Elizabeth Wilde-McCormick, Centre for Transpersonal Psychology

In session with a client who has cancer, demonstrates a classic approach to image work.

"The role of having a transpersonal perspective, that which transcents personality and allows another dimension, whether you call it; transpersonal, spiritual, or whatever, I mean most of the time we don't call it anything, the importance of that is to allow a space for that language to be part of the everyday, part of life. Our great maxim is that the transpersonal has us and it is that energy to which we ..... not exactly submit our lives but certainly we allow that energy to flow through us. I've long been interested in the interface between what we've separated in terms of body and mind, I mean I think they're actually the same things but we know them as different energies and the extraordinary way that the psyche has of communicating itself, signalling through physical symptoms and in our culture physical symptoms or neurosis, psychosis, whatever it is, is sometimes the only way a suffering soul can reach the outside world and find a place to be met. I've always been interested in terms of the idea of that but also because I've had quite a lot of illness myself, so that's the way I've been brought into it through my own experience of having quite a number of difficult and long drawn out illnesses. If somebody for example with a life threatening illness such as cancer or a heart attack can make a relationship with their symptom or their illness and because they've made a relationship with it then approach what is necessary and appropriate for the body's healing, I think that their whole experience of illness is quite transformed and can then move them into something like an initiatory experience, even if that means actual physical death.
I would use whatever technique seems to be appropriate for the person, whether it is drawing or Gestalt or psychodrama or writing. I do quite a lot of writing, being a writer, writing the life story, telling the story and obviously using a great deal of imagery, allowing the images to become real for the person, to explore them through the image, through the imagination which is very important to me, allowing the person to have a relationship with those images os that they become an integral part of their life and their story, and that they live on for them in between therapy, I mean therapy's only one small part of life, hopefully, and life is ultimately the great therapist."