"The beast that has never actually been ..."  Rilke

In the lecture and workshop I will explore the imagination as valued, needed and employed in analytical psychology. Jungians generally take the presence and work of imagination as given, but it is good to reflect on it more consciously. I will take off from a passage in the long narrative poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, by the Romantic poet, Lord Byron.

‘Tis to create, and in creating live

A being more intense that we endow

With form our fancy, gaining as we give

The life we image ….

We spend our waking hours taking in, collecting, both consciously and mostly subliminally, all that we experience and observe. This process generates an infinite repertoire of images, feelings, ideas and sensations that the unconscious imagination returns to us as the symbolic representations of our dreams. The imagination never rests. By day and by night it endows our deepest fantasies with forms that promote our healing and wholeness, with energy to transform and compensate ego consciousness.