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Gerald N. Epstein

’’’Gerald N. Epstein’’’ (born November 16, 1935), is an American psychiatrist who abruptly ended his professional career as a Freudian psychoanalyst to establish a new career using mental techniques to treat physical and emotional problems. To increase professional and public awareness of these techniques, he has founded and directs a school teaching the practice of mental imagery to post-graduate health professionals, has written technical books on mental imagery for professionals and produced self-help books and audios for the general public, and has collaborated in research to identify the effects of mental imagery. He has been described as having “vast experience…using imagery as a bridge to the inner world.”

Education and Early Professional Career

Epstein received his formal training as a medical doctor at New York Medical College, New York, NY, graduating in 1961. In 1961-62, he completed a rotating internship at Stamford Hospital, Stamford, CT, and in 1962-65, he took a residency in psychiatry at Kings County Hospital, Brooklyn, NY. In 1965, he began a private practice in New York City as a psychoanalyst. He trained in Freudian psychoanalysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, graduating in 1972. In 1973, he co-founded ‘’The Journal of Psychiatry and Law,’’ which Epstein edited from 1973 through 1986. In 1975, he became an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at New York’s Mt. Sinai Medical Center.

An “Epiphany”

In 1974, Epstein experienced what he calls an “epiphany.” In Jerusalem as a visiting professor in law and psychiatry, he met a young man who reported that three years of extensive psychoanalysis had not succeeded in freeing him of his depression but that four sessions with a local healer who practiced “waking dream therapy” had cured him. Confident that no such inner change could occur so quickly, but also piqued, Epstein arranged a meeting with the healer, a woman named Colette Aboulker-Muscat, who, at her death in 2003, “had an international reputation as a . . . healer of body and mind who employed visualization and dream interpretation.” When Epstein commented that Freudian free association was a kind of imagery exercise since Freud had proposed that analysts elicit free association by asking patients to ‘’imagine’’ being on a train with an analyst and describing to the analyst everything the patient sees while looking out a window, Aboulker-Muscat asked in response, “In what direction does the train go?” Disconcerted, Epstein made a flat, horizontal gesture with his hand. “What if the direction was changed to this axis?” Aboulker-Muscat asked, making a vertical gesture with her arm. Fifteen years later, Epstein described this moment in born-again language: “I felt an overwhelming sense of self-recognition, an ‘aha’ experience. It was an epiphany. The vertical movement seemed to lift me from the horizontal hold of the given, the ordinary patterns of everyday cause and effect. I leapt into freedom, and I saw that the task of therapy – the task of being human – was to help realize freedom, to go beyond the given, to the newness that we all are capable of. . . .This is what imagery, I have come to learn, makes possible.” Epstein began an apprenticeship in imagery with Aboulker-Muscat that continued for nine years. In New York, he closed his Freudian practice and opened a new practice based on mental imagery.

A School for Imagery

In 1982, Epstein founded and became the director of The Colette Aboulker-Muscat Center for Waking Dream Therapy, a post-graduate training center for imagery chartered by the New York State Regents. The school offers post-graduate courses for licensed mental health professionals and provides classes for the general public. In 1994, the school was renamed The American Institute for Mental Imagery. In 2008, the Board of Regents extended the charter for the Institute, still directed by Epstein.

Books for Professionals

In 1980, Epstein published the first of two books for fellow professionals. ‘’Studies in Non-Deterministic Psychology,’’ which he initiated and edited and to which he contributed two chapters, is a collection of papers presenting “the outstanding streams of an integrated non-deterministic psychological approach,” including Eastern psychologies. A review in ‘’The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease’’ concluded that psychologists and their patients “can benefit from the unique perspective provided by Eastern psychology.” In 1981, he published ‘’Waking Dream Therapy: Dream Process as Imagination,’’ setting out the method and purpose of waking dream, which is a process in which a patient continues in waking life the action of a dream from a previous night. The result is “possibilities for living that if followed through, can help free us from the restrictions we habitually live with in the concrete world.”

