REALITY AND IMAGINATION

by Stanley

Some say imagination is King. We are basically ‘homo imaginalis’; our true nature, so it is said, lies in our creative imagination. Reality, of course, cannot be ignored; but to neglect creative imagination is to lose all that is rich, vibrant and alive in us. Quite naturally we react against the dehumanising world of technology and the dead hand of scepticism where the highest of spiritual truths are reduced to mere mythical fables; where our deepest concerns are merely a disorder in some psychiatric textbook and where education is condensed to rote learning. There is such a thing as a ‘higher knowledge’ and the road to it is through a greater faith in our imaginative and intuitive sensibilities.

Yet, scientific research does everything in its power to guard against wishful thinking intruding into the search for truth. Imagination is OK in its place, but it can deceive us like the very devil. That you can predict the future by the stars or by reading signs in the entrails of dead animals is simply not on. Neither is fundamentalist religion, Ouija boards, Iridology, bleeding statutes, witchcraft, and channelling, alien abduction and crop circles. These and their like just do not pass muster as secure forms of knowledge, however much they may gratify a colourful imagination.

Imaginism and scientism seem to be opposing forces that grind against each other like two tectonic plates pushing in opposite directions – and psychology finds itself right on the fault-line. Nowhere is the opposition so strong as between behaviourists on one side and the archetypal and Jungian psychologists on the other. They glare at each other like enemies across the Great New Age divide. But the same conflict is seen among educational theorists. Now, after a decade or more stressing the importance of creativity, the government has decided that too many children are leaving school unable to read and write.

‘In Dreams Memories and Reflections Carl Jung describes his own struggle to honour the autonomy of the soul and its artist’s voice. In the chapter entitled “Confrontation with the Unconscious” Jung asks “what am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it? He then heard a voice that said “It is art.”’ (Glenyse Hyland 2006)

Marie-Louise von Franz was 18 when she first met Jung and was quite overawed at meeting the great man. 30 years earlier Jung had been working at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zürich and mentioned a patient who lived on the moon. Finding her courage, Von Franz said: ‘surely you mean that the woman acted as if she lived on the moon’. ‘No’, said Jung ‘it was not as if – the girl really did live on the moon.’ Von Franz later became a great disciple of Jung, but at the time she came away thinking ‘either he is crazy or I am’.

When I was young I was in the first class in England taught by the since notorious L. Ron Hubbard. There were no Hollywood stars in the class at that time. I remember at one point we touch on the tension between imagination and reality. I piped up: ‘if imagination conflicts with reality, so much the worse for reality.’ It was a clever remark because I picked up on the sort of thing Hubbard would want to hear. And he did – he liked it. Had Jung been there he would have smiled too.

The whole swag of ideas and sentiments that comprise what we call New Age is a sort of modern Romanticism. It is the same sort of ‘spiritual’ reaction as happened in the 19^th century revolt against scientific mechanisation. William Blake thought Newton’s influence was ‘Satanic’. He said, ‘God keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleep’. He was referring to what he thought was the narrowness of Newtonian physics, a cornerstone of the Age of Reason and a prime initiator of the scientific and the industrial revolution.

Charles Tart, an American psychologist said: ‘...the current popularity of ‘New Age’ ideas is a reaction against the dehumanising, despiritualising, effect of scientism, the philosophical belief...that we are nothing but material beings’.

But this idea of ‘scientism’ is a New Age romantic and mythical view of science. Isaac Newton actually wrote religious tracts, biblical hermeneutics and deeply studied the occult and alchemy. The idea that science is ‘materialistic’ comes about because it finds out what causes what. And when we find out exactly what causes what we call it a ‘mechanism’. For some minds it is a great achievement to be freed from illusion and bullshit; others feel trapped and spiritually deprived because they are no longer free to imagine what they like. Darwinian evolution by natural selection may take more getting used to than mythical Creation Stories that abound in every culture; but it is much simpler and also more awe-inspiring.

Because you are a therapist dealing with all that human stuff you may think you are on the spiritual side of the great divide, with the world of science on the other. But that’s not the way it is. If you are a good therapist you are a good scientist. Why? Because if you are a good therapist you wait upon phenomena; like Galileo, with his new toy telescope, you wait night after night, patiently observing Jupiter’s moons orbiting the planet that no one had ever noticed before.

You do not impose upon phenomena, you wait upon phenomena. Hippocrates of Cos was the Greek father of medicine. He urged meticulous and careful observation. ‘Leave nothing to chance’, he said. ‘Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough time.’

The term ‘psychotherapy’ has become a misnomer; there really is no adequate name yet for what we do. The client in the consulting room is like nature. You ask questions of this living world we call a person. But what is most important: you listen to the answers as though nature itself was speaking. You wait upon phenomena. You do not contradict or try to fashion nature. You do not tell nature anything – you let it tell you. You know that this person has her own ways; there will be a precise way her nature will unfold. Your fantasies have no place. You are not there to mold a human being; you are not a teacher, but a pupil. You are there to learn and to let nature show you what it does naturally: natura naturans. This is no different from a true scientific attitude. It takes the same creative imagination and respectful sense of wonder. Ours is not a highly disciplined science, and who knows if it ever will be. But we have more in common with Galileo, Newton and Darwin than we think.