Article: Emergent Imagery: Unconscious Processes, Play & the Co-Construction of Healing (Volume 16, Issue 1, September 2026)

Androff and Russell’s 2026 article, “Emergent Imagery: Unconscious Processes, Play & the Co-Construction of Healing,”proposes expanding AEDP’s traditional use of imagery and portrayals to include emergent imagery—spontaneous images that offer access to unconscious emotional and relational experiences, particularly for patients who find imagery more accessible than bodily sensations or words. Rather than directing a predetermined portrayal, the therapist and patient collaboratively explore emerging images in a playful, curious, and safe “third space,” potentially bypassing defenses, reducing aloneness, and strengthening agency.

The clinical example illustrates how imagery of a barren landscape, storm clouds, a hurdle, and a comforting blanket helps a patient explore abandonment, emotional deprivation, and unmet attachment needs. Through this co-created process, the patient experiences comfort, accesses grief, and gains deeper insight into her relationship with her mother. The authors conclude that emergent imagery, integrated with somatic awareness, affective processing, and metatherapeutic processing, can facilitate unconscious exploration, relational transformation, and the development of new autobiographical narratives.

Transformance: The AEDP Journal is the official journal of the AEDP Institute. Transformance has been published yearly since it’s inaugral  September 2010 and has published yearly since. It represented a quantum leap into a new era for a groundbreaking model of therapy that was introduced only 10 years earlier by Diana Fosha’s influential book, The Transforming Power of Affect: A Model for Accelerated Change. The publication also provided a much needed platform for disseminating the ever evolving advances, applications, and inspirations for the rapidly growing and highly productive AEDP community.   A quick scan of the titles will reveal the vast array of topics and the tremendous fount of clinical material, in the form of session transcripts, demonstrating the application of AEDP to clinical issues such as, eating disorders, sexual abuse, work with couples, addiction, racial trauma; methodological refinements such as, adjustments to attachment style, cultivating therapeutic presence; and innovation benefitting the general field of psychotherapy such as, harnessing termination as component of the healing process and the creation of an empirically validated model of short-term AEDP.  Additionally, Transformance has featured articles on cutting edge applications of neuroscience research as well as commentary on books and movies.