““Anyone who does creative work is familiar with this problem, and in many ways active imagination is similar to writing, painting, and so on; all creative work entails a give-and-take between inspiration (unconscious) and execution (conscious). (As I am writing this, for example, I have to allow my intuitions expression before I can start editing them.) The difference for Jung is that the aesthetic quality of the end product isn’t important; understanding it is. Nevertheless, one of the best introductions to active imagination are the letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man by the poet Friedrich Schiller, a contemporary of Goethe, which discuss in detail the dialogue between the creative (unconscious) and critical (conscious) drives and their union in art, both creating and experiencing it.””
