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Drs Kretschner, Frank and Guillerey - Guided imagery in healing and the importance of symbols
Identifier
023154
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
David Scott Rogo - Leaving the Body: A Complete Guide to Astral Projection
A German therapist, Wolfgang Kretschner, induced "landscape" images in his patients. Kretschner considered any associated images that surfaced to be symbolic of internal psychic problems. The goal was to show a patient how to gain access to his or her own unconscious mind and the symbols contained within it- a perfect road to self-discovery.
…. Ludwig Frank [also] discovered that deep relaxation stimulated the emergence of hypnagogic imagery. Greatly influenced by the psychoanalytic claim that one could achieve mental health through the discharge (or catharsis) of unhealthy mental material, he and his followers believed that producing spontaneous symbolic mental imagery was a self-normalizing procedure that was automatically cathartic. Therefore, they felt that learning to produce mental imagery was therapeutic in itself.
Meanwhile, a researcher in Switzerland, Marc Guillerey, was experimenting to see if specially suggested mental imagery could help his patients find solutions to their problems. He noted that when his patients were asked to reverie, conflicting images often appeared. He believed that helping them resolve these incongruities would carry over and help them solve real-life problems, which the conflicts no doubt symbolized.