Self-Help Books and Audios for the General Public

In 1989, Epstein published his first book for the general public, ‘’Healing Visualizations: Creating Health Through Imagery,’’ which consists of imagery exercises for treating seventy-six physical or emotional ailments, arranged alphabetically from acne to worry. This is his most popular and most often-referenced and often-cited work. In its 19th printing as of 2009, with more than 100,000 copies in print, it has been translated into eleven languages and published in thirteen countries. In 1994, Epstein published ‘’Healing Into Immortality: A New Spiritual Medicine of Healing Stories and Imagery, ’’ which he describes as “a coming home to the Western perspective on spirit and healing.” To Epstein, “the essential teaching of spiritual medicine is that we possess the means for healing ourselves through the use of our inner mental processes,” which he maintains derive from the Bible. In 2003, Epstein came out with an eight CD set, ’’The Natural Laws of Self-Healing,’’ which consists of twelve “laws” drawn from his practice and his study and understanding of the spiritual principles of life. A reviewer in the ‘’Townsend Letter: The Examiner of Alternative Medicine’’ described the set as “the most complete resource on using mental imagery that I have come across.” A six CD set appeared in 2007, ‘’The Phoenix Process: One-Minute a Day to Health, Longevity, and Well-Being,’’ which describes four self-help practices that each deals with one of four common life situations -- self-doubt, feelings of emergency, indecisiveness, and physical and emotional ailments – all of which, Epstein argues, physically wear away the body and shorten one’s life.

Research on Waking Dream and on Mental Imagery and Asthma

Toward the end of the 1970’s, Epstein participated in a study of 127 subjects to investigate the experiences engendered by “self-hypnosis, waking dreaming, and mindfulness meditation.” The experience of waking dream was reported to have a more “vivid inner reality,” with the practitioner more sensitive “to the immediate impact of spontaneously emerging images” and more likely “than in hypnosis and meditation to lose the sense that she/he is actually creating the experience, ” findings in line with the view that waking dream provides experiences that can reveal possibilities for living. In the mid 1990’s, Epstein collaborated with Elizabeth Ann Manhart Barrett, then the coordinator of the Center for Nursing Research at Hunter College, City University of New York, and with other colleagues, to conduct two studies on the use of mental imagery with adults experiencing asthma. The first study, funded by the Office of Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health, examined the quantitative effects of imagery and compared 17 participants who used mental imagery as a treatment for their asthma and 16 participants who did not. In the experimental group, eight people (47 percent) reduced or discontinued their medication, while in the control group, only three people (19 percent) reduced their medication and none discontinued it. No deterioration in lung function occurred. Data also showed that participants in the experimental group increased both their ability to make choices and their overall power to create changes in their lives. The second study used a phenomenological, qualitative approach to explore the meaning of the experimental group’s experience of using mental imagery to alleviate asthma. With responses from 14 subjects, the researchers found that the practice of mental imagery helped the participants to feel more powerful and “profoundly affected at least certain subjects’ views of themselves in favorable ways” – for example, relieving them of the fear that they will forget their inhaler and die from an asthma attack.

Controversy: How Quickly Does Imagery Work?

Epstein has consistently maintained that imagery works in a matter of minutes or less when used for a number of days. Martin Rossman, a mental imagery practitioner and the author of a book on imagery,[17] challenged this contention in a review of ‘’Healing Visualizations.’’ He used as an example an exercise that Epstein claimed could remove the feeling of aimlessness if done “once a day, for three to five minutes, for three days.” Rossman, making in tongue-in-cheek use of his California residence and Epstein’s New York residence, wrote: “Perhaps Dr. Epstein is seeing patients less seriously aimless than I, or perhaps East Coast people work more rapidly with imagery than people out here on the West Coast, but I, for one have not generally seen loss of direction in life to respond to nine minutes of treatment with or without visualization.” [18] Epstein matched his experience against Rossman’s: “All of the imagery in ‘’Healing Visualizations’’ has been tried in clinical situations over the 16 years that I have made imagery the central focus and treatment modality of my clinical work….The imagery summons new possibilities. . . and can thus result in the rapid relief of ailments or symptoms – like aimlessness – within a short period of time ” He invited Rossman to “come east to New York and try these exercises for himself.”[19]