Introduction

When I was young,” Mark Twain wrote, “I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.” Inasmuch as we have supposedly lost this capacity in growing up, the ability to relish the humor in this line is a remarkable human achievement. As adults, we like to call it “imagination.” But how does it develop? Let us imagine a four-year-old boy in the back seat of a car who is returning home at night with his parents after visiting grandma. He turns from staring out of the car window and says to his half-dozing mother in the front seat, “Hey Mom, look! The moon is following me.” His mother, unruffled, replies without opening her eyes, “It really isn't, honey. It just looks that way.” An issue is not made of the fact that the others in the car know that the boy's experience is “only” an illusion. There is no need to force the distinction between illusion and reality, and there is no cause for alarm; the parents recognize that this distinction is not a matter that can be grasped by logic and that eventually the boy will somehow know it on his own. But just “knowing” reality is not what growing up is all about. We are all well aware from our work that “knowing” reality can be a disastrously grim experience for many people. If a child is routinely allowed, as in this story, comfortably to retain his subjective experience while engaging with his parents in his own way as they tell him about what is “really” happening, he stands a pretty good chance of growing into an adult who, like Mark Twain, always has a child along for the ride.

Language alone is insufficient to mediate developmental growth. New experience of self in relation to reality is organized not by ideas but by personal imagery. There must therefore be a communication with the outside that is at the affective level of the experience for linguistic content to become integrated pleasurably. The analytic situation is designed as a therapeutic relationship to bring about this integration. Central to