Some Reflections on Robert Bosnak's “Embodied Imagination”

(2003). Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 39:697-710

On Being One's Dream: Some Reflections on Robert Bosnak's “Embodied Imagination”

Philip M. Bromberg, Ph.D.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untravel'd world …

—Tennyson's Ulysses, 1842

When seen within the model of embodied imagination, psyche is not a single world. In embodiment, soul mirrors manifold worlds.… Even when they lie dormant.… they are present as a multiplicity of existences.… [A] multiplicity of subjectivities is the norm, not the pathology.… From this perspective, the main task of imaginal work is to let the variety of selves be aware of one another by networking them through the craft of imagination. In this model, a person with a multiple personality disorder is one who does not fathom the multiplicity of embodied imagination, and so is condemned to live out each self, oblivious to the simultaneous coexistence of dormant other selves. [Bosnak, this issue, p. 688].

TO SAY that I am a great admirer of Robert Bosnak is no secret to anyone familiar with my writing (Bromberg, 1999, 2000, 2003) following my first exposure to “dreamwork” through his ground-breaking book, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming (Bosnak, 1996). My admiration embraces not only his ideas about the untapped potential of the individual human mind, but equally his deep sense of purpose that leads him to test and shape these ideas by his actions in the real world, not simply “inside his head.” As did Harry Stack Sullivan (1953, 1964), Robert Bosnak believes that an individual can be truly known (or healed) only through engaging the multiplicity of self-other representations that shape his identity, including those contributed by the history of his culture. Thus his boundless passion for directly embedding himself in ancient societies in a way that most psychoanalysts (myself included) would be

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 697 - unlikely to put into action even if seriously considered—personally encountering the roots of dreamwork in remote civilizations and ancient epochs in human evolution where the permeability of boundaries between self and other have been a cultural given. So, perhaps it would be more honest to say that I'm not simply an admirer, but that a part of me still hanging around from boyhood—a part that in grown-up imagery might be called an Indiana Jones wannabe—yearns to go with him. That being said, let me attend, safely, to my piece of the dialogue.

Joseph Campbell, I have been told, defined heroic deeds as comprising two types. The more familiar reading represents the hero as someone willing to courageously sacrifice his own life for the sake of a righteous cause or to spare the life of an other. The second presents the hero as one who has devoted himself to a spiritual quest, during the course of which he discovers hitherto unknown potential in the realm of human endowment and returns with a message. Robert Bosnak, in a quest that took him to the prehistoric caves of France, the outback of Australia (Bosnak, 1996), and the interior of the dreamworld, is in my view a “hero” in the latter sense. He has brought us to the threshold of being able to relate to dreams in a way that requires us to go beyond the theories that explain what we already know is possible.

Bosnak's journeys have led him to enter cultures and remains of cultures that predate contemporary civilization, and return with a message that, fascinatingly, is similar to that brought back by Campbell himself. Though not studying the “dream” per se, Campbell's studies, like Bosnak's own quest, took him similarly to the prehistoric caves of France and the outback of Australia, where he arrived at conclusions that parallel those of Bosnak and, when the two are taken together, offer us a powerful message about the nature of human consciousness as an evolutionary phenomenon.

The first Cro-Magnon skull was found in the Dordogne in France and dated from around 18,000 b. c. during the Magdalenian period (the same broad era represented by the paleolithic cave site explored by Bosnak and his companions). According to Campbell (1990, p. 12), the skull is believed to be that of the man who did “those beautiful works of art in those great caves.” Campbell then goes on:

In the great cave of Lascaux, in the Dordogne … there is a frieze of animals. On the left corner there is this strange beast with these strange horns. No animal in the world looks like that, and yet these artists painted them

in a way that no one's been able to paint them since. So what did they have in mind here? We will go to Australia. It is remarkable the continuity from these caves to Australia and what we can find.

Here is an Australian elder in a ritual costume with the same “pointing sticks,” as they are called there.… The pointing stick is a negative phallus; instead of generating, it kills. With certain whispered magical charms it is pointed between the legs at the enemy, and the enemy will then be killed by being ripped open from the rectum to the genitals.

