Constellations and psychogenealogy with imaginal approach reveal an image hidden behind every behaviour; this image could be called “God” or “Archetype”. Images are generated by a sharing of light and darkness, visible and invisible, human and divine.
The best way to understand the imaginal is definying it as the liminality which lies between conscious and unconscious, death and life, sleep and wakefullness, darkness and light, and between all opposites in general. Images are neither good nor bad. The liminality from which they spring is pure love, it is the sacred, the willingness to give oneself for love which, in turn, leads to an act of creation which goes beyond ourselves. Also the relationship between human and divine is made of images, so much so that we can intend the relationship, the entrusting and love as the only possible reality.
Since images are created by an act of love, they manifest all its essence, which is a form of giving, of entrusting. We only need to observe nature to understand that this entrusting becomes manifest in the shape of beauty and not in that of good or right. Beauty is the most direct expression of the sacred. Obviously, it has nothing to do with the sense of human tastes (likes/dislikes), which, once again, belong to mental categories. Nature is emotion, turmoil, it is the feeling of entrusting with something, in a word: it is poiesis. By poiesis we mean “soul making” which does not unfold according to ethical laws, rules and conventions, but rather according to rhythms and poetic harmonies which give birth to narratives, stories, tales, namely what we call myth. Myth has in itself the primordial shape of our behaviours. Myth, intended as an account of the origins, does not aim at describing something that happened in the past, but at bringing a behaviour alive, at making it emerge. This behaviour is transmitted from generation to generation. Each one of us inherits it at the moment of our conception. Mythical images carry a poetic, aesthetic importance.
Through the Imaginal Constellations and the Imaginal Psychogenealogy, as if we were undergoing an authentiuc path of meditation, we have the possibility to reconcile images, and consequently to reconcile our relationship with love and beauty. Reconciling images means mitigating the influence of the cage of the mental judgment, and , ultimately, dissolving it in the freedon of the illusions.
More than a century ago, Sigmund Freud realised that individuals are driven by a compulsive need to repeat the “unresolved” in order to “resolve” it. This could be seen as one of the mechanisms through which some traumatic events are repeated inside families. Family members can unconsciously be induced to re-invoking emotions and feelings which pertain to traumatic events happened to the ancestors with the aim of resolving/dissolving these traumas.
Freud and Jung had observed as fragments of traumas as well as previous blockages and the memory of forgotten or repressed experiences are manifested in the words, gestures, behavious and habits of their patients.
Recent studies have also shown how body and brain react when a shocking event happens. Through the use of modern technologies, the German psychiatist Bessel van der Kolk, who has researched on the post-traumatic stress, has been able to demonstrate that the functions and the activity of the frontal lobes is weakened by the triggering of a traumatic experience. As a consequence, some people have difficulties to think and to speak. They can’t communicate, not even to themselves, what they are experiencing. From this example we can therefore infer that words, images, emotions that belong to a traumatic event re-emerge in the form of a secret language or a mysterious suffering that we carry with us. In the modern psychotherapy there is an emerging tendency to consider not only the traumatic events experienced by the individual, but also those which have been undergone by the ancestors as parts of a big olographic image or mytheme.
As a result of episodes which have a significant traumatic consequence such as abandonments, bereavments, suicides, wars, premature deaths, waves of stress may fall on the next generations to come. The latest advancements in the field of neorobiology and psychobiology have highlighted the necessity of investigating at least three preceding generations if you want to have a clear pattern of the mechanisms that lie behind a trauma or a suffering that keeps being repeated.
Any suffering, behavioural attitude or compulsive repetition of a sequence of events can be deprogrammed if you go back to when it was generated. This is neither “individual time” nor “transgenerational time”: it is mythological time, the time of the origins. The place where the primeval image was generated for the first time is an invisible place, divine, chthonic, the Olympus or the underworld. Thanks to an imaginal vision, we can go back to that time and that place, since the imaginal vision always looks for a confrontation with the sacred. The official psychology produces profane (de-sacred – which have lost the sacred) systems which cannot compare with the idea of the divine. In the end it is essential to realise that the divine is the “other” which is in ourselves – the soul of the world – and due to the relationship with the “other” we can generate the images that we live/experience.
The compulsive need to repeat events, feelings or attitudes represents perhaps – as highlighted by Freud – the need to solve personal or ancestral traumas. But there is nonetheless something more, a further step that has to be undertaken. You can’t underatke it unless you accept the mysterious, the divine, the sacred and, together with them, the aesthetic, poetic, irrational, generative experience of myth.
A question is raised almost spontaneously: if knowledge does not meet love, can it get to the origin of things and can it really deprogram the psyche from the transgenerational and social schemes which seem to influence it so much?
If the answer is No, then psychology and neorosciences will have to unfold, to open up until they meet the poesy and the magic of nature. The imaginal vision applied to the psychogenealogy and the family constellations moves in this direction.
In the psychogenealogy and family constellations school we can rely on a great number of instruments:
Genogram (it is the genealogic tree drawn by means of symbols – in our school we use it in a shamanic and evocative way)
Mandala of Daimon or Daimongram (it is the genogram of the daimon, namely the genogram depicted with the eyes of who lives beyond the threshold. It is called mandala as it has a circular tendency. A mandala is a symbolic representaion which has a circular shape)
Mandala of sexuality
Mandala of creativity
Genosociogram
Mandala of work
Mandala of faith