Bromberg tells us that “the negotiation of selfhood and otherness...has a lot to do with imagination and creativity.” and that “The relative presence of “imagination” in human discourse overlaps to no small degree with the relative capacity for intersubjectivity that exists in any relationship.” [Being able to let in another’s experience allows for a “shared intersubjective space.”] Bromberg expands the shared space to include shared imagination, “loosen[ing] the rigidity” of one’s singular believes about the self [and other] to allow for a “relational unconscious.” I take this to mean if one is stuck in solipsistic fantasy, there is little to no room for interrelating with others much less comprehending that there exists another’s mind, one with separate contents from one’s own. He writes:
The cocreation of a lived, relational unconscious more and more nourishes the willingness of each person to participate in a growing sense of “We” that includes “Me” and “You” as part of their individually expanded self-experiences. By living together in the enacted shadow of what is visible but not perceived, an opportunity is afforded to encounter what has been hidden in plain sight. … This allows their relationship greater interpersonal spontaneity and creative self-expression that is carried by an expanded sense of selfhood into the world “out there.”
Relying on Winnicott’s 1971 paper on “Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living,” Bromberg elaborates that fantasy is a dissociated (‘Not me’) state while imagination embraces the ‘Me’. A colleague of mine noted that fantasy is somehow without hope [a remedy to hopelessness], while imagination includes hope about the future. Winnicott put it, in his enigmatically paradoxical way, like this: ”In fantasying, what happens, happens immediately, except that it does not happen at all.”
Bromberg explains:
For a person who is “imagining,” the state of affairs is different; the person is experiencing the self as it now exists, projected into the future. Because the self being imagined is the same self that is doing the imagining, the person as he is now has the capacity to act into a future that is real to him because the future that is imagined in the here-and-now is itself real. When the capacity to transform fantasy into imagination starts to increase, self-state transitions do not disrupt self-continuity, which in turn allows the present and the future to be bridged and thus to coexist. The person does not have to remain stuck in fantasy. What is imagined is not impossible for the self in the present; it just hasn't happened yet. [Einsteinian]
When the therapist can imagine, much like the mother for the infant, the patient’s expanding future on the horizon, then the patient, too, can consider such a future. The mother develops the mind of the infant by holding the infant in mind. The therapist develops the imagination of the patient by imagining.
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