Image as Portal

Once in a while an image strikes us as poignant in a peculiar way.  It’s as if the image offers a portal to an encounter with the objective psyche.

Jung shares the story of an analysand that was having trouble accessing   the experience of active imagination.  Upon looking at a poster of the alps, was able in his imagination to wander up into the scene until he came upon a small chapel, and upon entering and surveying the interior, was startled by the scurrying of a small being behind the altar.  Shaken by the experience, and after first wanting to dismiss it, the analysand reapproached the scene a second time.  Upon entering the small chapel, his internal dialogue expected the scurrying.  And when it again took place, his attitude toward the experience shifted.  He no longer had difficulty with the method.

As Whitmont points out:

“Dreams are not coherent myths, but rather flash pictures, as it were.  In dreams mythological pieces are fitted into a great deal of personal material in an apparently irrational arrangement.  The dream is thus a fragmented or personalized myth.  On the other hand the myth (and we include also the fairy tale) could be regarded as a consciously molded or depersonalized dream.  There are, however, instances when the unconscious presents a myth directly, when for example, fantasy production takes place, not under conditions of an absolute exclusion of consciousness but in half-awake or trance state, or under hypnosis, or by use of the technique which Jung called active imagination.  Myths also appear naturally and spontaneously in yarn-spinning and storytelling, especially by children.” Edward Whitmont, The Symbolic Quest, pg.76.

It’s also possible to re-enter a specific dream image if the threshold of consciousness is lowered.  Of course these experiences remain closed off, essentially defended against, if the collective prejudice against the imaginal and the psyche is embraced.