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Teaching Guided Imagery

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Abstract

Guided imagery is a technique useful for teaching and practicing psychodynamic assessment and psychotherapy. It combines a state of meditative relaxation with the presentation of evocative scenarios that stimulate the imagination to spontaneously generate almost dream-like fanciful productions. These “daydreams” ordinarily contain highly revealing suppressed and repressed conflicts, wishes, affects, perspectives and other aspects of the self. The instructional program offered to trainees at the UCLA Neuropsychiatrie Institute for almost two decades is described. Suggestions are offered as to how programs that lack faculty acquainted with these techniques can further familiarize themselves in order to evaluate the techniques’ value for their curriculum.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, School of Medicine, University of California at Los Angeles, USA

    Joel Yager M.D. (Professor of Psychiatry, Director of Residency Education)

  2. UCLA Neuropsychiatrie Institute and West Los Angeles V.A. Medical Center (Brentwood Division), USA

    Joel Yager M.D. (Professor of Psychiatry, Director of Residency Education)

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  1. Joel Yager M.D.
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Yager, J. Teaching Guided Imagery. Acad Psychiatry 13, 31–38 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03341838

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