This chapter discusses the author’s twin careers as a visual artist and psychoanalyst. As an artist,
the author describes his imaginative process occurring in a dissociative trance. Artmaking and
being a psychoanalytic patient are related practices taking place in an altered state of
consciousness and creating an atmosphere where anything is possible. The therapeutic role of
imagination in Mesmer’s animal magnetist movement, and in Breuer’s work with Bertha
Pappenheim, is compared with a clinical case in the author’s own practice. Using dreaming as its
model, the paper argues “imagining the impossible” is the basis of creative growth and
therapeutic change.