At Lascaux, in the crypt, a lower chamber, a famous image appears. This is definitely a shaman. He's got the masked head of a bird on his baton de commandement. Here is the erect phallus, the negative phallus, the pointing stick; and by a miracle a lance has struck through the animal master here, which is a bison, and opened up his guts exactly as the pointing stick would have worked. The bison is invoked in the name of the covenant, animals giving their lives willingly through the power of the shaman. [pp. 16-18; emphasis added]

It is hard not to think here of Berthe's bull giving up its “life” willingly—to become Berthe—in the name of the same covenant that led the bison to become one with man. Campbell's understanding of this seemingly “primitive” covenant clearly overlaps with Bosnak's understanding of embodied imagination as it takes place in dreamwork. In Campbell's words,

We're in a magical field. When you go into a cathedral today, you are in a magical field. And the men who are in there are not this individual, that individual, another individual, they are in a role. They are the experiences of the energy of nature coming through them.… The imagery is that of dream. The imagery is that of myth. The imagery is that of reference to transcendence.… Here is a Maori chieftan.… His whole body is tatooed.… the stained glass windows and incense and all have been imprinted on him. He's in the cathedral all the time, you might say. His life is that of a mythological role. [pp. 18-20; emphasis added]

Magical field, dream space, embodied imagination, potential space, transitional space, the analytic third—each a slightly different version of our efforts to symbolize in language what we cannot not yet fully comprehend. But is this not the essence of how we continue to evolve? In chapter I of The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud (1900) suggested that waking and sleeping realities may not be as experientially unbridgable as one believes them to be when awakening from a dream, but the implications

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 699 - of his insight were not subsequently pursued by Freud with respect to working with dreams in the analytic process. He wrote, “The unsophisticated waking judgment of someone who has just woken from sleep assumes that his dreams, even if they themselves did not come from another world, had at all events, carried him off into another world” (p. 7). “Thus the dream experience appears as something alien inserted between two sections of life which are perfectly continuous and consistent with each other” (p. 10). Historically, most analysts have tended not to see a patient as potentially able to “re-enter” in a session what Freud called “another world,” and thereby access the self-state of “dreamer” without losing the one of “patient.” For the most part, analysts have tended to collude with their patient's waking experience of a dream as something alien.

Erich Fromm (1951, p. 8), in The Forgotten Language, commented on how certain dreams are disturbing because “they do not fit the person we are sure we are during daytime,” a theme that was developed further by Charles Rycroft (1979), who stated that “dreams are messages from parts of the self of which the waking self is unaware” (p. 106; emphasis added). Bosnak is in the process of taking this to its next step. With him, I believe that a dream, in its essence, is a nonlinear reality and must be related to as such— not as a kind of story or a kind of movie, but as a real space in which the patient has been. By accepting that the dreamer is inside of his dream—inside of a separate psychic reality—then not only our way of approaching dreams in psychoanalysis is changed, but everything that takes place between ourselves and our patients is experienced differently, including how we perceive and use what we call the transference and countertransference field. Like Bosnak, I too have found that most individuals, particularly in the presence of an appropriately involved “other,” hold the capacity to reenter their own dream space while simultaneously retaining their waking reality, and that, in treatment, some people do it more easily and more naturally than others.

More than ten years ago (Bromberg, 1993) I offered the view that there is no such thing as an integrated self—a “real” you. I argued that “health is not integration. Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them. This is what I believe self-acceptance means and what creativity is really all about—the capacity to feel like one self while being many” (p. 186). Robert Bosnak shares this belief. Through his masterful development of its clinical implications—working with dreams as environments in which one exists physically rather than

stories one creates while asleep—he has done much more than simply leave “tracks in the wilderness of dreaming,” as the title of his 1996 book modestly implies. He has opened a clinical frontier in a process that was carved out a century ago as “the talking cure”—a frontier that can potentially lead us beyond the territory of dreams per se, into an enrichment of the total therapy environment, where what he calls “embodied imagination” is allowed to become a central aspect of working with the human capacity to feel like one self while being many.

Dreamwork, in part because of the dissociative nature of dreams themselves, makes use of the mind's capacity to enter hypnogogic states. I think that most analysts, regardless of theretical persuasion, would probably acknowledge that the same could be said of psychoanalysis per se; if this were not true, the phenomenon of transference would be unexplainable. Dreamwork, however, relies more directly on its ability to maintain a patient's light trance state. I do not use dreamwork the way Bosnak does—as a self- contained process. I use it only within the context of my analytic work, and not routinely with every patient. When introducing it into my clinical work with a particular patient, I have consistently found that because it does not involve a “hard-edged” hypnotic induction, it does not tend to intrude into the natural flow of the analytic relationship. Most importantly, I have discovered time and again that as long as my participation stays an aspect of genuine intersubjective negotiation, it is an extraordinarily powerful mode of bridging psyche and soma, affect and thought, and self-states that have been isolated self- protectively through dissociation.

