ABSTRACT
Chapter 9 reviews the importance of arousing desire, of finding one’s voice, of the clinician’s intuition, of the inevitability of the patient deciding who he wants to be and of the role of forgetting and remembering in trauma. The biblical story of Joseph is discussed as an example of working through extreme trauma.
The author reminds the reader of the implicit feelings of spirituality that arise in psychotherapeutic work and of the importance of the relational imagination that allows the clinician to intuit unconscious communication. The importance of dreamwork is stressed, during which early unconscious memories of the patient can be accessed to create new embodied states. This helps free the patient from dysfunctional patterns. The detailed discussion in Chapter 6 of the dream technique of Embodied Imagination, designed to address rigidities of personality and expand the imagination, is referenced.
Finally, the author offers considerations about space: collapsed space with nowhere to think; transitional space where creativity and imagination reside; mystical space generating a restorative sense of oneness; physical space becoming transitional, potential space; dramatic healing space, such as in therapeutic theater and open, hopeful space in art. Visiting these psychic and/or physical spaces helps both clinicians and patients stretch and explore new ways of being.
