Imagining the Roads Not Taken
by Marylyn Donahue -- Publishers Weekly, 8/27/2007
Two Jungian psychoanalysts suggest an inner dialogue called “active imagination” as a way to deal with unrealized dreams in Living Your Unlived Life (Reviews, Aug. 20).
Why attend to your unlived life? Why not just put it to rest?
Ruhl: You can’t just ignore or forget that which is urgent in you. If you try to shut it down, it comes back up as a mood, or an acting out, or some type of illness. To try to ignore it and to think these powerful feelings will go underground and vanish is the arrogance of consciousness. Sometimes it’s just a matter of making it conscious, devising some simple way to respond to it on an inner basis. Then you can put it to rest.
In relying on active imagination as a way of experiencing unlived moments, is there a danger of fantasizing away the life you are actually living now?
Johnson: My favorite vulgar quote is, Fantasies are like masturbation: nothing comes of it. Imagination is creation. I engaged and comforted myself with the same fantasy for years in my youth: South Sea island, girl, sunshine, palm trees. Dr. Jung taught me active imagination, and that fantasy got, so to speak, unstuck, and it immediately began to be a creative evolution in my life.
Dr. Johnson, having studied with Jung, do you find anything left unlived about that experience?
Johnson: It would take 10 incarnations, if one believes in such things, to explore what Jung opened up in me. He changed my life. He gave me tools wherein I could grow out of the childhood and adolescent mess I was stuck in.
Was there something in your own lives active imagination helped you with?
Ruhl: It was no accident when Robert and I met at a conference 20 years ago—we seemed to understand each other. We both limped across the room to each other. Robert lost a leg when he was eight and hit by a car. I suffered from polio when I was 18 months old. When you are wounded in an obvious way such as this, then you are confronted early on with obvious unlived life. In Robert’s case, it was an inability to run, and in my case I could run sort of but not well. So one begins searching for answers about suffering and meaning.
Johnson: The most encouraging thing I think I know is, on some level we can live any aspect of life which is presented to us. If you can't run, then all right—if one will pay the price of consciousness, one can find something to do with that energy. Most people want to drop the limitation. Well, you can’t, but you can transform it.