I think it important to note that despite our shared perspective, Bosnak and I do not see the concept of “dissociation” identically. For instance, I speak about “normal dissociation”—the natural hypnoid capacity of the mind that works in the service of creative adaptation—and distinguish it from dissociation as a “pathological mental structure” developed as a defense against the recurrence of trauma. Dissociation as a mental structure serves as an “early warning system” whose key quality is its proactive ability to retain, at any cost, the safety afforded by the hypnoid separateness of incompatible self-states, so that each can continue to play its own role, unimpeded by awareness of the others. Bosnak comes somewhat close to my view in a statement not unlike one made by Davies and Frawley (1994, p. 68), who describe dissociation as existing “along a broad continuum with coexistant, alternative ego states moving in ever- shifting patterns of mutual self-recognition and alienation.” Using a very

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 701 - similar metaphor, Bosnak writes, “the closer embodied presences are imagined to be, the more affinity they have.” His vision of the self, compatible in most respects with my own, is in his words, based on the embodied network of subjectivities that points beyond self-centered psychologies to a network of selves, like amoeba constantly shifting shapes, associating and dissociating in the magma we call embodiment. Such a psychology does not originate in a metaphor of a single self that fractures, but on the metaphor of a community of selves in various processes of interaction. Then we can understand each self as an autonomous life form interacting with the protagonist of our lives, the one we call “I.” [Bosnak, p. 694; emphasis added]

This description leads him to then raise the most obviously significant next question, “But who, then, is ‘I?’ I, too, ask that question, but with a different emphasis: If we are able to be many selves, what makes it possible to feel that we are one—to be one “I?” My own answer (Bromberg, 1998) has been to point out that the subjective experience of self-continuity is an “illusion”—an illusion supported by the fact that when all goes relatively well developmentally, a person is only dimly aware of the existence of individual self-states and their respective realities because the transitions between them are subjectively smooth. The developmental process that eases the transitions across states of consciousness is an achievement that is greatly facilitated by caretakers who, through a process of mutual regulation, help the child attain nontraumatic state transitions by appropriate interactive responsiveness to the child's subjectivity. Now consider Bosnak's answer to “Who, then, is ‘I?’”—an answer quite different from mine:

”I” is our habitual identification with a subjectivity that has reached such a state of permanence that the mirror body it truly is has cohered into a photographic plate, habitual consciousness. And since we are so habitually identified with this subjectivity, it is hard to see it for what it is: the subjectivity of an autonomous life form as mysterious as all the others. [pp. 694-695; emphasis added]

This is clearly a matter around which our perspectives diverge. I question the necessity to see the subjective experience of “I” as an autonomous life form—a self-state like the others. To me, it adds no clarity to

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 702 - the mystery, and in addition I don't believe that the continuity of one's subjective experience of “I” possesses anything close to “a state of permanence,” but is actually quite variable. What makes it seem unchanging is its subjective illusion of continuity. For example, in working with a patient suffering with a severe dissociative disorder, it is the therapist who notices that his patient is not “who she was” the session before, while also noticing that she does not subjectively experience a discontinuity in the “I” who is speaking.

The issue on which Bosnak and I differ is why the patient doesn't experience the discontinuity. Bosnak postulates a separate, “autonomous life form” that has cohered into something one can call “habitual consciousness”—an “I” self-state that is always present and will always feel subjectively the same no matter which self anyone else sees. What I offer as an alternative explanation—one that I believe is closer to what we observe clinically—is that the subjective experience of “I” is intrinsic to the existence of each self-state because each self-state is a “self-organizing and self-stabilizing structure of behavior. That is, “when a transition (switch) from one state of consciousness to another state of consciousness occurs, the new state acts to impose a quantitatively and qualitatively different structure on the variables that define the state of consciousness. The new self-structure acts to reorganize behavior and resist changes to other states” (Putnam, 1988, p. 25). In other words, personal identity holds a subjective consistency as “I” within each self-state regardless of which has access to consciousness and cognition at a given moment.

