Embodiment : creative imagination in medicine, art and travel

Prelude. Into the cave. 1 A radical change of perspective. 2 The embodying image. 3 A display of method. 4 The dreaming brain and simultaneous multiplicity in space. 5 Metabolizing trauma. 6 The endogenous healing response. 7 Surrender and dissociation. 8 Kinds of imagination. 9 Primal matter and tincture, the coloring agent. 10 Incubation, art, and dreaming by proxy. 11 The embodied condition. Appendix: a practical guide to technique

'A radical work that demands nothing less than the end of Descartes' view of the self as singular and fixed, of the self as solely a mental entity. Rather, Robert Bosnak argues, the human "self" is a constantly changing theatre of multiple, embodied or quasi-embodied beings. Intelligent and autonomous, operating in any state of consciousness but especially manifest in dreaming or vision, they are ignored at the cost of our own health. Aboriginal traditions may call them Ancestors; Jungian psychology "projections"; Bosnak directs us to a different metaphysics. Drawing on Henry Corbin's Imaginal Realm, as well as on medieval alchemy, scientific complexity theory, East Asian philosophy, postcolonial critique, and above all on three decades intensive work with dreams, Embodiment reveals how humans can relate to the multiple beings alive in each of us.''

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