Psychology finds itself in a continually awkward attempt to be a science. In its attempts to justify its existence to its professional and acacdemic communities by presenting itself as a science, Psychology has greatly retarded its own psychological growth. What has been lost in the donning of the ill-suited persona of science is its ability to imagine, and hence has prevented it from becoming an arena of psychological wealth.
To understand the way psychology fantasizes about the psyche, we must examine the mytho-structures that give form to psychology's ideation. A strong infrastructure of psychology's imagination is science. In trying to understand the logos of the psyche, the school of psychology has relied heavily upon scientific fantasies for structuring its ideas. By academia and the mental health profession, psychology has been held accountable to the ideals of the scientific method. Psychology has suffered from these restrictions for they have greatly constrained the formation of its images and ideas.
Liberating
Psychological
Imagination
The problem that psychology faces with the constraints of its pseudoscience academic classification, does not arise from its inability to follow methodologies that purport reliability in establishing objective truth. The problem is that it strangles itself imaginatively in its efforts to pretend to be something that it is not. Psychology attempts to study the phenomenon of the human being and his ever illusive non-physical nature, referred to as the psyche. In order to entertain the fantasy of understanding the psyche more tools are needed other than scientific methodology.
The idea that these fantasies of science have a negative impact on individuals and, hence, therapy and psychology comes from the assumption that the psyche benefits from expanding itself phenomenologically and imaginatively. The individual who is in need is most likely troubled by some motif that is burdening her life. The motif itself is usually less the problem than the fact that the motif is overwhelmingly pervasive to the exclusion of other necessary life themes. From this idea comes the therapeutic fantasy that a troubled individual would benefit by expanding the imagination with a plethora of experiential motifs, rather than the present palette of but a few which have become disabling. Science effects the imagination of the psychologist by putting great restrictions on psychology's theoretical perspectives. The psychologist who is limited in fantasy will bring these limitations to his client and the client at best will have a chance to trade a dysfunctionally limiting fantasy structure for a more socially accepted limiting one.
For the psychologist there is no bad news here. Accepting the process from which ideas are born as a natural human function that is always going to include the fantasy structure of the creator only liberates the imagination from the sterile fantasy of scientific methodology. Since the human experience or psyche is so multifaceted that it is essentially undefinable within the realm of ideas, the psychologist in an effort to bring understanding to such a mysterious beast must have a vast plethora of tools with which their fantasies of human nature are framed.
