In a land of a living God: The healing imagination and the Icelandic heritage.

摘要

The thesis introduces a new paradigm explaining the functioning of the imagination within the human mind based on insights from psychoanalytical theory and analytical psychology. The Imagination is defined as the synthesis of mental images or content into new ideas and as the process of forming a mental representation of absent objects, an effect, a bodily function, a memory, a situation or an instinctual drive, etc. producing images, symbols, fantasies, dreams, ideas, thoughts, and/or concepts. It differs from fantasy, in not being an adverse of reality but provides an active means of adaptation to it. The thesis explains the function of the imagination in four distinct, however interrelated, dimensions, i.e. the intra-psychic dimension, the inter-personal dimension, the supra-personal dimension and the transpersonal dimension. It uses examples from the history of healing in Iceland to explain the healing possibilities of the imagination that take place in the transitional space in-between the self and the objective psyche, the self and the human environment, the self and the nonhuman environment, and the self and the sacred, respectively. The imagination is regarded as the core of our being, the faculty that allows for perception, comprehension and creativity. Healthy imagination is a free flowing function, whereas unhealthy imagination interferes with reality and complicates. It is argued that mental disturbances can be caused and sustained by the inability to make appropriate use of the imagination and its dynamics. The "space" that allows for the workings the imagination is metaphorically referred to as "the land of the living God", an assumption that locates the theological discourse in a terra firma or the sacred intermediate space located in-between the self and God.