The Wise Old Man (Healing Through Inner Images)

The inner world of the imagination, with its own unique events and cast of characters, is active in most people, but many lose touch with it in their absorption with external life. Pieter Middlekoop shows how this dreamlike inner world can be entered deliberately while awake in order to gain self-knowledge and resolve conflicts. The book presents accounts of several people who entered the imaginal world by means of a technique called Imagination Therapy, which Middlekoop developed as a variation of C. G. Jung's Active Imagination. In a series of "imaginations," they encounter their joys and sorrows, their anxieties, their problems with relationships—and also the keys to solving their difficulties. During the course of therapy it becomes clear that there is an active center within the personality that communicates to the conscious self in the symbolic language of imagery. Often personified in fantasies and dreams as the archetypal Wise Old Man, this inner source of wisdom guides the individual to healing and wholeness.