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AIMIwest is the West Coast branch of The American Institute for Mental Imagery, a provisionally chartered school by the New York State Board of Regents, offering post-graduate certification for all health care practitioners, as well as workshops and services for the public. Health Care Professionals who have completed coursework and supervision may be able to receive Certification from The American Imstitiute for Mental Imagery.
Premised on the intrinsic connection between essence (belief) and existence (experience) , these programs teach a new perspective on the roots of wellness and illness. Students learn techniques such as mental imagery, voluntary will, dream reading, and morphology which restore the Self to wholeness, balance and health.
The Founder and Director of AIMI 
Gerald N. Epstein, MD, the Founder and Director of the Institute, is a physician, author and educator. He holds the positions of Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai Medical Center and Lecturer at Columbia University's School of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City. Dr. Epstein has attained national recognition as the leading expert in the use of the mind to heal emotional and physical illness. The author of five books, including Healing Visualizations, Healing Into Immortality, and Climbing Jacob's Ladder, he contributes articles to numerous alternative health publications and has recorded The Natural Laws of Self-Healing. He also conducts research into the physical effects of mental imagery, most recently in an asthma research project funded by National Institutes of Health, Office of Alternative Medicine. As an educator, he holds a wide variety of classes for the public. Dr. Epstein lives in New York City where he maintains a private practice.
Historical Background
This tradition of imagery and integrative education taught at AIMI originated with Colette Aboulker-Muscat, a renowned teacher and mystic recognized for her clarity of mind and great wisdom.
Dr. Epstein met Mme. Muscat in 1974 in Jerusalem and apprenticed with her for over nine years, to master her unique therapeutic method based on the image.
Mme. Muscat was born in Algeria in1909, the daughter of Professor Henri Aboulker, the most celebrated neurosurgeon of his time. She spent a large part of her early life as an assistant to her father and mastered many aspects of neurology and medicine. Even as a young girl of seven, people came to her for help with their emotional and physical difficulties. Drawing on her North African and Sephardic heritage, she originated and evolved a unique method of therapeutic treatment called Waking Dream.
After attaining degrees in psychology, sociology, philosophy and completing four years of training in physiology, she left Algeria for Paris. There she studied and obtained her Master’s degree in psychology. During World War II, she worked at hospitals in Algeria and France where she used her Waking Dream method to treat soldiers and fighter pilots given up as hopeless by physicians. Her work enabled many patients to heal, and others to die peacefully. Beginning in 1954, after she moved to Jerusalem, she taught people who came to her from all over the world. Mme. Muscat died in 2003.
What is Integrative Health Care?
Integrative Health Care views physical illness as a reflection of a person's life story: It unites all the dimensions that can be involved in illness: the physical, emotional, mental, social, moral and environmental. For example, a heart attack concurrently reflects problems in the physical condition of that organ and in the emotional sphere of love. Similarly, emotional depression emerges in the physical body through posture, facial expression, and metabolic changes. Regardless of the complaint, every illness represents a fragmentation of our Self, which manifests simultaneously in all spheres of our existence.
What is Mental Imagery?
Therapeutic mental imagery is the mind thinking in pictures. These images form the natural language of inner life that transcends the constraints of logical and lexical thinking. The process of mental imagery allows a return to wholeness.
Mental imagery offers a method for change that can occur in an instant. The image jolts the person’s system, explodes the ingrained patterns, and permits new directions to emerge unimpeded. It alters physiology, perceptions, and philosophy. To practice imagery, one must experience it. For this reason, AIMI’s programs require that particpants do exactly that - participate, as well as learn through didactic study.
Through the use of imagination, we begin to turn to tourselves for answers about life and to meet personal challenges with creative solutions. We no longer compare ourselves to external standards.
We become their own authorities. The therapeutic process becomes a self-directed movement of growth.
AIMI’s programs teach students to understand the image as it appears in human experience in the phenomenology of the moment: In the external image of our face and body form, where it is called the science of morphology; in the internal image of our night dreams, called intuitive dream reading; in the exploratory dream image, called Waking Dream; and in the formless image, called the voluntary Will.
What are the basic premises of the AIMI model?
AIMI teaches from a phenomenological and holographic model. Phenomenology describes the study of the moment without subjective interpretation -- as occurs in psychology -- or objective experimentation -- as in science. In the experience of the present moment, the phenomenon reveals true information and contains answers without having a need to investigate the past or foretell the future.
