Talking with Images: Imaginal Dialogue, the Befriended Doppelganger and the Art of Self-Befriending in Art Therapy

This paper introduces, to an international readership, a theory-informed account of imaginal dialogue in art therapy drawn from the author’s doctoral research on image dialogue, self, and dialogue. The dissertation asks how patients might be supported, within a conversation about their own artwork, in encountering themselves benevolently. Its empirical basis comprises three reconstructed art-therapy encounters, examined through thick description and a three-stage Grounded Theory coding process. The analysis yields three interlocking categories – Dialogical Interstice, Birth of the Third, and Imaginal Response – together with three cross-cutting dimensions that condition their unfolding: temporality, relational style, and self-relation. The findings suggest that an image dialogue acquires its distinctive quality when patient and therapist establish a shared field of attention in which the artwork is neither reduced to a diagnostic sign nor treated merely as a finished object, but is allowed the duration to become an as-if Other – a counterpart or doppelganger with whom the patient may enter into dialogue and thereby recognise, address, and care for an aspect of themselves. The concept of the befriended doppelganger is developed to describe this shift in self-relation, and the Aristotelian notion of philautia is invoked not as narcissistic self-regard but as an active, critical, and caring self-relation. A closing Practice Box translates these findings into a proposed – not prescriptive – sequence for conducting imaginal dialogues, understood as an orientation to be adapted rather than a protocol to be applied.