The Light of Creative Imagination

A Tribute to Colette Aboulker-Muscat

Oleg I. Reznik, MD

The possibilities of working with the imagination have interested me since my teens but this interest didn’t take a firm root until 1992 when my uncle, a clinical psychologist, introduced me to Dr. Colette Aboulker-Muscat, a teacher of mind-body medicine.

At that time, Colette was eighty-three years old; however her advanced age did not stop her from seeing patients and teaching six days a week. I attended a Saturday salon in Jerusalem, Israel, where she was leading group imagery exercises. About a third of us, were visitors from other countries—France, USA, Canada. All classes were held in English and she did not charge or accept money directly or indirectly from her patients or students, which made it easier to realize that she was a genuine teacher, interested only in the well being of her patients and students.

There was also no sign of a cultism. In fact, it was known among the students that if one were to show signs of attachment to Colette, she would tell that person that he (or she) was ready to be on his own and would break the tie permanently.

Colette did not teach a doctrine and the knowledge she imparted always came from within the learner, which was stimulated by the imagery exercises she offered. In my nine years with her I did not learn a structured knowledge base. Instead, I learned through the experience of doing the mental exercises myself, observing how Colette used them to help patients, and by asking questions. During this time, I witnessed the healing of patients with serious and “incurable” diseases (both physical and mental). Many of them returned to thank her because they had been cured.

Born in 1909 in Algiers, Colette’s parents came from a line of Sephardic Jewish aristocracy. Her father, Henry Aboulker, was professor of neurosurgery and her mother was a known novelist in France and North Africa. Colette’s father taped her mouth closed from age five to nine due to a condition involving the larynx and vocal cords. The tape was removed for meals and at nighttime. In her hand written biography she stated that she began to discover and apply her method of using the imagination first as a child in the hospital of Dunkerque during the First World War in France.

Dr. Colette Aboulker married a scientist with whom she had two sons, one a high-level engineer, the other a professor at Sorbonne University in France. She divorced her first husband and remarried Dr. Arye Muscat.

During the Second World War she developed and applied her therapeutic technique in an Algiers military hospital, at the same time teaching philosophy. She earned a doctorate of philosophy and was personally acquainted with Martin Buber and Hugo Bergman. She was also a student and friend of Robert Desoille, a French psychologist who invented a therapeutic method he called “Reve Eveille Dirige” or directed waking dream. (Desoille devised a set of motifs—mountain, cave, meadow, forest and others—that he invites patients to explore in their imagination).

Colette lived in Jerusalem from 1954 until 2003, when she died at the age of 95. She wrote that she “tried to help those who needed her knowledge, gave advice to many artists and some scientists in their search for their discoveries, and sustained a great number of people who needed to be listened to, or to have an answer to a question.”

During that time she taught classes in personal development to a large number of students from Israel, France, and USA. Colette privately received people with physical, emotional, and mental illness. Among many of her achievements she received a medal of exorcism from a Catholic monastery for achieving great success in the treatment of possession. Colette’s autobiographical book in French—La Vie n’est pas un Roman (Life is not a Novel). The book, written as a legacy for her children, describes many of her life’s adventures and is now available in English.

The knowledge that Colette imparted was unstructured yet not beyond being described. Her work has no real limits yet it is not formless, it is subtle and precise. True to her unstructured but experiential way, she imparted her teaching into a book of poetry entitled Alone with the One. The nature of poetry is to reveal itself to the degree that the learner is ready to receive. Much of her teaching was introduced as short mental imagery exercises that lasted about two minutes, including the preparatory breathing.

She also taught lengthy exploratory exercises, and longer (about 30 minutes) exploratory/therapeutic exercises based on patient’s nighttime dreams, which she called waking dream. She applied knowledge of numbers, colors and directions in space in this work, as well as morphology—the study of a person’s body build and facial features that can be used to assess physical and character traits. She helped children with the use of semi-structured drawings that were used for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Her interventions sometimes included physical and ritual exercises. It was during one of these interventions with a group ritual that she successfully treated a collective possession. She describes this in her book Mea Culpa or Tales of Resurrection.

In the short mental imagery exercise, an image is used to give a micro-shock that overcomes a person’s defenses (an inner wall that one builds to maintain a status quo, not the defenses of psychodynamic model), and initiates an inner movement in the direction of healing. A shock or an element of surprise is achieved by a variety of means that are discovered in the moment. An image, for example that resonates with a deeply held belief is one of the ways of achieving a surprise. This image can be found in the person’s language (I feel like I’m in a cage), from repetitive themes of nighttime dreams, or created in accordance with a person’s morphology (1.)—which reveals his or her innermost tendencies.

One could describe Colette’s method by using the metaphor of a battlefield. As in a real battle there are unlimited ways of achieving an element of surprise. She accomplished this surprise by approaching the client’s issue from other than their usual perspective. One of the things she did after the imagery session was help patients connect to something spiritual and greater than themselves. The change that the patient had to undergo came from the patient and was not imposed upon them. For example, a writer known in Israel and throughout the world was brought to my teacher, paralyzed from the neck down from a neurodegenerative disease. Living in Jerusalem had a special significance, and he had even written a book about the hills in Jerusalem. Because city of Jerusalem is built on hills and mountains, Colette asked him to imagine rolling over all the hills and mountains. She directed his imagination to sense his spine being massaged by the rolling movement over the mountains. The man experienced a change in perspective and a movement in his body where before, there was none. In his experience, Jerusalem and the mountains each had their own significance. The experience is reinforced by the fact that all of the elements occur simultaneously. Witnesses told me that the man regained some movement immediately after the exercise. I saw this same man more than 10 years after Colette worked with him. He walked with a cane but otherwise was independent.

Colette taught that she provided the keys, but we had to open and go through the doors that separated parts of ourselves from the rest. These parts of ourselves are locked away for a variety of reasons. She provided the “light” needed to regain wholeness—healing and cure usually followed.

Oleg I. Reznik M.D. originally from Odessa, Ukraine, is a board-certified family physician practicing general and mind-body medicine in Salem, Oregon. He is on staff at Salem Hospital, works at Willamette Family Medical Center practicing general medicine for adults, children, low-risk obstetrics and general hospital work. He has a private practice where he uses mental imagery, dream work, and other phenomenological integrative modalities for healing of a physical and mental illness. He can be reached by phone at 503-507-1143, or at his web site: www.olegreznikmd.com .

NOTE: Another of Colette’s students, Dr. Gerald Epstein, a psychiatrist in New York City has written several books based on her method. He heads the American Institute of Mental Imagery (AIMI) where he teaches his own imagery method. AIMI is a New York State Regents-chartered post-graduate training center offering a Certificate of Completion for all mental health practitioners; doctors, nurses, psychologists, osteopaths, social workers, chiropractors, acupuncturists, physical therapists and licensed massage therapists. http://www.wholefamily.com/experts/gepstein and www.drjerryepstein.org