Volume 2, Issue 9, page 11

AN ADIUDGEMENT FROM

'Creative image Therapy By VOLNEY G. MATHISON

Creative Imaging Is No Wizardry

ECULIAR ./Tenopountered image therapy patient who, books on the

situation sometimes is in cases where creative

is introduced to a

unfortunately, has read
books on the subject of psychoanalysis or psychiatry. Often such
a patient will
wanly inform you that he's sorry, but he can't
visualize or create mental images to save his
life. Not a one. It may be suspected that
this type of patient is trying, in his aberra-
ted way, to impress upon you the awful state
of his case. He's bad off--so far gone he
can't even visualize. He's putting you on
notice--unless you are a super-therapist, you
never will be able to aid him.

If you happen to get angry at this fellow, you might as well quit
at once. Bat if you are just amused, you can
agree with him. Inform him it's common, you have had such cases.
Then, with assurance and positiveness, try this: "In this
situation there is a useful substitute. Merely imagine that you
can see mental images. There's no question about it-you can't
SEE them. But anybody, unless dead or unconscious, can imagine
or-have an idea of what it would be like if he could create
mental images."

This sometimes works!

Bat here's a more practical and effective procedure. Develop good
understanding and rapport between yourself and
your patient. Then execute the psychological maneuver illustrated
in the following example:

The patient in this case was the wife of a foreign ambassador, an
attractive but selfconscious woman who suffered
from acute feelings of inferiority in the brilliant gatherings
that she had to attend. She came to me by way of an official of
our New York exporting firm, who previously had given her for
reading one of my earlier manuals that dealt to some extent
with mental-imaging exercises. Then she had attended some
"Scientology" group, where she found there was quite a to-do
about "mocking up", i.e., creating, various arbitrary systems of
mental images. Listening meekly to the fictitiously self-
assured gabble of this group about the extensiveness of their
"mockups", she became convinced that in this circle, too, she
was hopelessly inferior-. Try as she would, she declared, she
couldn't create mental images. She hadn't the slightest idea,
she said, what such an experience would be like.

After taking care to establish good relationship with her, I
queried:

"Whom do you most love?"

"My oldest son," she replied, after a pause. "I love him dearly."

"Please describe your son to me," 1 requested. "What color is his
hair?"

"Black. 11
"What color are his eyes?"

'Mack. 11
"How tall is he?"

"Six feet exactly."

"Describe to me a time, if you can, when he appeared before your
friends, or at a gathering, and you felt very glad and
proud that he was your son."

January-February, 1956

"Oh, yes... " and she described a gala event in detail.

Then I finally queried: "Bat how do you KNOW that his eyes and
hair are black, that he is tall and slender, that he
looked fine at the gathering, and so on?" I
"Why," she replied, unhesitatingly, "I CAN SEE HIM!"

"And that," I replied, "is what is meant --and ALL that is
meant--by saying that one is creating a mental image."

As I then painstakingly assured my patient, the difficulty seems
to be, mainly, that persons who in general feel
inferior are apt to assume that a mental or psychic image should
have much of the color, brilliance, intensity, and
stability of a cinemascope screen.

This is simply not the case.

Mental images are a rapidly duplicated series of exceedingly
transient flickers. Each one is fleeting, evanescent.

"But those!" she exclaimed. "They are so filmy. Thinner than
spider webs. They no more than come and they are
gone. How can such weak things have great power?"

The power of psychic images may not inhere in the transient
images themselves. The power is perhaps that which
creates the images. Each image is without weight, length,
breadth, or depth, has no physical appurtenances apparently. and
persists but a microsecond or so. Yet the creating and
duplicating of such images initiates and accomplishes, in time,
the
physical act of CREATION.

The longer one considers the phenomena of creative imagery, on
the level of awareness, the more clearly can one see
that this activity is basic to almost every other. This, too,
discloses the true nature of that which is generally called
"faith". "Faith". in any religion, comprises the never-faltering
duplication of psychic image systems wherein one is
positively ALREADY ACCOMPLISHING SOME ACT, ACHIEVING SOME DESIRED
EVENT. The mental images themselves
are only of FULFILLMENT. These, the actual images, are as of NOW,
only and forever as of now. They cannot be of
the "future". One "sees" them NOW. In "faith cures" of actual
disease, the psychic' image pattern of the re-created structure
is as of NOW. Not going to be, not will be, bat NOW. Psychic
images seen uncreatable, in the future sense. The image is
created and duplicated NOW. The new structure is already
created--on the psychic image level.

If it is not first created on this level it will not be completed
on the physical level. This is, must surely be, the mode
of all Creation. The whole material universe is a manifestation
of this prior creation by something that may be termed
Divine Mind. It seems obvious that our physical bodies and all
the structures that surround us--vegetable, animal, and
mineral--are manifestations of some Creative Power. The body and
everything physically pertaining to it is the instrument
of the psyche. What other purpose can it have?

(ED. NOTE--This is the sixth and next-to-last abridgment of
chapters from Mr. Mathison's now book, "Creative Image Therapy",
obtainable from the author at $2.)

The ABERREE

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