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By bringing the visual into the spotlight, this book asks the psychoanalytic community to focus on symbolic content, symbolic process, very much in accordance with Freud's understanding of dream imagery when he said, “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” (p. 608, 1900-1901).
This is very much in accordance with Jungian emphasis on the image and imagination. What is most striking is that Faye Carey identifies the visual image as a major element in processing countertransference. In her Introduction, she invites us to “reclaim the visual,” to contemplate bringing the image back to our awareness, to focus on what is seen before we conceptualize with words.
Why reclaim the mental image? Carey links the mental image with dream imagery, bringing us back to Freud's royal road to unconscious activities of the mind. She considers whether psychoanalysis is neglecting this rich source of understanding.
When Carey asks us, “What is a mental image?” she invites us to understand mental image as “a form of visual representation that is held in mind in the absence of any material manifestation” (p. 5). Thus, as we contemplate mental image, we are contemplating a type of interiority, a product of the mind. What is important here is that the interiority we are considering involves focusing more on the analyst's mental image than on the analysand's mental image.
Processing countertransference through visual imagery is thus a form of free-floating attention, of reverie, and of daydream.
Carey's exploration of “Spatiality, dimensionality and the visual,” is an intriguing journey through what she calls “subjective (emotional or perceived) space” (p. 14). She visualizes the “fort-da game” described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) as a creative adventure in both external and internal space. She elaborates the fort-da creative adventure further into spatial representation, linking to other writings of Freud's that ventur