This is James Hillman's preface from A.R. Pope's original translation. Printed privately for students in 1957 at the Jung Institute in Zurich.

This essay, which has not before appeared in print either in English or German, was written in 1916. Because it has not been revised by Dr. Jung, but stands in its original form, this note may serve to place the essay within its historical context.

In 1916, Dr. Jung was working out those two fundamental formulation of analytical psychology which, after many revisals, are now known in English as "Two Essays on Analytical Psychology." The first of these essays, in its 1916 version (see: Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology, 2nd ed., 1917, Chap. 14), mentions the transcendent function, which comes about as a result of "a new method of treating psychological materials such as dreams and phantasies." Since he had discovered that dreams and fantasies had a prospective aspect which could not be reduced to past events, the reductive methods of the Vienna School became only partial methods. Therefore, it had become necessary to evolve this new synthetic or constructive method to deal with these prospective aspects. As a detailed description of this new method of the Zurich School in its relation to the transcendent function, this paper fits in as an important complement to the work of that period. The term "transcendent function", used here for the "union of the conscious and unconscious", is not so much in use today, having been replaced in a wider sense by the self and in a narrower sense by the concept of the reconciling symbol, both of which are prefigured in this paper, thereby giving us further witness to the logical and empirical development of Dr. Jung's ideas. Also, as Miss Barbara Hannah points out in her short summary of this hitherto unpublished manuscript (see: "Some Remarks on Active Imagination", Spring 1953), we have here an early and very clear account of active imagination as available nowhere else in Dr. Jung's writings.

In addition to its historical value, the essay is also highly up-to-date. Active imagination is here discussed in terms of the compensatory relationship of the conscious and unconscious, that is the transcendent function is presented in terms of the psyche as a self-regulating system. This view is analogous to later ideas of self-regulation which are now much in vogue in contemporary psychology: the concept of homeostasis in physiology (Cannon, 1932) and the concept of the feed-back circuit in cybernetics (Wiener, 1948). Those views, however, the self-regulation is a biological or mechanical process. As such, the coming into balance (homeostasis) of self-steering (cybernetics) can not only e experienced, but also influenced by consciousness. Furthermore, as this paper shows, this influence of consciousness is necessary, because in civilized man self-regulation cannot be taken for granted as an automatic process. Without the participation of consciousness, there occurs an accelerated one-sidedness comparable to the physiologist's description of run-away, positive feedback, i.e. "a machine, whose speed regulation is so insensitive that it can continue to function to a point of self-injury" to use the remarkably contemporary words of Dr. Jung (p. 14 below). Seen in the light of these current ideas, active imagination, as an instance of the transcendent function of self-regulation, becomes a way of directly influencing psychological balance, and so it can have far-reaching significance, particularly for the field of psycho-somatics.

Because of the importance of this essay, the students are very proud and grateful that Dr. Jung gave us the honor of bringing it to print. We thank Dr. Jung most cordially for entrusting it to us. We also want to thank Miss Barbara Hannah most warmly for her generous help in going through the translation, and Mrs. Aniela Jaffe for her kind cooperation in many ways.

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