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Kim Hermanson PhD

Facilitating Creative Breakthroughs

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How I work with client metaphors

May 23, 2023

Clients often come to therapy because of negative associations and patterns (negative metaphors). But in my own work, I find it helpful to go deeper… into a client’s innate positive (rather than negative) metaphoric associations. Fifty years of outstanding research by George Lakoff and others has demonstrated how metaphors form the basis of our cognition, [ Read more … ]

Images produce breakthroughs

May 2, 2023

Psychologist David Premack writes, “The original and basic unit of mental activity, which remains the psyche’s preferred way of operating, is the image.” Humans have been accessing inner images since pre-historic times when tribes painted visions onto cave walls. In the case of every scientific discovery which has been researched carefully, it has been found [ Read more … ]

The psyche prefers to work with images.

January 31, 2023

For many years I led creative writing workshops. Early on I noticed that some writing prompts tended to keep people entrenched in analytical thinking and their subsequent writing was heady and dry. These exercises often involved using a word or newspaper headline to write from. Their writing might have been slick and witty, but it [ Read more … ]

Check out my new article in The Psychologist: What’s Your Metaphor?

October 4, 2022

An excerpt from my book, Deep Knowing, published in The Psychologist: “The ability to comprehend our experience through metaphor can be thought of as a sense like seeing, touching, or hearing. Metaphor is connected with intuition. For example, someone might walk away from a conversation and say, “I can’t put my finger on it, but [ Read more … ]

A deeper human language

April 10, 2021

When I work with a client’s deep inner images, I draw on the same visual language that artists work with, and so I find visual art, especially drawing, fascinating. I tell my students and workshop participants that we need to shift “how we are looking” to understand these potent inner images and allow them to [ Read more … ]

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