Guided Affective Imagery with Children and Adolescents

A major shift in our conception of human psychology has occurred in the past 20 years. Research scientists have recognized that the stimulus-response models that characterized the dominant "objec­ tive behaviorism" of the period between 1910 and 1960 had over­ looked the role of conscious thought, cognitive mapping, and related centrally generated information-processing as fundamental human characteristics. Indeed, even the psychoanalytic theorizing of that pe­ riod placed great emphasis on "drives," "energy displacements," and unconscious phenomena. Today, we increasingly recognize that human beings are curious, information-gathering creatures with a differential emotional structure that is closely tied to the nature of in­ formation processing and to problems of meaning as well as to the satisfaction of physiological needs. In the basic fields of social psy­ chology and personality theory, increasing attention is being paid to how people form constructs of the confusing ambiguities of daily life and social relationships and how they mentally play and replay these in waking or in nocturnal-sleeping fantasy form. The clinical methods developed by Professor Leuner and his col­ leagues exemplify the view that human reality consists not only of the direct experiences of environmental stimulation or social interaction but also of the private reality developed as we replay these experi­ ences in our day and night dreams and shape them into symbolic, metaphorical, or allegorical modes.