Perspectives on the Real, the Imaginary, and the Music in GIM
Martin Lawes - Volume: 15
This article focuses on the traveler’s experience in GIM being real and imaginary at the same time. Clinical material is drawn on to illustrate the theme as it relates to narrative transformation, defensive maneuvers, and working with trauma in GIM. The article includes an in-depth exploration of the role of the music in the process, where it often seems to provide just what the traveler needs when he needs it. This is not only of central importance therapeutically but is also highly paradoxical, part of the real-illusion of the traveller’s experience in GIM as the author describes it. The author develops a theoretical meta-perspective drawing on psychoanalytic, transpersonal, and other thinking and proposes that in opening deeply to the music, the traveler’s needs are met through his personal process becoming aligned with a universal process of being and becoming in which he and all things partake and are ultimately one.
Key words: Guided Imagery and Music, trauma, defensive maneuvers, real-illusion, trans-subjective-participation.