
A House Left Empty
On Intuition, Imagination, and the Poison of Suppressed Genius
"One of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power... the psychic energy turns to sheer poison."
— Marie-Louise von Franz
In a world obsessed with measurement, mastery, and rational control, we’ve been trained to mistrust the deeper signals—the whispers of intuition, the images that emerge unbidden from the soul, the subtle knowing that defies logic but reveals truth. Yet as Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz reminds us, these are not luxuries of the artistic mind—they are vital organs of perception, especially at the highest levels of science and spirit. Consider one of von Franz’s boldest affirmations—not offered as poetic indulgence, but as fundamental truth:
“Imagination and intuition are vital to our understanding. And though the usual popular opinion is that they are chiefly valuable to poets and artists (that in ‘sensible’ matters one should mistrust them), they are in fact equally vital in all the higher grades of science. Here they play an increasingly important role, which supplements that of the ‘rational’ intellect and its application to a specific problem.
Even physics, the strictest of all applied sciences, depends to an astonishing degree upon intuition, which works by way of the unconscious, although it is possible to demonstrate afterward the logical procedures that could have led on to the same result as intuition.
Nothing is more vulnerable than scientific theory, which is an ephemeral attempt to explain facts and not an everlasting truth in itself….”
When we silence these inner frequencies, we don’t merely miss inspiration—we suffer. The unused signal curdles into neurosis. The unlived possibility becomes psychic decay. In this page, we tune into the peril and promise of imaginative knowing, and how its resonance may be the most sacred power we are called to steward.
The Intuitive Organ
What the world has often relegated to the margins of art and mysticism, von Franz places at the heart of all higher knowing. Intuition and imagination are not just accessories to insight—they are its initiators. Even in disciplines defined by rigor and precision, intuition opens the path before logic can follow.
This is not a call to abandon reason, but to recognize the full spectrum of perception. Logic dissects. Imagination gathers. Intuition leaps. All are necessary—yet only some are celebrated in our modern paradigms. Von Franz opens a door to a richer epistemology, one that honors the unconscious as a vessel of insight and affirms that the unknown often speaks before we know how to listen.
These words hold particular weight when read alongside the voices of scientists like Einstein, Planck, and Tesla—figures who each acknowledged the mysterious and symbolic dimensions of insight. For von Franz, this is not contradiction but complementarity: the rational mind walks a path that the intuitive soul first glimpsed.
The Poison of Suppressed Creativity
Von Franz’s most haunting insight may be her warning about what happens when this imaginative function is neglected. "If someone has a creative gift and... doesn’t use it, the psychic energy turns to sheer poison." In this view, unused creativity is not inert—it is volatile. The potential energy of the soul, left unexpressed, becomes corrosive. It festers in the shadow, warping into anxiety, resentment, even madness.
This perspective invites a radical shift in how we understand suffering—not merely as a deficit of stability, but sometimes as a surplus of unlived possibility. Neurosis becomes the echo of a call unanswered. The spirit longs to give shape to something—to bridge the inner world and the outer—and when that bridge remains unbuilt, the pressure mounts.
In this, we hear a quiet resonance with the themes of Modes of Power. True power, we’ve seen, is not coercive but evocative. And what could be more evocative than the creative signal itself—the nudge of inspiration, the birth of an image, the forming of meaning from silence? When ignored, that same signal can become torment. The energy that might have nourished others collapses inward, eating away at the vessel that was meant to pour.
This is the paradox of the empty house.
In Luke 11, Jesus describes a man delivered from an unclean spirit. The spirit departs, and the house—his inner world—is swept and in order. But it remains unoccupied. And so the spirit returns, bringing seven others more wicked than itself, and “the last state of that person is worse than the first.” An empty soul will not stay empty.
If it is not filled with presence, it will be filled with substitute—addiction, distraction, bitterness, self-erasure. The refusal to live the signal does not result in silence, but distortion. The house echoes either way.
Toward the Resonant Life
To live resonantly is to live imaginatively—to be attuned to the whispers beneath the noise. It is to honor the irrational not as a threat, but as a source of integration and revelation. Von Franz gives us psychological permission to do what the mystics, prophets, and poets have long modeled: to take seriously the language of dreams, symbols, and silent certainties.
To honor the irrational is to make peace with mystery. But for some, mystery is unbearable. There is a kind of soul that would rather cling to false certainty than open itself to a living question. It’s not that such people lack imagination—it’s that they have learned to fear its consequences.
Those who reject the irrational most violently are often the ones who have most deeply shut down their capacity to suspend disbelief. In its place, they’ve installed a need to be right. To feel safe in systems. To be affirmed by a consensus reality. They have traded awe for assurance.
But the irrational is not the enemy of truth—it is its midwife. The irrational births the dream before the schema, the image before the proof. It is what allows the psyche to play, to mourn, to see beyond the immediate. The irrational does not demand that we abandon truth—it only asks that we make room for truths we cannot yet name. And the soul, if it is to remain alive, must sometimes believe before it understands.
This is not a rejection of science, but its resurrection. A call to remember that the greatest discoveries were often seeded by intuition before they were mapped by math. That every theory is, in the end, a story we tell about the world—a parable of truth, not the truth itself.
And so, to live the signal—to give voice to the image, form to the fire, shape to the surge—is not indulgence, but obedience. A stewardship of inner power that aligns us with the deeper logic of the Logos.
For it is better to be haunted by visions than hollowed by silence.
Better to tune the soul and risk dissonance than to leave the instrument untouched.
The signal is calling. Will we live it?