Remaking the Imago Paterna: How Psychotherapy Helps a Son Reimagine the Father - A Heuristic Enquiry
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Tudor, Keith
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Other Form of Assessable Output
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Auckland University of Technology
Description
Jung’s (1969) concept of imago suggests that inner representations of our objects can often take on a mythic quality. Woven together from subjective experience, sociocultural influence and archetypal forces, the imago can often become more powerful than the real person it represents. In the work of psychotherapy, it is often the patient’s imago that is reimagined, as memory is interrogated and reintegrated.
Led by a curiosity about how my psychotherapy journey has changed my relationship with my father, I embark on a heuristic journey to confront my internal representation of him, created through scraps of subjectivity and patched over in the absence of knowledge. Following the heuristic phases outlined by Moustakas, I call on poetry, research, archetype, and myth in order to deconstruct and remake the image of the man, wondering about the ways in which psychotherapy can facilitate such an odyssey.
Comparing psychotherapy to heurism, the research promotes therapy as a creative act of imago rewriting, a rite of passage between father and son, and the inheritance and repair of a transgenerational narrative. Seen through a mythic, archetypal lens, the implications of psychotherapy as a vicarious, transgenerational act of recreation continues to complicate Western ideas of the individual as an autonomous unit. Ultimately, the mythic quest to re-write the imago in therapy is not just the reimagining of a thing, but a powerful re-composing of a transgenerational relationship.