ABSTRACT
This chapter considers instances of the apparent incapacity of patients to imagine. It shows that trust and the capacity to imagine constructively are both severely disturbed by defects in early relationships. The chapter discusses the increasingly close relation between the ideas of psychoanalysts and some analytical psychologists. It is the experience of the past in the present which supplies the feeling of one's own reality, the ego-feeling as P. Federn calls it, which is so essential for being able to imagine constructively and to envisage a future. The ability to form mental images and feel closely associated with these is well established; but the ability to trust imagination is lacking. Imagination was severely inhibited in the first case by the patient's need to establish her own identity because she felt so empty when she came to analysis. C. G. Jung's statement also illustrates how fantasy and imagination were used more or less synonymously in some places.
