Toward a Medicine of the Imagination

This paper re-visits the medical history of the imagination and contemporary attitudes toward complementary and alternative medicine to consider three uses of the imagination: (1) imaginary medicine, in which wishful thinking, colorful metaphors and inflated expectations lead people to pursue forms of healing with little rational support; (2) imagination as medicine, in which the creative capacities to construct new images work to reshape and reposition the self; and (3) a medicine of imagination, which is directly concerned with the interactions between imaginative constructions of the self, the psychophysiology of image and metaphor, and the politicsof healing practices.