Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

Bringing Fantasies into Life 107
inside the circle. You can do anything you want—anything! It’s all
up to you.”
This was wily advice because, as I later learned, any circular image
is in effect a mandala, and mandalas are traditionally, that is to
say archetypally, containers of the mystery. At the time I certainly
needed a container, and everything was a mystery to me.
Before long my walls were covered with images of my inner life:
gaudy mandalas, stick figures, fanciful doodles, depictions of a
mood. I graduated from newspaper to cardboard to good quality
bond. I used whatever came to hand: pencils, pen, paint, felt-tipped
markers, fingers, toes, my tongue! All crude reflections of whatever
was going on in me when I did them. They had no style or technique
and people who came to visit my hole-in-the-wall apartment
looked askance. When I come across them now they do seem grotesque,
but at the time I loved them and my soul rejoiced.
Jung himself pioneered active imagination by painting and writing
his dreams and fantasies, and some he chiseled in stone. In fact,
he pinpointed this work on himself as fundamental both to his formulation
of the anima/animus concept and to the importance of personifying
unconscious contents:
When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself,
“What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science.
But then what is it?” Whereupon a voice within said, “It is
art.” I was astonished. It had never entered my head that what I was
writing had any connection with art. Then I thought, “Perhaps my
unconscious is forming a personality that is not me, but which is insisting
on coming through to expression.” I knew for a certainty that
the voice had come from a woman. 105
Jung said very emphatically to this voice that his fantasies had
nothing to do with art, and he felt a great inner resistance.
Then came the next assault, and again the same assertion: “That is
art.” This time I caught her and said, “No, it is not art! On the contrary,
it is nature,” and prepared myself for an argument. When
105 Memories, Dreams, Reflections, pp. 210f.