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I want to discuss my work using “guided exercises” of imagination (Muscat, 1977, 1978)* with borderline patients and some of the immediate behavioral results I observed. This will serve as a beginning investigation into the use of imagination as an important aspect of the healing process with borderline patients. Jerome Singer, in a recent book (1974), discusses the current American applications of imagery techniques in psychotherapy. However, there is no specific mention made of research done with borderline patients.
In this discussion, I am using the term borderline in the descriptive sense. I am not focusing on theoretical or psychodynamic issues in my presentation of patients. The descriptive category would include such major symptoms as Kernberg (1975) discusses, such as chronic diffuse, free-floating anxiety, multiple phobias, cluster of neurotic symptoms, obsessive compulsive symptoms, conversion symptoms, dissociative reactions, hypochondriasis, paranoid trends, perverse sexual trends, lack of anxiety tolerance, lack of impulse control, and lack of developed sublimitory channels. Grinker, Werble, and Drye (1968) describe the overall characteristics of the various nosological categories of the borderline syndrome as “anger as the main or only affect, defect in affectional relationships, absence of indications of self-identity and depressive loneliness.”
Each patient described was eager to talk about himself in sessions but did not actually want to work to change his or her habitual behavioral patterns. In each instance, his vision of the