In the tradition of Jungian psychology as developed further by post-Jungian James Hillman and his Archetypal Psychology, Embodied Imagination as a method could be called post-archetypal. It is focused primarily on physical sensations and affects engendered by the involuntary imagination, such as dreams and flashback memories. These images are understood to be quasi-physical environments that can be 're-entered' by way of artificial flashbacks. It is possible to shift perspectives away from habitual consciousness and experience dreaming or day-time memories from various different view-points, engendering vastly different embodied experiences. These contrasting embodiments are felt in the body as a complex simultaneous network of states. This produces hitherto unconscious emergent phenomena and a radically new self-organization. This complex composite outcome may lead to healing responses and to an outpouring of creative imagination.
Robert Bosnak, PsyA, is a Jungian psychoanalyst trained in Zurich from 1971-77. Since then he has developed a method called Embodied Imagination that is being practiced worldwide in medicine, psychotherapy, theater, fiction writing, art, business and technology. He is the author of 5 books of non-fiction about embodied imagination and dreaming translated into over a dozen languages. As a novelist he has written three volumes in the saga Red Sulphur: The Greatest Mystery in Alchemy -- a series of 17th century alchemical science fiction thrillers based loosely on historical facts. He is the founding director of the Santa Barbara Healing Sanctuary, a revival of dream-based treatment from the earliest days of Western medicine as described by Hippocrates among others, when dreamers would come to an Asclepian sanctuary to incubate healing dreams.