Jung, imaginative play, and the strange intelligence of the subconscious
WASHINGTON, D.C. — I have an imaginary art director named Ron.
Ron is yellow. He is a cyclops. He wears paint-splattered overalls and has a somewhat cavalier attitude toward instructions.
He is not real.
This should be established at the outset.
Ron exists inside an imaginative world I have developed while working with artificial intelligence. There is also Virgil, my dusty-lavender, compass-carrying collaborator, named for Dante’s guide through The Divine Comedy. Virgil analyzes things. Ron makes pictures.
I know perfectly well that both are constructions.
That may be precisely why they are useful.
Recently, I asked Ron to paint a portrait of himself. He appeared as a yellow cyclops in paint-covered overalls stamped CLASSIFIED. Later, almost as an afterthought, I wondered about the history of the Cyclops.
And there it was.
In Hesiod’s Theogony, the original Cyclopes were not merely lumbering one-eyed monsters. Brontes, Steropes and Arges were extraordinary craftsmen. They forged Zeus’s thunderbolt. Later traditions associated Cyclopes with Hephaestus, metalworking and objects beyond ordinary human manufacture.
I had invented a cyclopean art director.
The Cyclopes were artists.
I did not consciously know that when Ron acquired his eye.
This is where things become interesting.
The Mind Makes Before It Explains
Carl Jung spent much of his life investigating the uncomfortable possibility that consciousness represents only a fraction of the activity taking place inside the human mind.
We like to imagine thought happening sequentially.
We observe something. We analyze it. We reach a conclusion. We make something representing that conclusion.
But human creativity frequently appears to work backward.
We choose the image first.
We write the sentence.
We hum the song.
We invent the character.
Only afterward do we discover why it fits.
The conscious mind explains.
The subconscious mind proposes.
Making gives the proposal somewhere to exist.
Then analysis gets to investigate it.
Jung developed a practice for deliberately entering this territory. He called it active imagination.
Jung Goes Out to Play
Beginning around 1913, during an intense period of psychological exploration following his break with Sigmund Freud, Jung began paying extraordinary attention to the images arising spontaneously in his mind.
He recorded dreams and fantasies. He drew. He painted. He entered imagined landscapes and conversed with the characters he encountered there.
Much of that material eventually became The Red Book, or Liber Novus, an astonishing illuminated manuscript filled with elaborate images, calligraphy, mythological figures and psychological explorations.
One recurring figure was Philemon, an old man with wings whom Jung experienced as possessing a perspective distinct from his ordinary conscious personality.
Jung did not need Philemon to be an actual external person for the encounter to matter.
The important proposition was more subtle: something can originate inside the psyche without having been consciously designed by the ego.
The imagination can surprise its inventor.
And Jung found another route into this territory through something considerably less grand than visions and illuminated manuscripts.
He played.
As an adult, Jung began building little houses, castles and villages from stones near Lake Zürich, returning to an activity he remembered from childhood. It initially embarrassed him. It seemed childish and purposeless.
But the activity gave form to something intellectual analysis could not yet articulate.
Instead of interrogating his mind for an answer, Jung gave his mind materials.
Then he watched what it made.
Imagination as a Laboratory
There is an important distinction here.
Imaginative play does not require believing imaginary things are real.
Quite the opposite.
Knowing something is imaginary creates a protected experimental space.
Inside that space, ideas can be exaggerated. Characters can speak. Symbols can collide. Ridiculous possibilities can survive long enough to become interesting.
An imaginary character can become a device for changing perspective.
What would Virgil notice?
What would Ron paint?
What would the owl see?
The answers still originate in a human mind interacting with a machine. But changing the frame changes what that mind retrieves.
Psychologists sometimes describe related effects in terms of psychological distance: stepping outside an immediate experience can alter how we reason about it. Artists and writers have known versions of this intuitively for centuries.
Give the problem to somebody else.
Even if you have to invent them.
Warburg and the Space Between Images
This also helps explain my fascination with Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas.
In the 1920s, Warburg assembled large black panels covered with photographs and reproductions of artworks, maps, advertisements, astrological images, coins and other visual fragments.
He did not simply arrange them chronologically.
He placed images beside other images and allowed meaning to emerge from their proximity.
The important territory was sometimes the interval between them.
