The transmission
Barbara Hannah was a British-born Jungian analyst, a close associate of Jung and the longtime companion and colleague of Marie-Louise von Franz, with whom she shared a household in Zurich.
She is especially valued for her detailed treatment of active imagination: her book Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C.G. Jung (1981) provided extended case studies showing how patients engaged inner figures over time, making it one of the richest practical records of the technique.
She also wrote a notable biographical study of Jung and works applying analytical psychology to literature and animal symbolism. Hannah’s contribution to the lineage is her careful documentation of active imagination in practice—the lived, longitudinal experience of consciously dialoguing with the autonomous contents of the psyche.
Where Robert Johnson distilled the method into accessible steps, Hannah preserved the depth and difficulty of the actual process through extended casework, demonstrating that imaginal engagement is a serious, sometimes demanding discipline rather than casual visualization.
This grounds the imaginal-practice stream (Jung → Hillman → Johnson) in concrete clinical evidence and offers a sober counterweight to the often glib visualization techniques of popular manifestation culture, showing what disciplined engagement with inner images actually involves.
What they gave
Active-imagination casework: Documented the technique through detailed, longitudinal case studies.
- Depth over technique: Showed imaginal engagement as a serious, demanding discipline.
- Jungian biography: Preserved key first-hand accounts of Jung and his method.
- Practical grounding: Anchored the imaginal stream in concrete clinical experience.
In their words
The further we go, the more we realize that every widening of consciousness is indeed the greatest gain we can make.
Almost all of our difficulties in life come from our having too narrow a consciousness to meet and understand them, and nothing helps us more in understanding these difficulties than learning to contact them in active imagination.
In every case, the goal is to get into touch with the unconscious, and that entails giving it an opportunity to express itself in some way or other.
The first thing is to be alone, and as free as possible from being disturbed. Then one must sit down and concentrate on seeing or hearing whatever comes up from the unconscious.
The question is: Are we doing it honestly to try to reach and discover our own wholeness, or are we dishonestly using it as an attempt to get our own way?
It is a form of play, but a bloody serious one.
The line they stand in
Taught by / Influenced by: Carl Jung; Marie-Louise von Franz; the Zurich analytic tradition.
- Taught / Influenced: the practice and teaching of active imagination; Jungian casework method; later inner-work practitioners.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Essential Works
- Jung: His Life and Work, a Biographical Memoir1976
- Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C.G. Jung1981