Teaching guided imagery.

Guided imagery is a technique useful for teaching and practicing psychodynamic assessment and psychotherapy. It combines a state of meditative relaxation with the presentation of evocative scenarios that stimulate the imagination to spontaneously generate almost dream-like fanciful productions. These "daydreams" ordinarily contain highly revealing suppressed and repressed conflicts, wishes, affects, perspectives and other aspects of the self. The instructional program offered to trainees at the UCLA Neuropsychiatrie Institute for almost two decades is described. Suggestions are offered as to how programs that lack faculty acquainted with these techniques can further familiarize themselves in order to evaluate the techniques' value for their curriculum.