Reflections About not Being Able to Imagine

In this paper I am going to consider instances of the apparent incapacity of patients to imagine. I thought this subject would be of interest for a number of reasons which will emerge more clearly as I proceed, but first I want to state my main hypothesis: the capacity to imagine constructively is closely related to, if not identical with, the capacity to trust. Part I is mainly clinical and descriptive; in it I shall show that trust and the capacity to imagine constructively are both severely disturbed by defects in early relationships. It will be maintained that a good enough parent-child relationship is an essential ingredient, if not the actual cause, of the development of both capacities. In Part II I shall discuss the increasingly close relation between the ideas of psycho-analysts and some analytical psychologists.

Part I

Jung [1916] states that thought, affect, aesthetic and moral appreciation, etc. are the means whereby images can be apprehended. He also states that without verbal expression they can be very effective. But just as premature and defensive intellectual formulation can neutralize their impact, so can reliance on images alone lead into a kind of desert unless associated with analysis of personal relationships. Analysis requires the use of words which in the long run facilitate the therapeutic process. An additional advantage of putting imagery into words is this: it provides a means of communication with related disciplines of knowledge.

We can now add to my main thesis another, which states that the apparent absence of imagination can lead to the erroneous conclusion that such patients are not analysable: indeed some analytical psychologists appear to think that patients' ability to use dreams and/or active imagination is the sine-qua-non for conducting an analysis. I shall maintain that the following cases all show that this notion can be mistaken.