Knowing Imagination

Here’s an article from TimesOnline that discusses the phenomenon of therapy and counseling is increasingly performed online with good results. "Net gains for mental health. The news that antidepressants may not be very effective could open the door for online therapy."

Although they link it in the title with recent news that questions the effectiveness of antidepressants, the bulk of the article is about the way people are getting their therapy and counseling online in Great Britain. I have a little trouble understanding how this could work for most people, since I have been practicing face-to-face therapy for over 30 years. Cognitive-based, short term, problem-solving models would seem to be the best bet for methods used on line. But, in my experience, this does not work for everyone and, even for those for whom it does work, it often does not go far enough.

On the other hand, as mentioned in the article, some people might be more likely to partake of therapy if they can do so with the anonymity of a web interaction. Perhaps this could be most effective for them and may even lead them to trust enough to go further.

I am pretty involved with the web and the increased ability connect it affords- this blog is an example of that. I have seen the benefit the web can be for people with limited mobility and for information gathering about psychological and medical issues. I am excited about the potential of this for us all. But I have trouble imagining this medium as one for the practice of therapy or counseling with any depth.

What do you think?

Matthieu Ricard is a monk, an author of several books on science and Buddhism, and an accomplished photographer. In this video from TED.com he talks about what is happiness. In speaking about the inner and outer conditions that influence our experience of happiness he says, "The experience that translates everything is in the mind".

After training in biochemistry at the Institute Pasteur, Matthieu
Ricard left science behind to move to the Himalayas and become a
Buddhist monk — and to pursue happiness, both at a basic human level and as a subject of inquiry.
Achieving happiness, he has come to believe, requires the same kind of
effort and mind training that any other serious pursuit involves. His books include The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddism Meet and Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill.

http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf

Guided imagery and art therapy are methods often used to treat trauma and post traumatic stress. An article in the October/November 2007 issue of Scientific American Mind magazine discusses how these same modalities can be misused and misunderstood.

The article discusses how guided imagery and art therapy were used to encourage a psychiatric patient to remember memories that probably never took place and to become aware of alternative personalities that may have been constructed during the course of the treatment. It seems clear from this article that some therapists do misunderstand the use of these modalities to tragic ends for theirs clients.

One example of such a misunderstanding is to misinterpret the imagination into ordinary, concrete, reality. When an event is experienced or an image develops in the mind during art therapy and guided imagery, this should not be misunderstood as a representation of external reality. Such experiences happen in the present moment and may not represent past events at all. When addressing those kind of painful experiences through the use of the imagination it is important to deal with them in the here and now, without interpretation as to meaning or even relationship to ordinary reality, as a potential opportunity for release and transformation. The reality accessed by the imagination is that of the personal and collective unconscious.

As posted earlier on knowingimagination.com, the Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, posited four functions of knowing- thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuiting. He discussed these as a system, each having its own way of knowing- its own logic. To emphasize one form of knowing over another, upsetting the balance of the four, will cause a distortion in one’s ability to discern a balanced reality. It is common for our culture to emphasize and value the function of thinking over the others as having more validity and more utility. Intuition, the function that makes use of the imagination and imagery, is surely the least valued.

To commit the potentially grave misunderstanding of the imagination through the logic of the thinking function is to distort the information. The imagination knows what it knows through its own logical system, not the logical system of the thinking function. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson writes about this in his essay, “Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art”, from the book, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, he points out that the logical system of one form of knowing is not equivalent to another and that the application of one to another will result in an inability to access that original knowing. Just as one’s feelings or hunches are not a valid way of rational knowing, similarly, applying rational logic in the domain of the imagination is also not valid.

Hence, to make the meaning that images that arise in the imagination, in dreams, art therapy, and guided imagery, are memories of real events or, in the instance of multiple personalities, literal beings in one’s unconscious are erroneous and misleading. The imagination, operating in the present moment, organizes with the use of pattern and metaphor, where, often, one thing stands for another. Often, the patterns of imagery and other material emerging from the unconscious that can be observed clarify and validate meaning but should not be confused with memory. Even if there is some influence from past experience, and there often is, the functioning of the unconscious and the imagination is to use this as raw material in the construction of a reality- not the reality. The constructed reality may have little or much to do with ordinary, consensual reality but must be understood as a construct and not mistaken for fact.

The use of the imagination in psychotherapy must, in my opinion, respect the distinction between these different modes of knowing. The application of art therapy and guided imagery can help to facilitate change through the use of the imagination to release or transform negative images. It is rare that one would mistake dream reality for ordinary reality, although a relationship is often present. Just so, the use of the imagination in therapy must be understood and treated as psychic experience or psychic reality, but not as fact.

One reader of this blog has alerted me to a web site, The Blind Spot Test, that has a demonstration that shows the viewer how to “see” their blind spot. The blind spot is a result of the spot on the retina in each eye where the optic nerve attaches the eye to the brain. At that spot there are no rods or cones to process light on the retina so there can be no perception in that particular spot.
The reason we do not aware of the blind spot at every moment is simply because the brain is constantly computing to fill the missing information with extrapolations from the surrounding retinal information. It is remarkable and amazing that our brains can perform this function with the consistency and accuracy that it does- well enough to not come to our awareness unless specifically pointed out.
This is interesting in terms of the imagination because it could be argued that it is the imagination that is responsible for the construction of the reality that fills the blank spots. Although this phenomenon has been used as a demonstration and proof by cyberneticists and philosophical constructivists like Heinz Von Foerster, Humberto Maturana, and Fransisco Varela, they discussed it as neurological processes that are part of a closed system.
Maybe the imagination is also part of a closed system. Certainly the imagination must have a neurological component because all mental activities do in human beings. Try the demonstrations at The Blind Spot Test and “see” for yourself the power of the imagination. The come back here and let us know what you think.