The equivocal and widespread use of
the word ‘imagination’ throughout the history of modern thought frequently
renders any attempt to use it in a precise manner extremely difficult.
Imagination may be a fundamental category in philosophy from Spinoza and Locke
through Kant to the present day in theorists such as Castoriadis, but in each
case the use of the term differs more or less dramatically — and certainly
hold nothing in common with the quotidian use of imagination.  Psychoanalysis,
on the other hand, can certainly be accused of blind-siding this concept to a
certain degree (as J. Melvin Woody’s article in this collection demonstrates),
at least prior to Lacan, who uses ‘Imagination’ to mean something different
again from the stock-standard. And other forms of clinical psychotherapy really
fare no better. "A vision on my brain was rolled," says Coleridge’s
Ancient Mariner — and clinical theories of the imagination more or less
uniformly confine the effects of imagination to this level of pathological
invasiveness.

Rather than taking the reductive
path of attempting a convergent series of ostensive definitions, this welcome
book presents papers which traverse the ill-defined field of meanings carried
by ‘imagination’ and put it to work in a variety of quite precise and extremely
interesting ways. And, furthermore, it does so with reference to an area in
which such elaboration can find concrete application, the study of the nature
and treatment of psychopathology.  It is rare to find a collection of essays
that does so much to open up a single, albeit underdetermined, concept in such
a fruitful way.

Imagination and Its Pathologies
is divided into three sections.  The first, ‘Pathologic Imagination in Light
of Philosophical Reflection,‘ is the more philosophically orientated part
of the book, investigating the topic with reference to Wittgenstein’s language
games, Heidegger’s thrownnes, Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception, and
phenomenology more generally. ‘Pathologic Imagination and Pyschodynamic
Thought,’ turns us towards a range of Freudian-related investigations into
the phenomena of imagination. Finally, ‘Pathological Imagination Applied to
Creative and Clinical Phenomena‘ constitutes a small dossier of reflections
on some concrete pathological cases, using the concept of imagination to analyze
the cases themselves, or critique the deficient ways that such cases are
frequently taken into account. Included are discussions on St. Anthony, the
dancer Nijinsky, Nietzsche and childrens’ play.  To have some idea of the
breadth of this book, consider the following three articles, each of which
falls into one part of Imagination and Its Pathologies‘ tripartite
structure.

The philosophically oriented first
section of the book contains a number of interesting pieces.  Most striking is
Paul Lieberman’s ‘Imagination: Looking in the Right Place (and in the Right Way)’. 
Lieberman uses a reassessment of Wittgenstein’s discussions of rule-following
in the Philosophical Investigations to examine the role of imagination
in psychotic and schizophrenic experience. Noting that the clinical
relationship can easily become a combative one — where the patient insists
that a certain experience was real, and the clinician that it is not —
Lieberman argues that the adoption of a Wittgensteinian perspective (1) locates
users of a particular language game (here, imagination) before opposing
positions are assumed, and (2) focuses attention on the "fine shades of
behavior" (Imagination 32).  That is, for Liebeman, therapy must
begin with what is in common between the clinician and the patient as common
participants in certain languages games, and must not proceed through gross generalizations. 
Such a dialogic procedure would allow the patient, he suggests, to "develop,
incorporate and sublimate those [pathological] forms of life into others which
are ‘more realistic.’ In this way [. . .] the sharp contrast between what is
imagined and what is real is not established more clearly but dissolved."
(Imagination 30)  Thus, pathological life and ‘more realistic’ life
become different ways of participating in the same language games, and can thus
be substantially brought together by drawing upon this common level of
experience.7

