Hold Fast

Hurlyburly

..We draw a distinction between white and black magic, which would be that the latter is used for egotistical purposes. 

A woman in love uses a love potion, but that is the ego trying to push through its egotistical demands. There is also white magic in the form of exorcism, but that serves an ecclesiastical purpose. Active imagination is produced entirely from within and is looked at in the same way, though it has sometimes an outer effect; indeed, one should only do it for one's own inner sake. Jung has experienced that if it is done with living people, the other person is actually affected, though he could not explain how it works, but that is why it is dangerous, and we try to keep away from it. You can talk to your projection on the living person, but not directly to the living person. If you hate someone very intensely and want to work on that, you have to personify your hate and talk to it and not the living person.

I had an analysand who had a kind of admiration transference for a couple with whom she was first friendly, but then began to hate intensely. She always went to see them and always returned poisoned and upset. It was clearly a projection: they had a lot of shadow in common. Then she heard vaguely about active imagination, but what she thought was active imagination was to imagine that the man was there and then to insult and fight and in the end kill him. Afterward she felt quite relieved and went to bed and then dreamt that a witch had caught and imprisoned her. I asked her what she had done and said that something must have happened during the day, and she told me of her pseudo active imagination; her dream showed clearly that she had practiced witchcraft and not active imagination. She could have personified her hate or affect, and then it would have been all right, for she would have had the two figures of herself and "a woman who hates," and she could have asked the latter why she wanted to kill the man, and that would have worked. To deal with the image of the outer person is a mistake which has bad results and can act like a boomerang. The analysand did not rid herself of her hate, but fell into the archetype of the witch and even deeper into the unconscious. If you wish to work on a relationship with a real person and don't want to fall into magic, then talk to your own personified affect; but you must keep it within the vessel of your own personality and not draw in the outer person.

In cases where you can watch the effect of witchcraft, you can see that there are exteriorized destructive effects, but more than that, it harms the person who does it, making him even more unconscious, and it has no curative effect. In active imagination the ego must empty itself and be an objective onlooker. The ego should say, "Now, let's look at my affect," so the first step is that of disidentification when the ego becomes an objective onlooker. The analysand identified with her hatred where she should have disidentified. 

That is what we call an Auseinandersetzung, namely "sitting apart and having it out with each other," and the first thing is to "sit apart." That is a wonderful description of active imagination. I "sit apart" from my hatred, or my great love, and then I discuss with that factor, but I leave out the object because otherwise I am practicing black magic. 

The object of your hatred or love is something on which your unconscious greed fastens, and by that you produce wishful thinking, just the opposite of active imagination. People think of what they love, or what they would like to do, and believe that that is active imagination, but it is magic, and has all the effects of an abaissement du niveau mental; it can even release a psychosis.

If we are upset about something, a discussion goes on all the time within us, but that is passive imagination and completely different from the difficult art of sitting apart and disidentifying and looking at something objectively. If people can do active imagination for hours, then it is wrong; if it is done rightly, one is exhausted after ten minutes, for it is a real effort and not a "letting go."We don't know exactly how the other person could be affected by the black magic method described above. The other person might have a similar complex, and that would be affected; that is how all such things work among primitive people—someone has a photograph and puts a pin in it, etc. If you do witchcraft imagination, you can become an addict and go on and on—the thing that was started involuntarily cannot be stopped.