The Great Fever image and creative imagination

By Aimé Agnel
English

In her short story “The Sick Child,” Colette opposes two types of images: repetitive ones that can be manipulated, like the aerial reveries of the paralyzed child, and the impersonal, creative images of the Great Fever that seizes him and restores the use of his legs. In Winnicott, we find the same distinction between fantasying that “paralyzes action” and “participates neither in dream, nor in life” and imagination, which “is in relation with dream and reality.” As for Jung, he emphasizes the autonomy of images coming from the unconscious through dreams. According to him, these images represent “the inner reality as it really is, not as I conjecture or desire it to be.” The question that arises in any analysis is therefore: how can an unconscious that is “not this thing or that, but the Unknown as it immediately affects us” be confronted?

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