Guided imagery (also known as guided affective imagery, or katathym-imaginative psychotherapy) is a mind-body intervention by which a trained practitioner or teacher helps a participant or patient to evoke and generate mental images that simulate or recreate the sensory perception of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, movements, and images associated with touch, such as texture, temperature, and pressure, as well as imaginative or mental content that the participant or patient experiences as defying conventional sensory categories, and that may precipitate strong emotions or feelings in the absence of the stimuli to which correlating sensory receptors are receptive.

The practitioner or teacher may facilitate this process in person to an individual or a group or you may do it with a virtual group. Alternatively, the participant or patient may follow guidance provided by a sound recording, video, or audiovisual media comprising spoken instruction that may be accompanied by music or sound.

There are two fundamental ways by which mental imagery is generated: voluntary and involuntary.

The involuntary and spontaneous generation of mental images is integral to ordinary sensory perception, and cognition, and occurs without volitional intent. Meanwhile, many different aspects of everyday problem solving, scientific reasoning, and creative activity involve the volitional and deliberate generation of mental images.

The generation of involuntary mental imagery is created directly from present sensory stimulation and perceptual information, such as when someone sees an object, creates mental images of it, and maintains this imagery as they look away or close their eyes; or when someone hears a noise and maintains an auditory image of it, after the sound ceases or is no longer perceptible.

Voluntary mental imagery may resemble previous sensory perception and experience, recalled from memory; or the images may be entirely novel and the product of fantasy.

The term guided imagery denotes the technique used in the second (voluntary) instance, by which images are recalled from long-term or short-term memory, or created from fantasy, or a combination of both, in response to guidance, instruction, or supervision. Guided imagery is, therefore, the assisted simulation or re-creation of perceptual experience across sensory modalities.

Mental imagery can result from both voluntary and involuntary processes, and it comprises simulation or recreation of perceptual experience across all sensory modalities, including olfactory imagery, gustatory imagery, haptic imagery, and motor imagery. Nonetheless, visual and auditory mental images are reported as being the most frequently experienced by people ordinarily as well as in controlled experiments, with visual imagery remaining the most extensively researched and documented in scientific literature.