Published reports that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton had consulted with Jean Houston, a psychological counselor, and had imaginary conversations with the late Eleanor Roosevelt have kindled new heartburn inside the White House.

White House officials expressed concern privately Monday that--coupled with Whitewater, the developing controversy over White House use of FBI files and other problems--the news might be used by critics to hold the Clintons up to ridicule.

They relied on two allies Monday: psychotherapists and the first lady herself.

Mrs. Clinton opened her remarks at a Nashville, Tenn., conference on family issues by joking that she had just had an imaginary talk with First Lady Roosevelt, “and she thinks this is a terrific idea.” The audience laughed.


In a statement issued Monday, Mrs. Clinton described the meetings with Houston and others as an “intellectual exercise.” She said: “The bottom line is, I have no spiritual advisors or any other alternatives to my deeply held Methodist faith and traditions on which I have relied since childhood.”

Psychologists and psychiatrists indicated Monday that Mrs. Clinton’s activity, while differing from traditional psychotherapy, appears to fall well within the wider bounds of contemporary therapeutic techniques. And some strongly disagreed with those who sought to draw parallels to former First Lady Nancy Reagan’s reliance on astrologers.

Dr. Glen Gabbard, a psychiatrist at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., and a leading expert on treatment methods, said in an interview that, while he was not familiar with Houston, the technique of encouraging individuals to delve into their feelings by having imaginary conversations with someone is “certainly within the standards of reasonable practice.”

Stuart Vyse, a psychologist at Connecticut College in New London, said: “This seems to be a mental exercise for the purpose of gaining some insight or inspiration, and when that is the goal, this kind of technique can be quite useful. Imagery technique can be quite mainstream. It’s not unlike the athlete who imagines a successful performance before participating in the event.”


There was no suggestion that Mrs. Clinton believed she was literally communing with Mrs. Roosevelt’s spirit--only that she was imagining what might have occurred if she had been able to discuss her painful experiences in the White House with someone who she felt had faced similar difficulties.

*

Such techniques were developed in what is known as Gestalt therapy. Dr. Francis Lu, a professor of clinical psychiatry at UC San Francisco, said the technique is a tool used in humanistic psychology to evoke intuitive responses and flesh out the understanding of feelings.

An account of Mrs. Clinton’s imaginary conversations with Mrs. Roosevelt, as well as with Mahatma Gandhi, first appeared Sunday in the Washington Post in an excerpt from a forthcoming book by Bob Woodward, the newspaper’s assistant managing editor.


In late 1994, according to Woodward, Mrs. Clinton met with a wide range of psychologists and other counselors in an effort to regain her balance and sense of direction after the defeat of the administration’s health care reform plan and the massive Republican victory in congressional elections.

Among those Mrs. Clinton consulted was Houston, a protege of the late Margaret Mead and prominent leader of the human potential movement from the 1970s. It was Mrs. Houston who suggested Mrs. Clinton try to imagine meeting Eleanor Roosevelt and talking to her about the pressures and pains of being an activist first lady.

On two or more occasions, Mrs. Clinton apparently held such conversations, though Woodward said she turned aside a suggestion from Houston that she imagine herself talking to Jesus.

The first lady and the president first talked with Houston and with Mary Catherine Bateson, daughter of Margaret Mead and herself a professor of anthropology at George Mason University in Virginia, and with several other “popular self-help authors,” Woodward wrote, at a meeting at Camp David during the 1994 New Year’s Eve weekend.


The session was organized, Woodward reported, to help the Clintons “dissect what had happened in the first two years of the presidency and to search for a way back from the Democrats’ devastating loss” of the House and Senate the previous month.

Later, in a meeting in the residential quarters of the White House, Houston suggested that Mrs. Clinton close her eyes and imagine an encounter with Mrs. Roosevelt in the presidential residence.

As Mrs. Clinton did so, Houston said, she “needed to see and understand that Mrs. Roosevelt was not just a historic figure but was someone who also was hurt by all that happened to her. And yet she went on with her work,” according to Woodward. “Hillary needed to unleash the same potential in herself,” she said.

*


The White House hopes to defuse any controversy from the encounter by distancing Mrs. Clinton from Houston’s New Age thinking. In her book “The Possible Human,” Houston wrote: “The high actualizers I have known, the pragmatic saints and world-making mystics, have been essentially of that genre: They have allowed their body-minds to become fields of space-time from which can be harvested the formings of the Farm. Their will and intentionality have become macrophase and consonant with the primary order. Of course they get the job done.”

There is no sign that Houston and Mrs. Clinton ventured down any psychic paths in their meetings.

Houston has defenders.

She is not in the same category as “witches, wackos and psychos,” said Amy Morse, a massage therapist, healer and entrepreneur from Manhasset, N.Y. Morse, a former Wall Street broker, made a career change with Houston’s encouragement after losing her job in a corporate downsizing.


Times staff writer David Lamb contributed to this story.