination had deeply personal origins.
Between 1913 and 1916, during his dark night of the soul, Jung decided to let himself follow his impulses. Next thing he knew he was playing at beach, building with stones at the side of the lake where he lived. He found that this childhood activity released fantasies and dreams, and he carefully recorded his experiences in a set of black notebooks.
Jung transcribed his visions and imaginative experiences into a red, leather-bound book, using calligraphy, and he illustrated them with beautiful paintings. Almost a century later, in 2009, The Red Book was published and the original put on display at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.
Just as Jung later encouraged his patients to relax their everyday consciousness and express themselves in whatever form of art came most naturally to them, it seems that
he himself was healed when, out of the material of his chaotic inner life, he created the paintings and calligraphy of The Red Book. This creative work was the soil out of which Jung's theories emerged.
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