Psychotherapy the Imaginal (or Imaginary)

¶ … Psychotherapy

The Imaginal (or imaginary) can be used effectively in psychotherapy but it can be mysterious and seemingly beyond the realm of understanding for a lay person. Still, there are scholars that have helped alert individuals find suitable definitions for this kind of therapy. There are paths to understanding, as Henry Corbin explains, and the spiritual reality of life can become "the where of all things," once material reality has become enveloped in one's spiritual reality. This is not easily done unless the therapist and the individual in therapy are both transformed, according to Mansfield, et al.

In fact, Mansfield seeks to boil it down for better clarity, and he points to four levels of therapy. The first is "traditional analysis"; the analyst offers a "supportive environment" and the work is conduced in an imaginary "cave or womb" where the exploration can be conducted safely. The second level of therapy ("womb interaction") uses traditional dream analysis and "transference," and the third ("mutual process proper") features an "active consideration and verbalization" of the activity, "sometimes from moment to moment" (Mansfield, p. 182). Mutual process is a level of therapy during which the unconscious produces "archetypal figures" and those imagined figures establish a relationship to the therapist and the person in therapy. And the fourth level of therapy, Mansfield continues, is inclusive of the previous three plus there sometimes is the element of synchronicity involved (both parties experiencing similar phenomenon as meaningful coincidences).

Carl Jung is considered the founder of analytical psychology, and while Jung is not the first psychiatrist to go into dream analysis he was first to explore and carefully define the workings of human psyche. Jung found that the psyche is in fact "the creative process itself," Ross Woodman writes, and the psyche "enacts both its binding to matter" as well as "the transformation of matter that the binding performs" (Woodman, p. 23). But what does this mean for the individual in need of therapy? After all, as Jung asserts, humans inhabit "a mystery -- the unknowable realm of the unconscious" which is represented symbolically as a "sensible world" (Woodman, p. 24). That mystery -- in religious terms -- can be accounted for as the God in each human's consciousness, according to Jung, who discovered God not in a church but through an occult experience. Moreover, Jung's view is that knowledge of the psyche should lead the individual to a place where he or she realizes "God" is within us; "God-image" is indeed the self.

Meanwhile, depth psychotherapy, according to Edward Edinger, can be described as having four aspects: it is a science and an art, and it is theoretical as well as a practice. The goal, from the art perspective, is understanding. Indeed, the art application, for the therapist, is to use a one-on-one dynamic with one person and have a positive effect on that person's "life and development" (Edinger, 1997, p. 8). Looking at depth psychotherapy from a scientific perspective, it can produce "objective knowledge of the nature of the human psyche"; this knowledge, Edinger continues, can be abstract and objective (p. 8). Edinger (p. 10) further advises though that "objective knowledge" (science) has an application to the human psyche "in general" but understanding (art) works with one individual at a time.