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

Since its inception, AEDP has relied on the use of imagery, particularly through portrayals, in order to help process emotional experience to completion. This article explores the therapeutic potential of imagery through a more organic and less structured approach we call emergent imagery. Visual mental imagery can be a powerful tool for helping clients access unconscious material, connect with core emotions, and create new, transformative narratives. Spontaneous images, recurring symbols, and dream fragments often provide entry points to affective experiences that might otherwise remain hidden. 

This article advocates an expanded explicit focus on imaginal experience as a frequently available entry point to doing deeper work in the unconscious and to facilitating deeper healing. In the context of relational safety, this therapeutic approach taps into the power of play and enables a rich dimension of intersubjectivity. Extended case material from a single session illustrates the concepts discussed in the article.

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.