I am arguing, in other words, that subjective consciousness (“I”) adheres to whatever self-configuration is present and that the natural hyp-noid capacity of the mind functions so as to keep dissociated any other self-states that would feel too disjunctive with that configuration. I feel that this simpler understanding is already implied in Bosnak's view that “the closer embodied presences are imagined to be, the more affinity they have.” But it is never a perfectly functioning system, which is why the illusory continuity of “I-ness” is not nearly as stable as a photographic plate in its permanence. The stability of “I-ness” is greatest when there is the most simultaneous access to alternative self-states with other perceptual realities and internal self-narratives. When a person is able to “stand in the spaces” between self-states, “I” can be quite flexible and permeable without loss of stability (i. e., without triggering a “loss of self” alarm), but for individuals with a history of trauma, selfhood is protected

as a life or death matter through pathological dissociation. As I've said, dissociation as a proactive defense against the recurrence of trauma preserves selfhood by keeping incompatible states of consciousness rigidly unbridgable and allowing access to them only as discontinuous and cognitively unrelated mental experiences. The paradox is that the illusory continuity of “I-ness” is thus preserved by narrowing its range at any given moment to one or another self-contained version of “me.” By creating a mental structure that fiercely maintains the division of self-experience into defensively dissociated islands of self, the continuity of “I” is preserved, but the wholeness of “me” is sacrificed.

And yet, is there something larger—something more foundational than what I've just offered as an explanation? Bosnak is not alone in suggesting the existence of an overarching “I” that exercises a kind of executive function over the individual states. There is no question that this is a reassuring idea—for one thing, it makes the spectre of annihilation anxiety (“losing” yourself forever) less fearsome—but it is not a prerequisite for believing in the existence of an immortal soul. Positing the existence of an additional, separate entity—a transcendent, never-changing self that provides continuity across state shifts is not supported either clinically or through research, and I don't believe it brings us either closer to God or closer to science.

I do think, however, that there is something else that is foundationally necessary. Put most simply, in my view as well as Bosnak's, what holds it all together—the piece of the mystery upon which self-state coherence and continuity of “I-nes” most depend—is human relatedness. “Unity” is a shorthand term for the experience of feeling fully in life, and “life” is the experience of our connection with the rest of humanity. That is, unity is the connection to mankind and other people. In analytic treatment or in dreamwork, when the therapist or dreamworker is able to relate to each aspect of the patient's self through its own subjectivity, each part of the self becomes increasingly able to coexist with the rest, and in that sense is linked to the others. It is an experience of coherence, cohesive- ness, and continuity, that comes about through human relatedness. At those moments when we “objectify” our patients (most often when our analytic stance is being used defensively), patient and analyst both sacrifice the experience of wholeness because unity is temporarily lost. These are the moments when we are most likely to find ourselves in the presence of a “difficult patient”—a patient who is trying to force us out of the isolated self-state in which we are hiding. When we are able to eventually

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 704 - experience our felt discomfort, feel it as an assault by the patient, and then recognize the assault as an expression of the patient's refusal to be robbed of “wholeness,” we have done a pretty good piece of work.

Edgar Levenson observed that Levi-Strauss (1963) put forth a belief system based on the principle that in the process of being healed each person will demonstrate both individual and cultural wholeness. From that vantage point, says Levenson (1972), “psychoanalysis is the inquiry into private aesthetic structure—if you will, private myth. Each person will meet the criteria of structural organization. He will demonstrate wholeness” (p. 40). In our own time, and as part of our own society, Bosnak is a superb example of such a healer; I further believe that within his concept of “dreamwork” (more so than Jung's) lie the seeds for the next natural step in the evolution of the psychoanalytic relationship. It introduces a truly “holistic” union of psyche and soma into analytic work (cf. Graham Bass, 2002) that can lead new self-experience to promote healing of both body and mind, such as took place with his patient Helen, a woman who had recently been told she had Multiple Sclerosis.

Even though I am writing what is, technically, a commentary on what Bosnak has said in his present paper, I've chosen to utilize some notes I took in 1999, when I had the pleasure of attending one of his dreamwork seminars, an experience that has stayed with me in a number of different ways. I'm including these “quotations” from Bosnak because in looking over my notes, I feel they add additional clarity to the necessary brevity with which he was able to elucidate certain concepts within his present article:

The concept of “fabrication”:

Tell the dreamer to start out with what he actually remembers. Do not let him fabricate to please you. Fabrication is the enemy of imagination. The work is about imagination. For example, in working with a dream about a woman with blue eyes, all the dreamer could remember was the blue eyes. I made the person focus only on the eyes. By not fabricating, images can emerge from other domains of consciousness.