In the section devoted to Freud,
Jennifer Church’s chapter ‘Depression, Depth, and the Imagination,’ stands out
for its clarity and originality.  After opening with a critique of the Sartrean
picture of depression as the result of a deficiency of the will, Church’s
argument constructs a synthesis of Kant, Freud and Kristeva to offer an
alternative: depression as a failure of the imagination.  As the invocation of
Kant here might suggest, Church is not talking about depression as the
inability to imagine what the pyramids might be like, not having visited them,
but rather the ability to have the proper kind experiences of the world at
all.  For Kant, the imagination is one key element in the complex
transcendental system of experience, and the one that allows the self in
question to connect past and future elements, along with things that are not
perceptible from a certain point of view, to the present experiences, thereby
rendering them meaningful.  For Church, as the depressive person’s "capacity
to imagine alternative perspectives on the world diminishes, so too does the
experienced depth of that world; appearances flatten out to become more and
more a mere string of conjoined impressions, and hence less and less
appearances of a world at all." (Imagination 179-80)  Church
uses this Kantian picture to orient Freud’s understanding of the failure of
sublimation.  When a repressed desire cannot be re-connected (sublimated) to
some other means of expression, necessary for a healthy relation to the world,
this desire becomes the cause of depression: "When deflection or
sublimation is unsuccessful — as when imagination fails to find successful
continuations for one’s frustrated desires — then, according to Freud, the
impulses that underline one’s desires disconnect from the objects one perceives
or the ideas that one entertains [. . .] Depression involves a loss of
affective engagement and, precisely because of this loss, it involves a kind of
objectless longing — a desire for everything and nothing." (Imagination
181)

Finally, in the section of the book
devoted to discussing imagination in the context of clinical cases, Amedeo Giorgi’s
‘A Phenomenological Psychological Approach to Research on Hallucinations’
exemplifies itself.  Like all the pieces in this section, Giorgi’s is characterized
by the attempt to find some common ground between ‘sick’ and ‘normal’ people —
or rather to see that there is a more profound continuity to experience in
general that can only be broken up into dyads like ‘literal/imaginative’ or ‘real/hallucinatory’. 
Giorgi gives a rigorous account of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory of
perception, paying special attention to the inclusion of ‘aberrant’ experiences
like hallucinations into the basic structure of experience (James Morley’s
piece in Chapter Five deals with related questions). It is the body as the
locus of experience that must be examined, according to Merleau-Ponty, if we
wish to understand the ‘meaning’ of pathological modes of experience. This in
turn leads us to the whole corporeal and experiential world of the psychotic
sufferer. Using this framework, Giorgi then goes on to discuss an account of a
recovered psychotic, noting the failure of a traditional clinical approach and
the strength of his phenomenologically-inspired perspective for doing justice
to the patient’s experiential world.

Having touted the virtues of this collection,
not all of the articles present equally cogent positions — for example, J.
Melvin Woody’s ‘The Unconscious as a Hermeneutic Myth: A Defense of the
Imagination.’ Woody’s aim is to undermine the Freudian concept of the
unconscious by arguing that consciousness, on the psychoanalytic account is a
discursive notion, and thus all non-discursive thought (and imagination par
excellence) is relegated to the fictional realm of unconscious thought. 
Interesting as this claim may be, there is a wealth of material in Freud that
rebuts this picture in a number of directions.  Not only, as Jacques Lacan was
to insist upon, is the relation between discourse and subjectivity fairly complex
in Freud’s work, but the unconscious is not simply that which is not symbolised. 
As the realm of drives, the unconscious could never be described as the
imagination — at least without a substantial redefinition of the term, which
would defeat Woody’s argument.

Aside from this point, the only
weakness of the collection otherwise is in the articles that do not deal with
imagination at all, or only in a cursory manner. Richard Kearney’s ‘Narrative
and the Ethics of Remembrance’ and Jennifer Hansen’s ‘The Impossibility of
Female Mourning’ are interesting pieces in and of themselves, but do little to
enrich the discussion.  In fact, both Kearney’s meditation on memory and ethics
and Hansen’s critique of Kristeva’s Black Sun could have profited by
dealing with the topic question.  Such an attention would have broadened Kearney’s
Derridean approach to memory by including the question of imaginary fabrication
of memory, and not just fabrication — that is, fictional writing — as
a wellspring of the imperative to remember.  Likewise, Hansen’s already
substantial point about Kristeva’s lingering psychoanalytically-inspired
misogyny could be further advanced by dealing with the Lacanian concept of the
Imaginary and its role in Kristeva’s thought.

It is a shame that there are not
more collections that draw together such a diversity of opinions on such
ambiguous topics in such a spirit.  In the sea of often poorly conceived
academic publications, they would be welcome.

© 2003 Jonathan Roffe

Jonathan Roffe is the Convenor
of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, and the co-editor of the
forthcoming Understanding Derrida (Continuum, 2004).

Categories: Philosophical, Psychoanalysis