A number of approaches have been devised, in the history of psychoanalysis, to access the unconscious.

In his seminal work using the technique known as “Rêve Éveillé Dirigé”, Robert Desoille discovered that the examination of the supervised, freely flowing imaginative thought, under conditions of relax and quiet, combined the analytic power of the interpretation of dreams − with their symbolic and emotional richness − and free associations (which reveal unconscious short-circuits and trace the pathways of preverbal thought and imagination) in a fruitful relational context.

Modern developments of Desoille's approach have been developed in France (Girep, Group International du Rêve Éveillé en Psychanalise) and in Italy, where the Rêve Éveillé has been initially developed into a standard Imaginative Procedure by Rocca & Stendoro and further elaborated within S.I.S.P.I. (International Specialization School using the Imaginative Procedure) by highlighting its “experiential” aspect and studying the neurobiological correlates of the psychic processes involved.

The Imaginative Experience (I.E.) is initiated by an appropriate perceptual stimulus (image, word, sentence...) that the analyst offers to explore a specific psychic area (archetypal stimuli) or a psychic movement by the patient (the stimulus is defined as “egosyntonic”) or a transferential / counter-transferential emotion that emerged in the vis-à-vis conversation or in a previous I.E.

The patient is accompanied by the analyst in her journey in the imagination to generate a relevant emotional experience, in a relation of circular empathy. During the I.E. the analyst takes care that emotionally relevant images are adequately explored, the appropriate degree of regression is obtained, painful images are only approached when the patient is ready to face and elaborate them, and a reasonably quiet and painless condition is reached before exiting the procedure.

No interpretation is offered. Rather, the patient is requested to analyze and give meaning to the experienced images and emotions (“semantic” phase) and such meanings are discussed with the analyst (“propositional” phase).

This setting offers the possibility of working under several distinct relational schemes:
− in the purely analytic relation during the I.E. the patient autonomously travels in her internal reality, the analyst plays an empathic role of transferential target and transference dynamics can freely emerge and develop
− in the phases of autonomous cognitive elaboration (semantic) and cooperation (propositional) the relation is less influenced by transferential aspects and hidden, deep movements are helped to spontaneously emerge to consciousness, when one is ready to face them − finally, the vis-à-vis situation is anchored to the exam of reality and the relation between the two actual people (patient and analyst) dominates.

Psychotherapy based on the I.E. has been successfully used for about thirty years to treat most kinds of psychic suffering. In addition to offering a privileged analytical space (the imagery) in which the analyst can freely and safely explore the transferential movements of the patient, the procedure actually constitutes an active and emotionally relevant experience for the patient; this leads to profound destabilization and re-elaboration of deep associations, phantasmatic images, memories and internalized relational and behavioral schemes, and helps drawing a novel emotional framework, based on more functional mechanisms of attributions of meaning and affective relevance.

At difference with pure behavioral and cognitive and behavioral approaches, the use of the Imaginative Experience appears able to effectively act on the deep and complex universe that connects – mostly below the level of consciousness – emotional reactions and behavioral response patterns with the cognitive dimension, therefore producing profound changes in overall psychic organization and persistent therapeutic results.