Gerald Epstein - Epiphany

Epiphany

In 1974, Epstein experienced what he calls an "epiphany". In Jerusalem as a visiting professor in law and psychiatry, he met a young man who reported that three years of extensive psychoanalysis had not succeeded in freeing him of his depression but that four sessions with a local healer who practiced "waking dream therapy" had cured him. Epstein arranged a meeting with the healer, a woman named Colette Aboulker-Muscat, who, at her death in 2003, "had an international reputation as a . . . healer of body and mind who employed visualization and dream interpretation." Epstein's epiphany came after he suggested to Aboulker-Muscat that since Freud had proposed to analysts that they elicit free association by asking patients to imagine being on a train with an analyst and describing to the analyst everything the patient sees while looking out a window, one could consider Freud's free association a form of mental imagery. Aboulker-Muscat asked, "In what direction does the train go?" Disconcerted, Epstein made a horizontal gesture with his hand. Aboulker-Muscat made a vertical gesture in response. "What if the direction was changed to this axis?" Fifteen years later, Epstein described this moment in born-again language:

I felt an overwhelming sense of self-recognition, an 'aha' experience. It was an epiphany. The vertical movement seemed to lift me from the horizontal hold of the given, the ordinary patterns of everyday cause and effect. I leapt into freedom, and I saw that the task of therapy . . . was to help realize freedom, to go beyond the given to the newness that we all are capable of. . . .This is what imagery, I have come to learn, makes possible.

Epstein studied imagery with Aboulker-Muscat for nine years. In New York, he closed his Freudian practice and opened a new practice based on mental imagery.