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This book emphasizes the integral connections between imagination, creativity, and spirituality and their role in healing. First, the author highlights the work of a neglected yet important psychoanalyst, Marion Milner - a painter and undeclared mystic - expanding her work on creativity, mysticism, and mental health. Second, she explores imagination and creativity as expressed in fostering hope and in spiritually-oriented therapies, particularly for mood, anxiety, and eating disorders - offering practical application of studies in imagination and the arts. Raab Mayo concludes that both creativity and the potential for transcendence are inherent in the human psyche and can work as allies in the process of recovery from mental illness.

This conclusion presents some closing on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book explores a number of ways that spirituality and religion can assist in recovery. It explains the author's aim to emphasize the integral connections between imagination, creativity, and spirituality and their role in healing. Since the field of psychiatry largely utilizes a medical model for treatment, the healing potential found in creative, spiritual, and religious expressions tends to be overlooked. The book shows how spirituality and religious experience particularly in such imaginative forms such as storytelling, music, and the arts can play an integral role in recovery from and management of mental illness. Listening, valuing the patient's humanity, encouraging healthy spirituality, challenging unhealthy spirituality, are important in any form of spiritually integrated therapy.

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book concerns how creativity and spirituality can work as allies in the process of recovery from mental illness. It takes two directions: one is to explore the nature and sources of hope. Viewing creativity as spiritual pursuit can be a fruitful avenue for exploring ways that spirituality and creativity can be utilized in clinical application. Manic-depressive illness has been associated with heightened states of both religiousness and creativity, and spiritual strategies can be used alongside other treatment modalities in its treatment. Spiritual interventions have been shown effective for anxiety disorders as well. Fundamental controversies between science and religion laid the groundwork for the modern origin of the antagonism between psychiatry and religion. If psychiatrists were to view religion in a holistic perspective, religion might be understood as a significant domain of adaptive functioning, which may be adversely impacted by psychopathology.

This chapter explores spiritually-oriented treatments for anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating disorder. While the causes of eating disorders are complex, there is some evidence that eating disorders share risk factors with other emotional disorders. Individuals suffering from eating disorder report high levels of comorbid emotional disorders such as depressive and anxiety disorders. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the roots of eating disorders can be traced to dysfunction during the early childhood developmental stages of symbiosis and separation/individuation, such that the baby fails to develop the ability to self-soothe and achieve object constancy. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is based upon a provisional \"biosocial theory\" that understands the origins of borderline personality disorder in a probable biological tendency towards emotionality that is shaped by an invalidating environment. Much of the basic thinking of DBT emerges from the cognitive-behavioral tradition. Interpersonal therapy, developed as a short-term outpatient treatment for major depression has been successfully adapted to treat bulimia nervosa (BN) and binge-eating disorder (BED).

Contemporary society is indeed stressful, and pain is a part of life. While anxiety may be inherent in the human condition, both psychotherapists and theologians distinguish between pathological and normal forms. Many persons who suffer from anxiety are reluctant to see a psychiatrist or psychologist due to cost or stigma. Potential indicators of risk factors for adult anxiety disorders include: genetic factors, childhood psychopathology, temperamental factors, cognitive predispositions, behavioral tendencies, parental influences, life events, and peers. Manic depression strikes millions of persons in North America and Europe. Classified as an affective disorder, manic depression is characterized by mania and, but not always, depression. Moreover, manic depression is one of the few psychiatric illnesses in which 'shadow syndromes', such as bipolar II and cyclothymia, have been established. Religious themes and mystical experiences pervade the language of manic-depressive illness, 'conveying an extraordinary degree and type of experience, one beyond adequate control, comprehension, or adequate description'.

The relationship between spirituality and creativity is explored by British psychoanalyst Marion Milner. The effect of Milner's mystical leanings on her own psychological well-being is of considerable interest. For Milner both mysticism and art are experiences of bodily awareness. Mystical experience, for Milner involves an undoing of the split into subject and object that is the basis of logical thinking. Milner also discusses emptiness as a truth of the Gospels that it is only by a repeated giving up of every kind of purpose, a voluntary dying upon the cross, that the human spirit can grow and achieve wisdom. Dragstedt explains that for Milner, conscious imaginings are surrendered in a different way in regenerative versus unregenerative emptiness. In unregenerative emptiness, the reality of the world and body can be wiped out with unconscious hatred, potentially resulting in madness. Milner viewed Susan's drawings as a \"non-discursive affirmation\" of her internal world.

Hope is the general tendency to construct and respond to the perceived future positively. Hope is not merely cognitive, but conative, and implicit to motivation. According to Miller, 'Hope is an anticipation of a future which is good and is based upon: mutuality, a sense of personal competence, coping ability, psychological wellbeing, purpose and meaning in life, as well as a sense of the possible'. In the mystical tradition of Sufi Islam, the teacher works with story, poetry, spiritual practice, or music to get beyond blocks created by the conscious mind that cause failure to recognize one's greater place in the universe. A common Buddhist practice, particularly in North America, is mindfulness, or paying close attention to the present moment. Much older than Buddhism, Hinduism is also a cyclical tradition, where samsara, or the cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth, is commonly believed. Yoga, or being \"yoked\" with God, is the means of getting off the wheel of samsara.

Within the field of psychology of religion, interest in mysticism is threefold: exploration of its origins in brain processes, study of its healing versus pathological effects, and investigations of whether mysticism is the defining feature of religious experience or but one component of it. Parsons outlines three categories encompassing various psychoanalytic approaches to mysticism: classic, adaptive, and transformational. The classic perspective views mysticism as regressive and pathological. The adaptive school ultimately sees mysticism as healing and therapeutic. The transformation lists allow for dialogue with the transcendent, of mystics. Similar to mysticism, psychoanalytic views on creativity also generally fall into one of two camps. One camp labels creative expression a regressive phenomenon. The second camp for psychoanalytic views on creativity focuses on its unconscious or preconscious origin without the emphasis on regression. Creativity may provide a means by which novel and more \"liberating\" self/world interrelations are experienced by the artist.