| The relevance of the imagination to clinical psychology is hermeneutically investigated within this body of work from the perspective of four main schools: phenomenology, gestalt therapy, analytical psychology, and archetypal psychology. This study will show how the imagination is central to psychological process and to psychodynamic psychotherapy.; The multiplicity and depth of psyche's interior life---from the ego to the collective unconscious---are the foundation on which clinical depth psychology stands. This research project has demonstrated that the Other, the multiplicity of the unconscious, is constantly present and expresses itself imaginally through dreams, sensations and diseases of the body, slips of the tongue, daydreaming, fantasy, and spontaneous imagery.; Phenomenology emphasizes the honoring of the pure possibility of phenomena and of "what is." The phenomenological method facilitates an open, unbiased way of being and seeing phenomena as a psychological process that begins in the imagination.; Gestalt therapy posits a consciousness that is present-centered, one that builds on the formation of the I-Thou therapeutic relationship. Creating the environment of the empathic, dynamically alive encounter, the gestalt-trained psychologist joins the patient on his imaginal journey.; In analytical psychology, image is the mythopoetic voice of psyche that is heard through the imagination. Jung's theories of the pluralistic and autonomous nature of the psyche expanded the understanding of the totality of the personality in the field of clinical psychology. Jung understood that the language of the personal and collective unconscious is the metaphorical language of the imagination.; Archetypal psychology sees-through and hears-into a consciousness and "derangement of the senses." This derangement mixes and re-orders our conventional use of language to hear the expressions of psyche as imagistic statements. Archetypal psychology places the realm of the imagination in the mundus imaginalis, calling forth the autonomy and power of the imagination in its own right.; This investigation further employs the image of the hermeneutic circle. Placing imagination at the circle's center, the study delineates the radiating spokes as the specific and unique aspect of each school's theoretical and clinical application of imaginal work. From the resulting synthesis, a new whole is created. |
