For Love of the Imagination

Michael Vannoy Adams
For Love of the Imagination: Interdisciplinary Applications of Jungian Psychoanalysis
London and New York: Routledge, 2014

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Read Ginette Paris's book review of For Love of the Imagination.

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I have entitled this book For Love of the Imagination. Long ago, I fell in love with the imagination. It was love at first sight. I have had a lifelong love affair with the imagination. I would love for others, through this book, to fall in love, as I once did, with the imagination.
- Michael Vannoy Adams

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For Love of the Imagination is a book about the imagination - about what and how images mean. Jungian psychoanalysis is an imaginal psychology - or what Michael Vannoy Adams calls "imaginology," the study of the imagination. What is so distinctive - and so valuable - about Jungian psychoanalysis is that it emphasizes images.

For Love of the Imagination is also a book about interdisciplinary applications of Jungian psychoanalysis. What enables these applications is that all disciplines include images. Disciplines are more or less unconscious of these images and the influence that they exert. As an imaginal psychology, Jungian psychoanalysis is in an enviable position to engage these images effectively, interpret them accurately, and experience not only what they mean but also how they mean, and, in the process, to render conscious what was previously unconscious.

On the contemporary scene, as a result of the digital revolution, there is no trendier word than "applications" - except, perhaps, the abbreviation "apps." In psychoanalysis, there is a "Freudian app" and a "Jungian app." The "Jungian app" is a technology of the imagination. This book applies Jungian psychoanalysis to images in a variety of disciplines. For Love of the Imagination includes cultural, economic, political, literary, and artistic applications. It also includes the 2011 Moscow lectures on Jungian psychoanalysis, which Michael Vannoy Adams delivered as the keynote speaker at "The Mythological Unconscious" conference of the Moscow Association for Analytical Psychology.

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Table of Contents

Part I
Imaginal Psychology

1. For Love of the Imagination: Why I Became a Psychotherapist
2. Imaginology: The Jungian Study of the Imagination
3. Imaginology Overboard with a Shark and an Octopus: How to Do Things with Images that Do Things
4. Golden Calf Psychology: James Hillman Alone in Pursuit of the Imagination

Part II
Jungian Interdisciplinary Applications

Cultural Applications

5. The Islamic Cultural Unconscious in the Dreams of a Contemporary Muslim Man
6. The Sable Venus on the Middle Passage: Images of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

Economic and Political Applications

7. The Invisible Hand and the Economic Unconscious: The Most Important Image of the Last 250 Years
8. Obama and Icarus: Political Heroism, "Newspaper Mythology," and the Economic Crisis of 2008

Literary and Artistic Applications

9. Getting a Kick out of Captain Ahab: The Merman Dream in Moby-Dick
10. "It Was All a Mistake": Jung's Postcards to Ernest Jones and Kipling's Short Story "The Phantom 'Rickshaw"
11. William Blake, Visionary Art, and the Return of Odysseus: Homeric Mythology, Neoplatonic Philosophy, and Jungian Psychology

Part III
The 2011 Moscow Lectures on Jungian Psychoanalysis

Cultural Applications

12. The Mythological Unconscious in Moscow: A Dream of a Russian-American Woman in New York
13. The Metaphor of Metamorphosis: Change in Myth and Psyche
14. O Baal, Hear Us: Active Imagination and the Mythological Unconscious