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Invisible Guests offers an alternative to a 'standard' psychotherapy which, according to Watkins, is dominated by the oversocialized, the intellectualizer, the therapist too enmeshed in abstract concepts. This book combines a developmental psychology of imagination with a mode of therapy Watkins apparently invented herself in the course of her practice. Like other humanistic psychotherapies, this one depends on the ideas of psychoanalysis. Like other creators of such psychotherapies, Watkins disavows these roots to differentiate herself from psychoanalytic tradition and to assert a new theory of the mind to serve as underpinning for her new mode of treatment. Since the mode of treatment as described in the last chapter is the point of the whole enterprise, it makes sense to look at the book's last chapter first.
To introduce a new therapeutic method one must delineate a particular disease or a particular group of patients with whom it would be useful. Watkins does not do that. She gives only one case. The woman whose treatment she sketches is a depressed housewife and mother who complains of a wish to run away from her family, which she understands as a need to go back to her previous work. By embodying this wish and others in voices inside her, she comes to accept her wishes for sexual pleasure, nurturance, and expression of unpleasure. The depression lifts. The cathartic method returns.
The patient can 'move, lie down on the floor, enlist the therapist as a co-character, to scream or cry. This freedom is established to facilitate the unfoldings of characters' (p. 153). Far from the process of adult psychoanalysis, this echoes play therapy with very disturbed children. The child analyst uses more sublimated forms of play; puppets or dolls may substitute for the actual patient or therapist. But the principle is the same. Elaboration of feeling states, interpersonal interactions, and the intrapsychic situation is facilitated by encouraging fantasy in the