Jim Manganiello (CGS’66)—Using Art and Depth Psychotherapy to Unlock the Creative Mind
As a psychologist, Jim Manganiello (CGS’66, CAS’68, SED’74) believes the scientific method has its limits in helping people to live whole and healthy lives. He argues that people also need art, creativity and imagination to find their true selves—and that journey is the focus of his recent collaboration with internationally renowned artist, Frank Arnold.
Manganiello studied at Boston University in the throes of the 1960s, when people were protesting the Vietnam War in Marsh Plaza and debating women’s liberation in classes. They were even combining hallucinogenic mushrooms with Marsh Chapel’s Good Friday services to foster mystical experiences.
Manganiello says when he came to CGS (then called the College of Basic Studies), “It felt a little bit like I was a plant that got well-watered, fed, and I had a fair share of sunlight there that could allow me to emerge in ways that I don’t think would have happened had I started at another school.” He said the team approach and small classes gave a sense of “kinship” among faculty and students.
His course work at CGS deepened his interest in people’s behavior and family dynamics. “CGS prepared me for academic success,” Manganiello said. “I learned how to excel academically.”
He continued on to the College of Arts and Sciences to major in psychology. Thanks to a full fellowship, he continued his education at the School of Education at BU, where he experienced what many students felt in the sixties—that “a new day was arising” for students but that faculty and curriculum were lagging behind. “That created some difficulties, some discord, some dissent, and it was a challenge,” he said.
Manganiello went on to teach psychology at Boston University and at Lesley University Graduate School. In addition to his private practice, he also created and directed the New England Mindbody Institute and the Center for East-West Psychology and Contemplative Healing. A licensed clinical psychologist, his specialty is depth psychotherapy, a field often informed by other disciplines, including art and spirituality. “Depth therapy has respect for science but it appreciates that science is limited. Depth therapy works hard to avoid being trapped by those limitations,” he says. Manganiello says that when each person emerges into the world, they immediately begin to construct a self-image from their family interactions, from how others perceive and react to them. This image drives what people think, feel and do, and sometimes locks them into an identity that is too small for who they truly are. Depth therapy is “a journey of undoing that problem,” says Manganiello, and a journey toward connecting with our deep innermost core, with our “soul”.
“A depth therapist has to keep their eyes open and be interested, where and when it’s possible, to connect other streams of knowledge,” Manganiello says—an interdisciplinary approach of the kind CGS tries to instill in its students. For Manganiello, this means diving into literature and art, neuroscience, behavioral medicine, and the meditative, contemplative traditions of Eastern and Western spirituality.
Unlocking creativity and imagination is a key part of this journey, which is why Manganiello collaborated with artist Frank Arnold to write the recently published, Your Creative Imagination UNLOCKED: Become Who You Truly Are.” The book weaves Manganiello’s writing in with images of the art of Arnold and others. It emerged from conversations Arnold and Manganiello had about creative imagination in Arnold’s gallery in Mexico.
Thomas Putnam, a Jungian analyst with the Boston Psychoanalytic Society & Institute and three-time president of the New England Society of Jungian Psychoanalysts, said of the book: “This lucidly written, genuinely thoughtful and heartfelt book is a must read for all Depth Psychologists. … What Jim does is a glimpse into the way psychotherapy will be taught and practiced in the future.”
“Everyone is born with an immense capacity to be creative and to be whole, but it tends to get sidetracked,” Manganiello says—and even actively discouraged. Artists access what he calls “the deep, intuitive mind” when they create. When you experience visual art, he says, “your own imagination has to be activated so you can unpack that image… and gain access to some of the experience that is its source.”
The book is designed to help readers see art, not just look at it, in a way that changes them profoundly, Manganiello says: “Art, like depth therapy, is meant to trigger an awakening, to enchant us, to give us the zing required to dive more deeply into our interior so that we can connect to and wake up to who we deeply are.”
Learn more about Jim Manganiello’s work and books at drjimmanganiello.com.