An image-based approach to psychotherapy with Allan Frater

Join author Allan Frater and learn an image-based approach to psychotherapy

Allan is a psychotherapist with a long-term research interest in story and imagination – which came to fruition in his 2021 book, ‘Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy & Everyday Life’

This workshop offers a pre-view of material from Allan’s forthcoming book developing the role of imagination in psychosynthesis psychotherapy – structured around an adaptation of the ‘Stages of Psychosynthesis’:

Stage1: story identification

Stage2: story disidentification

Stage3: story emergence

Stage4: living between stories

These stages provide a basis for understanding presenting issue symptoms as an impoverishment of imagination – and for the healing and recovery from those symptoms, not as is often assumed, by the replacement of fantasy with reality, but rather with the cultivation of imaginative life itself.

As we shall learn on the workshop, there is no getting away from stories as imaginative experiences, but what we can do is help the client to re-imagine the story being told about self and world, creating a new expanded story better able to incorporate the presenting issue.

Event Learning Outcomes

• Distinguishing the benefits of working with imaginative experiences from the limitations of an interpretative-analytical emphasis upon figuring out what images mean.
• How to appreciate images as the raw-material of therapeutic work within memories, present-moment-perceptions (the transference) and future fantasies.
• Applying the playful unpredictability and creative adaptability of imagining so as to avoid the deadening and humourless effects of a formulaic scripted approach.
• Understanding how the synthesising capacities of imagination align with psychosynthesis theory and technique.
• Working therapeutically with imagination as a meta-function which includes sensations, feelings, thoughts, intuitions, perceptions and actions.
• Understanding imagination to be in operation all-the-time, not just as ‘pictures inside the mind’, but also in normal everyday life in the physical world.

Facilitator

Allan Frater is the author of ‘Waking Dreams: Imagination in Psychotherapy & Everyday Life’ (TranspersonalPress, 2021). He is a psychotherapist in private practice and since 2011 has taught at the Psychosynthesis Trust, on the Foundation and Counselling Diploma courses as well as CPD events related to his research interests in imagination, ecopsychology and transpersonal psychotherapy.

Qualifications: Diploma in Supervision with Soul (2013), MA Psychosynthesis Psychotherapy (2011), PGDip Psychosynthesis Counselling (2007) MBACP (Accred) UKCP (reg)

Find out more: wildimagination.uk | @wakingdreams20

Price: CaPPP Members Early Bird £65.00, CaPPP Members £70, Non-members £75.00

Places are limited and must be booked in advance by 12.00 on Wednesday 10th Sep 2025

Registration & refreshments: 9.30 to 10.00 refreshments will be available throughout the day and are included in the price.

Lunch: Lunch is included in the price

Venue: Engineer's House, The Promenade, Avon, Clifton Down, Bristol BS8 3NB