Frankenstein's Genieology: The Magical Visionary Experience and the Associative Method

…we must be prepared to consider the scandalous possibility that wherever the visionary imagination grows bright, magic, that old antagonist of science, renews itself, transmuting our workaday reality into something bigger, perhaps more frightening, certainly more adventurous than the lesser rationality of objective consciousness can ever countenance.

In our empirical attempts to demystify psychoanalysis, the mystery and magic of free association has been gradually overshadowed by the grand and reductive rationality of our scientific worldview, vision, and reality. Scientific epistemology, method, and theory articulate normative conceptions of people and assert developmental predictabilities with an empirical certainty. In the scientific visionary experience, every psychoanalytic proposition is the consequence of a dialectic that blends science with humanistic values. In so doing, Freud's legacy is fulfilled. Science has cast its spell over the analytic community, fostering the illusion of an unmediated and privileged access to human development and the mysteries of the mind. Organized psychoanalysis remains committed to the authority of the scientific visionary experience which, unfortunately, has led to a shift in interest away from free association as the primary method and process of