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The author calls the writing of this book ‘a journey of discovery’ and hopes it will be similar for the reader. Although relatively short in pages, it contains a veritable storehouse of useful summaries of pioneering ideas, both psychological and cultural, and there is a comprehensive bibliography.
Dr Pruyser is a professor and director of the Inter-disciplinary Studies Programme at the Menninger Foundation, and Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic. His book is based on part of a didactic course given at the Topeka Institute of Psychoanalysis in 1976 and seeks to be a continuation and modernisation of the cultural interests of the psychoanalytical movement which Freud himself inaugurated and developed in the journal Imago in 1912.
The author starts with the two reference points that are needed in any discussion of images and imagination, external reality and its impact on the human mind, and the mind itself with its capacity for generating mental images which may develop into creative works of art. He postulates a third reference point which comprises a wealth of symbol systems that each generation transmits to the next, ‘constituting a