The concept of “embodiment”:

The importance of the body cannot be overemphasized. While you are dreaming you are fully embodied—in your body. So is everyone else in the dream. Many emotions exist only as body experiences. There are very subtle differences in the way body sensations emerge. The more aware you are of what is happening in your body (the language of your body) the more aware you are of the range of emotions. The dreamwork is to

make the dream environment a palpable environment and a visceral experience. But the pressure of the material shouldn't be greater than the strength of the vessel. In dreamwork the vessel is very thin, so the level of anxiety must be modified by the dreamworker.

The concept of “multiplicity of consciousness”:

A dog in your dream has a different experience than the man standing next to you, or you. Get out of the single perspective of the protagonist.

Bosnak, I would argue, has in this last concept elevated to an entirely new level Benjamin's (1988, 1995) seminal point that the essence of human integrity resides in allowing “the other” to become a subject in his or her own right, rather than being viewed as simply an “object.” When you look at a dream as an environment, then any of the figures in it—human or nonhuman—have a subjectivity of their own that can potentially be known directly by the dreamer if he or she is able and willing to experience those figures through the perspective of their own subjectivity. Although he does not make explicit the powerful link between dreamwork and “intersubjectivity” theory, Bosnak is in his own way offering the view that dreamwork is healing in the same way that connectedness to an “other's” subjectivity is healing in real life—whether the other is man or animal.1 Helen

Bosnak believes, as do I, that true integration is the growing ability to hold a multiplicity of realities without dissociating. One of the most important parts of his technique is in his supportive presence that encourages a patient to contain, simultaneously, more than one of her dissociated states as a perceptual experience—thus increasing her capacity to “stand in the spaces” and hold several states in a unitary consciousness without dissociating. Because this is so pivotal to each of us in our work, I want to comment on the way in which he brings it about in his treatment of Helen—through a clinical stance that is powerfully effective, but

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1 It is interesting to consider a similar point made by Campbell (1990, p. 16) in his discussion of a particular cave painting, “The Sorcerer of Tres Frères,” a figure part human and part animal. Campbell asks, “Does he represent a diety or does he represent a shaman? There's been an argument on this, but it doesn't make any difference whatsoever, because the shaman, in this form, would be the deity. We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what's important, and that could be incarnate in a man or in an animal.

is also a stance that, in my own experience, more often than not requires a greater degree of negotiation than was necessary here. I doubt that this would have even come to my attention were it not for Bosnak's open-hearted willingness to share the “lived-process” with us. Because the vivid description contained in his verbatim clinical interchanges with Helen are such a rarity in the current psychoanalytic literature, it made me realize once again how precious is the commodity offered by an analyst who is willing to tell us what took place rather than tell us only about what took place.

The first instance of Bosnak's helping Helen to experience two oppositional states simultaneously took place without evidence of subjective collision between the states. It also took place without a collision between Bosnak's subjectivity and Helen's. I refer particularly to Helen's self-state that is vigilantly dedicated to preserving affective safety through dissociation, and that part of Bosnak's self most dedicated to the view that healing is best brought about through a patient's surrendering dissociation and becoming able to hold a multiplicity of self-states simultaneously. I think that Bosnak, rightfully, would attribute Helen's equanimity in this instance to his having made sure than her inital point of entry into her embodied dream state was a safe one—the stone building through which she could “harvest its solid strength.”

Soon, however, they entered “white water,” which was not a safe image. She could “feel the combination of exhilaration and fear in her intestines.” Here is where Bosnak's presence as a therapist becomes stronger, more direct, and more complex. His response to her wish to dissociate—”I feel I'm gonna lose consciousness… overwhelm my consciousness completely”—is to lead her again and again into her experience of her experience. “What is it like to be in front of a wave that will end your consciousness?” “What is it like to be confronted with this awesome scary entity?” “What is it like to be confronted by power beyond comprehension?” And this indeed had a positive effect; Helen remains able to hold the two disjunctive self-states simultaneously.

But suddenly, Helen seems about to be overcome by the power of her fear. She states, “I can't stay in this form of consciousness with that power.” Bosnak writes, that “in order to give her a chance to remain conscious through this onslaught” he tries to reintroduce the embodied dream images of strength that earlier gave her power, such as the strong building and the suppleness of the diving woman. But in so doing, his stance (and I think, his own self-state configuration) subtly shifts. He