The holographic model teaches that the part contains the whole just as a seed contains the information and potential realization of a tree. In healing, a holographic framework permits a single image, dream, or facial feature to encapsulate the whole life experience of the person. This principle aligns with phenomenology to expedite healing without extensive discussion or analysis.
Faculty
Randy Kasper, LCSW BCD
Director
I have been practicing psychotherapy and integrative psychotherapy for over twenty years. I became interested in Integrative Medicine/Therapy while still a master’s student of Social Work at University of Houston doing research on Biofeedback. After practicing traditional “talking” psychotherapy for about five years, I decided I needed a career with more concrete results and entered City of New York College of Landscape Architecture. At this time, I was introduced to Healing Visualizations by Gerald Epstein, MD. I used the exercises with a colleague who was in distress. Seeing the impact of this work inspired me to call Dr. Epstein for a private session. I became a student for twenty years and counting. I had the fortune to be the first group of AIMI students to study with Mme. Albouker– Muscat for two weeks in her home in Jerusalem. I have presented many workshops and seminars, among them Imagery in Healing, Addiction Issues, and Stress Reduction.
Through the years, I have been featured on WCBS–TV, WOR–TV, KHOU–TV, The New Yorker, New York Newsday, The Houston Chronicle and American Media.
I am on faculty at the PsyD program at Alliant University, San Diego and at Calstate Dominguez Hills.. Concurrent to my private practice as a therapist and trainer, I have created and directed hospital- based Chemical Dependency, Eating Disorders, and Employee Assistance Programs. Having retained my love of the land, I am a Master Gardener, benefiting from the bounty that Southern California's climate offers. I have recently collaborated with my Forensic Psychologist husband on training programs that aim to safeguard vulnerable populations.
Oleg Reznik, MD
I am a board certified family physician with a holistic approach, in private practice in Sellwood area of Portland. From 2006 to 2009 I worked for OHSU department of Family Medicine and was promoted from Clinical Instructor to Assistant Professor. Prior to that I worked in Salem, OR 2003 to 2006, doing a full range of family medicine including hospital medicine and obstetrics, which I stopped doing in 6/2008 as a lifestyle choice. At my private office I see adults and children, use mental imagery and other techniques of mind-body medicine to treat physical, emotional, and mental illness and treat addictions. I try to minimize patients' reliance on medications, while encouraging personal transformation and healthy activities.
In addition, I am opening a first West coast branch of AIMI Oregon, a post graduate training center, offering courses for the general public and health professionals. The Institute will tentatively start offering classes in the Fall of 2009.
I was born in Odessa, Ukraine and came to the US with my family in 1988. In 1995 I earned a Bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience from New York University, cum laude. In 2000 I graduated Medical School at SUNY Downstate, also cum laude, completed a Family Practice Residency Program at SUNY Stony Brook in 2003, receiving a Resident-Teacher Award.
A vital part of my education was my nine-year apprenticeship with a teacher of mind-body integrative medicine, Madame Colette Aboulker-Muscat (1909-2003). Colette practiced mind-body integrative medicine for seventy years. She was a master of mental techniques that can effect profound changes in the mind and body. It is with her that I witnessed and learned how to facilitate profound changes in the mind and body through the use of creative imagination.
I am certified by The American Institute for Mental Imagery (a post-graduate training center in New York City, which teaches this method) in Imagination, Mental Imagery, and Phenomenology.
I spend most of my out-of-office time reading conventional, mind-body, and spiritual literature, and writing. I enjoy spending my free time with my wife and our two boys, going to the park, beach, or just hanging out in the back yard.
Phyllis Kahaney, MSW
I am a former English professor who directed the writing programs at the University of San Diego and the University of Hawaii.
I have a PhD in Rhetoric. In 2001, I completed a Master of Social Work degree at San Diego State University. Since then, I have been applying my interest and extensive training in writing and uses of imagery to my work with veterans who have been in combat. During the early summer of 2008 I along with Randal Wittry, LCSW, developed a seminar to help OIF/OEF veterans apply relaxation techniques and grounding methods in their daily lives to help them overcome their tendencies to be hypervigilant, angry and isolated.
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