PsychoImagination >> The Psychologist's Imagination and the Fantastic World of Imagery Reviews

The Psychologist's Imagination and the Fantastic World of Imagery Reviews

Reviewed by Leonard B. Olinger, Ph.D.

Some fifty years ago, Theodor Reik, a former student of Sigmund Freud, wrote Listening With the Third Ear. For those too young to have read or to remember it, this was a highly original and stimulating book based on that author's provocative assertions that his youthful experiences and reactions to his analysands' reports allowed him to alloy his own reverberations, based on his memory and abreactions, to those of the reports from the couch. These deepened and widened his empathic understanding. He felt that, where appropriate, this helped him to pass on to the patient a congruence that enhanced the contents of the psychoanalytic hour, consequently enriching the analysis.

Reik's vividly jogged recollections were often auditory and visual, sometimes visceral and dermatological. It was as if all these became as one with him, melding him with the patient. Apart from the pleasures and other satisfactions afforded the analyst, an increased emotional intimacy formed that constructed a curious unity which Reik declared he could distinguish from the tainting effects of a damaging counter-transference, illuminating rather than clouding the treatment process.

Shorr's approach is different, more complementary than conflicting. It also emphasizes the patient's intellectual activity-creative, roaming and searching-rather than the associative efforts or memories of the psychotherapist. He makes profitable use of the ability of his patient to employ his own resources in plumbing the depths of mental and somatic processes. Thus, any revivications that appear are entirely those of the individual undergoing treatment, with the aid of no external connections. The author's road to hidden material is at once original and traditional, novel and time-tested.

Literary and historical accounts of imagery, conscious as well as unconscious, have a long and often elegant history in human civilization. For example, biblical recounting of Joseph's dream in Pharaonic Egypt deals with fat and lean cows; its significance, whatever the "true" interpretation of its content, influenced both economic and political events. Cultural and religious ramifications blossomed equally. Norse sagas, Eastern tales, Greek and Roman mythology, South Seas recitations and heroic Amerindian tradition all attest to the human capacity to conceive and perpetuate ideas, with varying approximations of "truths" adopted by cultures across wide geographical areas and vast expanses of time. As summarized in Sumner's Folkways, each has served distinctive purposes.

Systematic study, however, of what Joseph Shorr refers to in his latest work, The Psychologist's Imagination and the Fantastic World of Imagery, is a relatively recent development, incorporating a number of strands that braid a new series of techniques. His interest in imagery is long-standing He has, in fact, produced a number of works on the subject, including such titles as Psychotherapy Through Imagery and Go See the Movie in Your Head, among others. Shorr draws on his own considerable research as well as on the ideas of others in integrating Imagery with theory and the practice of psychotherapy. He has been an ardent scholar and prolific writer, penetrating and wide-ranging. The present volume is an appetizing compilation of his ideas, some of them chapters in other authors' collections, some of them separate articles in professional journals. The titles provide a piquant sampling.

"Imagery and the Self-Image" examines the various selves, for instance. Certainly there is the "conferred" self, which derives from our beliefs of how others perceive us. So, too, is there the self we fear we are, as well as the self we hope we are. There is the self we know and the one we catch only glimpses of in dreams or special circumstances. We recognize the self that some people know us as, and this may be in stark contrast to the perception we are sure others have of us. We conduct ourselves differently with different persons and under varying conditions.

"Imagine in What Part of Your Body Your Mother Resides" is the title of yet another article. "Imagery as a Projective Device" is replete with suggestions as to how the self may be explored, and even cultivated. "The Use of Imagery in Group Psychotherapy" suggests yet another pathway in treatment. And, of course, body imagery is employable in both healthy self-perceptions and in instances of injury where "phantom" sensations and reconceptualization of how one is viewed by others and the self feels.

By now the reader may be both intrigued with the usefulness of the author's recommendations and the characterization as defined by Shorr himself. Probably the most accurate and succinct description is Shorr's own, as explained in his chapter of "Innovative Therapy" edited by Raymond Corsini. "Psycho-Imagination Therapy is a phenomenological and dialogical process with major emphasis on subjective meaning through the use of waking imagination and imagery. Emphasis on the therapeutic interaction itself has to do with the question of one's identifying oneself and separating one's own view of oneself from the attributed self as defined by the significant others in one's childhood." Adult experiences may be especially crucial too.

Joseph Shorr developed this system in 1965, and it continues to burgeon. The author declares that "theoretically it represents the interpersonal school of psychoanalysis stemming mainly from the work of Harry Stack Sullivan." The reader will recognize some of these origins, but will also find a wealth of material that is applicable to almost any psychodynamic system of therapy. In more than 35 years, the author has amalgamated what he has learned, formally and informally, from the literature, from his patients, and from his own personal growth.

In a field such as psychology, where systems and niches abound and proliferate, one may ask why Shorr's work-related as it is to hypnosis, to the various guided-imagery methods, to Harry Stack Sullivan's exponential elaborations-should be afforded any contemporary recognition. For one thing, the very attempts at combining and integrating such useful concepts provides it with special value. For another, this volume reaches into areas that are generally treated separately and hence fragmentedly, if at all.

As Eric Klinger points out, the author pushes boundaries responsibly. The voyages of discovery that are encouraged join both conscious thinking and dreamwork into new configurations. Interpretations that are typically given to the patient's productions are stretched to new meanings that ordinarily are not avidly sought-after in most psychotherapeutic efforts. In the current atmosphere of brief treatment and abandonment of the older methods that have proven useful so often, a return to basics and the renewed appreciation of patient search into the farthest explorations possible finds not only rich reward but, literally, undreamt-of discoveries.

If, as Freud pointed out almost a century ago, "the mind is a far country," like our ongoing astronomical trips into cosmic space, there should be no limits placed on the parameters which the scientists of the mind would wish to push. Strict methodology that is employed in these inner explorations can only enlarge our view of the internal world that the mind's imagination is capable of constructing and which a skilled therapist may, with the collaboration of the analysand, dissect and recompose or re-assemble. Shorr's relentless pursuit of these dimensions genuinely merits the time and thought that they will gratifyingly yield. The experience is truly one of seeing deeper, farther, and more colorfully via the magical embrace of the canny third eye.

THE PSYCHOLOGIST'S IMAGINATION AND THE FANTASTIC
WORLD OF IMAGERY
Santa Barbara: Fithian Press, 1998, 219 pp.
(ISBN 1-56474-285-7)
$25.00 (California residents add sales tax)
plus $3.00 shipping & handling

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