now has access to a part of himself that changes his mode of relating and takes it beyond just safely deepening her hypnogogic dream experience. He is now sounding, simultaneously, a little like a highly skilled personal trainer. I know what this stance feels like because I've often found myself in it, sometimes to good immediate effect and sometimes creating a bit of a mess. “Don't go unconscious. Just feel it.” “Feel it. Stay with it, that shaking.” [Helen: “I want to stop it”]. “Please, please don't go out of it. Don't lose consciousness or pass out. Go entirely inside the shaking.” He continues in this way, exhorting her to stay conscious and stay inside the experience—but all the while, continuing to inquire what it's like being in it. “What's it like inside the shaking?” His own two self-states are being used synchronously—an example of what I would call Bosnak's “standing in the spaces”—and it is this combination of “pulling” her further into the feared experience and helping her cognitively process the experience of what they are doing while they are doing it that I believe most accounts for Helen's being able to “hang- in.” Without his continuing to help her experience the experience of what was taking place in the moment, he would have been no more than a cheerleader, and she would have been denied the source of help that most enables a patient to free herself from the grip of unprocessed traumatic affect— help in developing an increased capacity to self- reflect on an experience that has been “too dreadful to contain and process at the level of thought.”

Let me clarify this last point just a bit more. Asking “What's it like inside the shaking?” addresses a more complex reality than even the question, “What was the shaking like”? (which is a request simply to describe the shaking). An answer to “What's it like inside the shaking?” requires not only accessing the shaking feeling itself, but simultaneously trying to access the experience of the experience (a request to reflect on what the experience of shaking is itself like in the here and now. Fonagy and Target (1996) refer to this as the ability to represent a mental representation—the underpinning of mentalization and the foundation for what analysts have traditionally called “the observing ego.” Bosnak's goal with Helen was to help her cognitively process unprocessed trauma through embodied imagination. It involves enabling her to increasingly take her own mind as an object of reflection in the presence of negative affect that starts out as beyond cognitive management. The power of Bosnak's clinical sensibility notwithstanding, any therapist who asks a dissociative patient to do what Bosnak is asking Helen to do

WARNING! This text is printed for the personal use of the subscriber to PEP Web and is copyright to the Journal in which it originally appeared. It is illegal to copy, distribute or circulate it in any form whatsoever. - 708 - is requesting that she attempt something her whole psyche has organized itself to prevent—to access the dissociated self-state that holds the fearful perceptual image, try to contain it consciously in her working memory as part of the here-and-now reality as she talks about it with her therapist and, most difficult of all, continue to hold onto the immediate reality that she is in the hands of a safe person while reflecting on the entire experience. Such moments are typically quite messy in my own work and that of most analysts I know. Why? Because when the feared perceptual experience is embodied, the trauma is to some degree relived, not just talked about. This often (but not always) pulls patient and therapist into an enactment of the trauma in the here and now, as a part of which the therapist is dissociatively experienced by his patient as a contemporary version of an abusive, uncaring, or neglectful other, and because he is in a dissociative state of his own, he contributes to the patient's perception of him. That is, the dissociative enactment is a joint “cocoon” that continues to hold them in thrall while the therapist is consciously engaged in doing the work” with another part of his patient—a part who may, at least for a while, appear to be collaborating splendidly and is seeming very attached to the therapist; perhaps a bit “too” attached.

This is all to say that even though I am in complete agreement with Bosnak's way of expressing the treatment goal—to bring about greater harmony within the patient so that formerly incompatible versions of self can be experienced simultaneously—much of the action that brings this about typically takes place through enactment, between the respective self-states of the patient and those of the therapist. I wonder, however, whether some of the difference in our respective experiences of what it is like to work with embodied imagination may stem in part from differences in our individual temperments and personality styles as well as from differences in technique or theory. Further, I would not be surprised to find that if we were each to translate into concepts used by neuroscience and cognitive science what we think we are doing when we do what we do, we might arrive at a similar formulation. Maybe we might both accept something like the following: By using the hypnogic power of the mind in the context of human relatedness we are helping bring dissociated trauma into working memory, and helping to then create a link in the here and now between its mental representation and a mental representation of the self as the agent or experiencer. What, then, is my caveat? Simply that “exhorting” a patient not to dissociate is a very complicated piece of business. It is an action I have found

not only important but vital at a certain point in treatment, because if you don't do it, a patient will seem to remain more dissociative than he really is for an unnecessarily long time. But most typically, several different selves are heard from with very different views about the wisdom of what you are doing. This is not to say “don't do it,” but rather that it is important to keep in mind that when you do what Bosnak did with Helen, do not take it as a “mistake” when a patient gives you Hell. It's usually a sign that some parts of the patient's self are feeling force-fed, and that further negotiation with those parts is needed. References

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