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This book presents the serial killer as having 'imagopathy' - that is, a disorder of the imagination - manifested through such deficiencies as failure of empathy, rigid fantasies, and unresolved projections. The author argues that this disorder is a form of failed alchemy.
List of contents
Origins and Introduction , An Explanation of this Work’s Origins , Fictions, Themes, and Questions , Methodology , The Literature , The Analytic Literature of Countertransference , The Literature of Active Imagination , Archetypal Psychology’s Contributions , Criminal Profiling Literature , Synthesis , An Imaginal Synthesis , An Imaginal View of Crime Scene Analysis , Discoveries and Rhizomes
About the author
Aaron B. Daniels teaches psychology in Boston, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from: Baldwin Wallace College (BA); Duquesne University (MA), where he studied existential phenomenology; and Pacifica Graduate Institute (PhD), where his degree emphasized the depth tradition. After working for a decade in private and public practice, he transitioned into academia. His previous two works, 'Imaginal Reality, Volume One: Journey to the Voids' and 'Imaginal Reality, Volume Two: Voidcraft' were both published in 2011. Written with Laura M. Daniels, they are syntheses of imaginal psychology with existential principles.
Summary
This book presents the serial killer as having 'imagopathy' - that is, a disorder of the imagination - manifested through such deficiencies as failure of empathy, rigid fantasies, and unresolved projections. The author argues that this disorder is a form of failed alchemy. His study challenges long-held assumptions that the Jungian concept of individuation is a purely healthful drive. Serial killers are unable to form insight after projecting untenable material onto their victims. Criminal profilers must therefore effect that insight informed by their own reactions to violent crime scene imagery, using what the author asserts is a form of Jung's 'active imagination'. This book posits sexual homicides as irrational shadow images in our rationalistic modern culture. Consequently, profilers bridge conscious and unconscious for the inexorably splintered killer as well as the culture at large.
