Barbara L. Green – For Therapists:
Knowing:
Imago and Object Relations
All sounds a bit mysterious to me, but it is a worthy project, to grasp the shape of the Imago (which I think of a a complex of little hooks or valencies which search out healing relationships.) Now that is a form of knowing, and yes it will have its origins in that psychological entity which Psychodramatists call the “Original Social Atom” or internal object relationships in the Britich Psychoanalytic tradition.
The amalgam that is the imago, therefore, is a complicated component of the mental apparatus. Partly conscious but to a large degree preconscious and unconscious, it contains numerous bytes of knowledge. Some are certainties but have never become differentiated thoughts; others are the residue of direct bodily experiences recorded permanently, like a dent made in the earth by a falling meteor. Still others result from distal observations and are filed away, to be later referred to with unconscious automaticity.