In Jerusalem as a visiting professor in law and psychiatry, he met a young man who reported that three years of extensive psychoanalysis had not succeeded in freeing him of his depression but that four sessions with a local healer who practiced "waking dream therapy" had cured him.
Epstein arranged a meeting with the healer, a woman named Colette Béatrice Aboulker-Muscat, who, at her death in 2003, "had an international reputation as a .
Fifteen years later, Epstein described this moment in born-again language: I felt an overwhelming sense of self-recognition, an 'aha' experience.
The school offers post-graduate courses for licensed mental health professionals and provides classes for the general public.
[7] Epstein's first book for fellow professionals appeared in 1980, Studies in Non-Deterministic Psychology, an edited collection of papers (two by Epstein) presenting "outstanding" analytic efforts to develop "integrated non-deterministic" approaches to understanding human behavior.
This book serves as a compendium of 2100 mental imagery exercises, drawn from the original work of Colette Aboulker-Muscat.
[16] A second audio, a 6-CD set, appeared in 2007, The Phoenix Process: One-Minute a Day to Health, Longevity, and Well-Being, which describes four self-help practices, one for each of four common life problems—self-doubt, feelings of emergency, indecisiveness, and physical and emotional ailments – all of which, Epstein argues, physically wear away the body and shorten one's life.
[17] In 2010, he released Emotional Mastery: Life Transformation Through Higher Consciousness, a work intended for learning to face the stresses of the everyday life: including moving beyond negative states of mind, finding the right job, creating income, and improving your self-image.
[19] Toward the end of the 1970s, Epstein participated in a study of 127 subjects to investigate the experiences of "self-hypnosis, waking dreaming, and mindfulness meditation."
[20] In the mid-1990s, Epstein collaborated with Elizabeth Ann Manhart Barrett, then the coordinator of the Center for Nursing Research at Hunter College, City University of New York, and with other colleagues, to conduct two studies on the use of mental imagery by adults experiencing asthma.
People using imagery also indicated that they had increased their ability to make choices and their overall power to create changes in their lives.
[21] The second study used a phenomenological, qualitative approach to explore the experience of the people using mental imagery to alleviate their asthma.
With responses from 14 participants, researchers found that the use of mental imagery helped these people to feel more powerful and in some cases "profoundly affected" in favorable ways their views of themselves—for example, relieving them of the fear that they would forget their inhaler and die from an asthma attack.
Epstein has consistently maintained that imagery works in a matter of minutes or less when used for a number of days.
Martin Rossman, also a practitioner of mental imagery and the author of a book on imagery,[23] challenged this contention in a review of Healing Visualizations, pointing to an exercise that Epstein claimed could remove the feeling of aimlessness if done "once a day, for three to five minutes, for three days."
years that I have made imagery the central focus and treatment modality of my clinical work.