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The therapeutic imagination: Freud,
Coleridge and Eliot in conversation
Jeremy holmes
University of Exeter
UK
Oberon and Titania reconciled
Theseus’s speech
‘And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown;
The poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothings
A local habitation and a name’.
Imagination
• Impersonal : an ‘it’ rather than an ‘I’
• Corporeal: we think with our bodies
(Dimascio)
• Embodiment and language: the ‘pen’ transforms vague shapes into definite forms; gives
‘body’ to our half-glimpsed scraps of ideas;
names as signposts to shared meanings
Imagination, romanticism and the
psychoanalytic tradition
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•
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Kant and Schelling
Coleridge
Sharpe, Bion, Winnicott & Rycroft
Britton, Waddell & Ogden
Coleridge: from romantic quest(ion)er
to sage of Highgate
Key phrases
• Coleridge: ‘reverie’; ‘willing suspension of
disbelief’
• Keats: ‘negative capability’; ‘capacity to
remain in doubts mysteries and uncertainties’
• Jung: ‘active imagination’
• Bion: ‘beyond memory and desire’
• Ogden: ‘dreaming the patient’
Mary Ann Eliot
Deronda
‘He longed now to have the sort of
apprenticeship to life which would not shape
him too definitely, and rob him of the choice
that might come from a free
growth…Deronda’s demerits were likely to be
on the side of reflective hesitation…’.
Sadler: Thames at Richmond 1860
The encounter
• ‘eyes were fixed on the river with a look of immovable
statuesque despair’
• ‘he felt an outleap of interest and compassion towards her’
• ‘‘I should not have forgotten the look of misery if she had
been ugly and vulgar”
• …‘solemn passivity’… ‘half-speculative, half-involuntary
identification of himself with the objects he was looking
at’…‘shift his centre til his whole personality would be no
less outside than the landscape’.
Continued…
• “Don’t be afraid…You are unhappy…Pray, trust
me…Tell me what I can do to help you…But I fear
you will injure yourself staying here. Pray let me
carry you in my boat to some place of safety.”
• ‘The agitating impression this forsaken girl was
making on him stirred a fibre that lay close to his
deepest interest in the fates of women – ‘perhaps
my mother was like this one’’.
Breaking the silence
• ‘they went along swiftly for many minutes without speaking’.
• “I like to listen to the oar”
“So do I’’
“If you had not come I should have been dead by now”…
‘Deronda was mute: to question her seemed an unwarrantable
freedom…’.
“I want to know nothing except what you would like to tell me”.
“This morning when the light came I felt as if one word kept
sounding within me ‘Never’ never!’ But now – I begin – to think”
her words were broken by rising sobs – “I am commanded to live…”.
Conclusion
• The Maenads: ‘…outworn with their torch-lit
wanderings they lay down in the marketplace, and the
matrons came and stood silently around them to keep
guard over their slumbers…He could trust the women
he was going to for having hearts as good’.
• ‘…how to make sure that snatching from death was
rescue? The moment of finding a fellow-creature is
often as full of mingled doubt and exultation as the
moment of finding an idea’.
Therapeutic Imagination: stages
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Primary attachment; Whitman’s ‘inspiration’
Reverie
Logos
Decision
Reflection
Primary attachment
• C.f. primary maternal preoccupation
• The care-giver dynamic: reciprocates secure
base search when stressed, threatened, ill
• Levinas: ‘me voici’.
• The working alliance
Primary attachment
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•
•
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Protected space, literal and psychological
Focus
Contingency + marked mirroring (PCM)
Sensitivity & responsiveness
Reverie
• Franzen: ‘What is fiction, after all, if not a kind
of purposeful dreaming? The writer works to
create a dream that is vivid and has meaning,
so that the reader can vividly dream it and
experience meaning'.
• Ogden: dreaming the patient
• Deronda’s motherlessness resonates with
Mirah’s – ‘countertransferential third’;
‘relational reverie’
Reverie
• The vantage point: seeing yet safe
• The dialogical position: availability, nonintrusive support, encouragement (Feeney)
• Creating a shared transitional space
• The ‘negative capability’ that goes with
security
• Allowing thoughts and feelings to arise
spontaneously, within and between
Mabel Alvares 1925: Reverie: the inner
eye(I)
Coleridge on imagination
• The ‘thin blue flame’ in frost at midnight
• Imagination v ‘fancy’: Imagination ‘dissolves,
diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create’;
fancy: ‘receives all its materials ready-made’ .
• C.f. protocols and ready-made risk assessment
forms versus holistic engagement
Logos: the flesh made word
Logos (not the plural of logo!)
• Traumatised Mirah (kidnapped and abused by
her father; fruitless search for her dead
mother) finds her words through Deronda’s
capacity to hold back and respect her silence
• He provides the container, the secure base,
which means that sorrow can be given words
rather than enacted through suicide
Logos
• The paradox of language: language that
pinions, language that liberates
• Mentalising and ‘meaning holism’
• Language as linking: ‘in the beginning was the
dialogue’
• Speech, gesture, metaphor as bridges
between two inner worlds
• Language as affect-regulatory
Decision/action
• Stepping back from ‘equivalence mode’ to
mentalising
• Imagination a) enhances range of possible
actions b) factors-in the role of ‘mind’.
• Therefore misery does not equate to suicide.
• Decision: for patient and therapist: is psa the
best treatment for this patient?
Action
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Speech and silence as action
Boundaries as action
Actions as Ainsworth’s ‘appropriate sensitivity’
Awareness of context beyond therapy
Reflection
• Psa as a ‘school of suspicion’ (Ricoeur)
• Deronda needs to think back on the whole
process
• Perhaps it was because he was just attracted
to the girl.
• Perhaps death is, under some circumstances,
preferable to life
Reflection
• Role of therapist’s self-mentalising
• No absolute ‘Newtonian’ psychotherapeutic
stance
• ‘Supervision’, whether internal or external,
integral to psychotherapeutic process
Conclusions
• Therapeutic imagination as a five step
sequence, cycling throughout clinical work
• Reverieans (Bion, Winnicott, Ogden, Waddell)
influenced as much by Coleridge as Freud
• Validates the inner world of therapist and
patient as vital component of healing
• ? Nostalgia for forgotten world – or new
avenue for modern neuroscience
Freud and Coleridge
Thanks…
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