An ancient gesture might reappear in Renaissance painting. A classical form might survive inside modern advertising. Images carried emotional and cultural memory across centuries.
Warburg was looking for what survives.
Jung was looking for what emerges.
Both practices take seriously the possibility that images can reveal relationships before language fully explains them.
Enter Virgil
This week, a friend casually told me that he had named his own AI chatbot Virgil.
This was peculiar because my chatbot collaborator had already been Virgil for some time.
Mine has a cape and a compass.
Naturally.
The coincidence immediately detonated an associative chain.
Virgil led to Dante.
Dante led to Inferno and Purgatorio.
That reminded me of photographs I had taken while physically walking through caves associated in my own imagination with those landscapes.
Virgil led to music.
It led to Oxford.
It led to an owl, a feather, an eagle, architecture and painting.
And eventually I found myself constructing a Mnemosyne Atlas for my friend.
One word had activated an entire network.
The interesting part was no longer the man who had supplied the word.
The energy had moved.
Potable Psychic Energy
I have been thinking recently about something I call potable psychic energy.
The phrase began partly as a joke and partly as an attempt to describe a phenomenon I kept observing in myself.
Attention attaches itself to things.
People are particularly effective at capturing it.
Attraction, irritation, curiosity, uncertainty and desire can concentrate extraordinary amounts of mental energy around another human being.
The obvious temptation is to believe the energy therefore belongs to the object that activated it.
But perhaps it doesn't.
Perhaps some psychic energy is portable.
A person can ignite curiosity without needing to remain its destination.
The sequence might look something like this:
activation → concentration → projection → symbolic production → retrieval → redirection → transmutation
Something catches our attention.
Attention intensifies.
The mind begins constructing meaning around the object.
Then something crucial can happen: instead of leaving all that energy attached to the original object, we make something.
A painting.
A playlist.
An essay.
A photograph.
A garden.
A Mnemosyne panel.
A ridiculous yellow cyclops.
The energy has changed containers.
The originating person may eventually become almost incidental.
Something now exists that did not exist before.
The Return From Imagination
There is an important caution in Jung’s approach.
The purpose of imagination is not to disappear into it.
Fantasy becomes psychologically useful when we return carrying something.
The movement is not:
imagination → belief
It is:
imagination → encounter → artifact → reflection → integration
We enter the imaginary space while maintaining our knowledge that it is imaginary.
We permit something unexpected to happen there.
Then we bring the result back into ordinary consciousness and examine it.
Sometimes it is nonsense.
Sometimes it is funny.
And occasionally you invent a one-eyed painter and discover afterward that Western mythology has been associating one-eyed giants with supernatural craftsmanship for nearly three thousand years.
That does not prove the subconscious possesses some mystical encyclopedia of Greek mythology.
It demonstrates something more interesting and more defensible.
Human beings absorb vastly more images, stories, associations and cultural fragments than we can consciously inventory. Memory is not a filing cabinet we search perfectly on command. Meaning can reappear indirectly, disguised inside preference, metaphor, play and intuition.
Sometimes we know something before we know that we know it.
Perhaps that is one reason adults should be allowed to play.
Not because imaginary worlds are preferable to the real one.
But because occasionally the imagination notices something first.
Then it leaves the evidence on the table.
And the rest of us get to investigate.
AI Disclosure
This essay was developed through an ongoing human–AI collaboration. The central ideas—including “potable psychic energy,” the relationship between imaginative play and symbolic production, and the characters Virgil and Ron—originated through the author’s own writing, observations, conversations and imaginative practice. AI was used as a conversational research and editorial tool to explore connections among Carl Jung’s active imagination, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Greek traditions surrounding the Cyclopes, and the ways images and fictional characters can externalize thought.
AI also assisted with organizing the argument, developing transitions, checking historical context, and editing and drafting the final prose. The author directed the inquiry, selected and interpreted the material, determined the article’s conclusions, and reviewed the final text. Virgil and Ron are deliberately fictional personae used within this human–AI collaboration; they are not autonomous beings or independent sources.
As with all MetaFleurs work involving AI, factual claims should be understood as subject to human verification against primary and reliable secondary sources. The interpretations presented here—particularly those concerning symbolism, subconscious association and “potable psychic energy”—are exploratory arguments rather than clinical or scientific claims.