Imaginal Training
Here's another take on the way my work differs from psychotherapy. courtesy of a former client. He says my work is less like psychotherapy than "training.” I asked him to elaborate and he says it far better than I could:
"I see the work as training first because it's focused on developing skills, tekhne. You teach people practical methods of engaging particular activities that serve as catalysts--journal-keeping, dialogues, even structural work* in the way you use it.
"The infusion of a rational element into an encounter with unconscious material doesn't have the quality of rationalizing or defusing; rather it allows people to linger longer over something and really see what they've conjured up. Therapy tends to rush past the initial encounter with the retrieved vision, treating it as a Skylla and Charybdis to be carefully and quickly navigated past.
"And finally, therapy tends to assert somehow, however muddily, that a person can wash their sins and hurts away. Your work invites people to learn, like Odysseus, to be known by their wounds in meaningful ways. That, again, is tekhne, skill, training."
(*Note: Al Pesso is the founder of psychomotor therapy, which has very much inspired my own work, although I eventually came to see its value mainly as cathartic. As my client says, I question its capacity to "correct" or "cure" the wound. Indeed, I question the wisdom of such an undertaking at all.)
Is this work for you?
*You are looking for a form of personal growth that recognizes that all change begins with the capacity to imagine it.
*You are looking for an adjunct or alternative to psychotherapy for personal growth issues (but not for treatment of psychological disorders).
*You are looking for a way to unfreeze a creative block. Writers and artists of all types particularly benefit from this work.
*You are looking for a form of growth that does not insist upon endlessly rehashing your childhood history. In Imaginal Training, we see our "symptoms" in a much broader context. In fact, we avoid pathologizing.
*You are looking for a form of personal growth that recognizes that the imagination is inherently healing.
*You are looking for a kind of work that fully acknowledges the body as a "field" in which the emotional, the spiritual and the mental are expressed.
*You are looking for a way to explore your dreams and other drug-free altered states of consciousness.
*You are open to exploring your relationship to society and culture.
TO SCHEDULE AN INITIAL CONSULTATION:
CALL 404-518-4415 OR WRITE CLIFFBOSTOCK@GMAIL.COM
My Psycho Credo:
a history and general description of my work
“Creation is a more excellent act than illumination.”
MARSILIO FICINO'S statement above expresses my basic philosophy about personal growth. Like Ficino, teacher of the great artists of Renaissance Florence, I believe creating something beautiful out of our lives, no matter what happened to us, is more important than repeatedly illuminating the past.
I WORK with the imagination. I try to help people imagine their lives differently by paying closer attention to their calling. I have developed techniques in service to that objective. Most of us have never learned how to look both inward and to the larger world outside ourselves to discern life purpose, much less what impassions us, makes us happy and what holds us back.
Therapy often tells us that we are inhibited by the past. It is certainly true that our fears may originate in the past, but I have found that the failure to "follow one's bliss," to use Joseph Campbell's expression, is really a failure of the imagination in the present. In my way of working, even the way we remember the past -- and remembering itself is an act of imagination -- is always as much a comment on the present as a historical statement. So, when we talk about the past, we are always talking about the present too.
MY WORK is personal growth but no longer psychotherapy in the conventional sense. (And my work is not intended for people with mental health disorders.) For the last 15 years I've been part of a movement succinctly described in an issue of the Utne Reader : "A new artistic and spiritual movement has evolved so far beyond . . . therapy that it needs its own name . "
MAUREEN O’HARA, former president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, suggests new names like "soulcraft," "psychopoetics" and "the existential arts.” (Atlanta Magazine called me an "anti-therapist.") If you want to read about my journey away from conventional psychotherapy after a few years of its practice, click on “writing” on the links above. (Much of my writing is still filed under my former site, soulworks.net.)
FOR A PERIOD I used the term "soulwork" to describe my work, but the term "soul" has become so over-used that its original meaning has been almost completely eclipsed by religion and the self-help industry. (Even James Hillman has begun to move away from it.)
A CLIENT from the past does a better job than I do in describing my work in the piece at right. He distinguishes my work from therapy by calling it training. In that sense it is closer to "life coaching," in which the facilitator enters a mentoring partnership with the client instead of making a diagnosis and trying to "cure" pathology.
MY WORK, following James Hillman, rejects the medical model and the fantasy of cure where personal growth is concerned. A medical perspective only further entrenches people in their inhibitions by turning confusion into a disease. My work presumes that the client is motivated to change but has lost her way - not that she is too afflicted to change.
I HAVE rechristened my work "Imaginal Training." In my way of working, as my client points out, the intellect is not accorded a position that is inferior to feelings, as is true in much therapy, but joins directly with the feelings in the project the client establishes for himself.
WHAT IS THE OUTCOME of this kind of work? One way of putting it would be to say the goal of my work is the cultivation of eccentricity through an appreciation of beauty, not as prettiness, but as the quality that gives every living and inanimate thing of the world its particularity. The poet Rimbaud wrote: "Finally I came to regard as sacred the disorder of my mind." It is in the very "disorder" of our minds - exactly what most psychotherapy attempts to "fix" or "cure" - that our sense of life purpose can be gleaned.
THIS IS SO alien to the way most of us live that it is hard to communicate except experientially how deeply satisfying it is when we learn to live from an aesthetic perspective. We stop monitoring ourselves continually to accommodate values that may not suit us. We find our passion and our compassion --happiness.
THIS IS completely consistent with the original, long forgotten project of depth psychology created by Freud and Jung. It has been continued by Hillman, one of my teachers, and Thomas Moore ( author of "Care of the Soul" ) . The work of all four of them draws heavily from the creative arts - a great difference from the very focused clinical scientific orientation of most psychologists today. They might be of great help to people with disorders but less helpful to ordinary people who are questing for meaning and creative purpose in their lives
It’s training, not therapy
“The psyche’s reality is lived in the death of the literal “
-- Gaston Bachelard
