ABSTRACT
Oddly, it reconciles the pre-Sullivanian concept of a self that is not interpersonal, which has a private aesthetic experience rich in fantasy and imagery. In this sense, although we are all "more alike than different," as Sullivan put it, at the level of "deep" structure (LeviStrauss's structure), at the level of personal configurations we are more different than alike-and glad for it. Sullivan, I think, lost much of Freud's great poetry. American psychoanalysis has remained largely pragmatic. Much of European psychoanalysis, not pressured by American practicality, has stayed with the concept of an internal mythopoetic process. Dreams, free-floating imagery states, are considered to be curative in themselves. Jerome Singer has summarized developments in the therapeutic use of imagery. He claims,
the journey itself, the very process of exploring this preconscious realm through the succession of images is intrinsically therapeutic. The major therapeutic element, sometimes carried over dozens of sessions, entails the active exploration of one's own flow of images, and the working through of blocks in the natural use of imagination. . . . The funda-
mental imagery pattern of the individual-partly idiosyncratic in the sense of its relationship to family experience, partly shared by others of the same sex by virtue of constitution, and partly collective in the sense of commonality of culture and the emergent expression of man's primal development-becomes the focus of exploration in oneiric therapy.14
