Imagination in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life
Allan Frater, 2021
By Caitlyn McCarthy
Before I met Allan Frater, I was deeply suspicious, even fearful, of the imagination. Growing up with a delusional father, I had decided from a very young age to concentrate, with great effort, only on the concrete and the provable. I came into my training as a Psychosynthesis counsellor with a dread of anything ‘imaginary’. OK, the world might have felt two dimensional but it was safe, right?
I remember being aghast when Allan, in our CNG1 Creativity weekend, suggested that rather than the imagination being inside the person; a subjective, interior experience; that it is in-between the inner and the outer, the perceived and the perceiver. In this perception there is no separation between us and the imagery. We are immersed in it. The characters we ‘imagine’ are independent and ‘real’ and the images are experienced with all the senses.
When Allan asked us to step into an embodied landscape – to suspend our disbelief so we could sense the life in the otherwise inanimate – it was with some doubt and trepidation that I walked round London Bridge activating my imagination to bring the shops and restaurants to life. It was discombobulating, to say the least, when I experienced the restaurants and buses communicate with each other – ‘Ciao, Ciao Signor’ hollered Costa Coffee to the red, cockney bus who was whistling ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ as he took off from the lights with a wink in my direction.
When we came back into the seminar room from our urban jungle walk, we created a theatre of the psyche by inviting in characters from our imagination. The room was crowded out with all sorts of creatures, phantoms and misfits. The impact was palpable. Rather than showing my colleagues a badly-drawn picture of a lion that was my ‘angry part’ – I welcomed into the room a free ranging, growling, wild lioness with scratches all over her face from fighting. It was a much more powerful and meaningful meeting which, through this embodied, immersive and animistic interaction, gave me far more insight into the working of the psyche than the reductionist, analysing approach of conventional image work. This weekend was deeply transformative and healing for me. But until now, until I read Allan’s new book Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life, I couldn’t have articulated why nor easily re-created this experience for my clients in my own clinical practice.
Waking Dreams is an experiential and theoretical appreciation of imagination, not just as a means to rational insight but as a creative ability at the heart of human potential. The book pulls together the answers to three key questions; What is imagination? How do we imagine more fully? and Why do we want to imagine? And it does this by exploring the meeting place of transpersonal psychology, ecotherapy, complexity theory and fractal geometry.
Frater’s exploration of the imagination started when he felt life had lost depth which propelled him into training as a Psychosynthesis psychotherapist. But he was disappointed to discover that the theory of the imagination didn’t match his lost childhood experience of the imagination – and his inquiry into this liminal space began. The book argues that rather than the imagination being a personal, interior and discrete function (as depicted in the Psychosynthesis star diagram); that inevitably pushes the imaginer down a dualistic, rationalistic, narcissistic and mechanistic cul-de-sac; it is conceived as a perception of animate, autonomous images arising in between self and the world. And furthermore, the imagination is the very process through which we perceive the world.
Along this journey and throughout the book Frater pulls from a diverse pool of divergent thinkers and theories such as post-Jungian psychotherapists James Hillman, Mary Watkins and Robert Bosnak; ecopsychologists Theodor Roszak, Jerome Bernstein and Nick Totton; cultural ecologist David Abram; and the integration of psychotherapy with complexity theory and fractal geometry by Terry Marks-Tarlow and Robert M. Galatzer-Levy.
Unlike other books that journey through vast landscapes of complex theory and thought – I’m thinking of James Hillman here – this book is surprisingly accessible, practical and jargon-free. In many ways, it feels like Allan Frater himself in book form. The book is laid out in 13 chapters and neatly alternates between theory and practice – building the argument for the concluding chapter on the transpersonal imagination. An imagination that is non-dual, transrational, participatory and emergent.
The earlier practice chapters offer simple, step-by-step instructions about how best to create the right conditions to access a waking dream – that liminal space between waking and sleeping where we can easily lift the lid on the process of imagining – and cleverly builds up our own experience of entering, exploring and dialoguing in waking dreams through engaging the embodied, immersive and animstic imagination. Our experiential understanding is then reinforced as he walks us through the application of our experience in an unfolding journey with a client. As a counsellor, I particularly value these tangible examples of how to easily shift my work with clients in order to enhance engagement with the imaginary in my practice.
In the second half of the book; Frater offers the best description and definition of countertransference I have come across yet; namely, shapeshifting, a process that happens when ‘the centre of the imagination is able to flow outwards, becoming decentred from the habitual self and taking up residence in a non-egoic perspective’ in order to sketch out the non-dualistic nature of the imagination and pulls on the metaphor of an ecosystem – a web or field of relations or energy flows – to re-imagine imagination where all parts are in relationship to and effect each other. Rather than being a closed system that is contained and predictable; drawing from chaos theory, Frater argues that the imagination is an open, complex system that is interconnected and unpredictable. It is this very unpredictability that leads to the emergent of the new.
Pulling these divergent threads together, Frater outlines the creative possibility of opening up to the transpersonal imagination and to dialoguing with the world in this way. In exploring a way to re-connect to the lost imagination of his childhood; Frater offers us all a way to re-connect to a liminal image-centric world full of creative potential, meaning and soul. The book also makes explicit and explores the obvious tension at the heart of Psychosynthesis; the spiritual transpersonal psychology posing as a science. And convinces us that the re-visioning of the imagination is not only important, but fundamental, to the evolution of Psychosynthesis and also to our meaningful experience of being human in an animate and transrational world. And this neat, accessible, paradigm-shifting book shows us how.
Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life by Allan Frater, Transpersonal Press (2021). Purchase the book here.
Caitlyn McCarthy trained at The Psychosynthesis Trust and is a practising Psychosynthesis Counsellor.