The contributions of Jung and Loyola to the Western tradition of active imagination: Reflections on an experimental study of visualisers and the Spiritual Exercises

Abstract

One night in 1939 while Jung was preoccupied by his seminar on Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises… he saw at the bottom of his bed a green-gold Christ, magnificently awesome but frightening… This green gold, which resembles the natural and organic viriditas (or greenery)… expresses (the alchemical) concept of a saviour who is not purely spiritual but actually lives in metal or stone or in matter. (Gaillard, 2006, p.356)In his war-time lectures on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, Jung portrayed them as a Western Christian account of the active imagination, aiming for transformation and unification of the exercitant. Empirical work on the Exercises has focused on the nature of the transformation of the exercitant.However, in 1992, the present author attempted research on the workings of the active imagination in the Exercises.A questionnaire relating to the way in which people might (or had) set about doing the specific ‘First Week’ Spiritual Exercises was given to a group of 10 exercitants and a contrast group of 10 psychotherapists and psychologists. Results suggested that ‘visualisers’ found the Exercises more accessible and helpful than ‘verbalisers’, irrespective of religious position.In 1997, the data from the study were reflected on in the light of recent work on the Ignatian imagination, the meaning of the Richardson measure, and guided imagery in education. Today (2012) particular attention is given to similarities between Loyola and Jung, who were (arguably) not only ‘visualisers’ but sufferers from childhood trauma, and affected by three archetypes (alchemist, healer, shaman) in the light of current work on the inner world of trauma and shamanism.