Imagination in the Western Psyche

From Ancient Greece to Modern Neuroscience

Jonathan Erickson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429537530
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Imagination in the Western Psyche: From Ancient Greece to Modern Neuroscience offers a comprehensive treatment of the human imagination by integrating the rich discourse on imagination in the humanities with modern neuroscientific research. This book is the first to offer an integrated understanding of imagination from both a humanistic (i.e., historical, philosophical, cultural, depth psychological) and scientific perspective.

The book presents neurobiological accounts that align with prominent theories in Jungian and archetypal psychology and offers a window into the many ways imagination can be understood. It elaborates on the discourse on imagination in Western civilization that goes back thousands of years. Chapters analyze how imagination has been considered throughout history and contrasts a modern neuroscientific approach that looks at imagination by studying its component parts without addressing the phenomenon in all its experiential richness and complexity. By bringing these two approaches together an account of the human imagination emerges that is grounded in scientific rigor without diminishing the fullness of human experience.

This book will appeal to academics, researchers, and post-graduate students in the fields of analytical psychology, depth psychology, Jungian studies, and psychotherapy

Part I

Introduction

This initial section lays out the premise of the work: a deep investigation into the human imagination from both scientific and humanistic perspectives. These early chapters explore both the challenges of this approach and also make the case for why such an integrative perspective is both necessary and fruitful.

Chapter 1 offers an initial sketch of how imagination is treated in the laboratories of neuroscience and how this reductive approach contrasts with the rich discourse on imagination in the humanities stretching back millennia. Various definitions of imagination are considered and a working definition is given, along with some helpful psychological and methodological frameworks. Chapter 2 takes a deeper look at overarching philosophical issues around the production of knowledge through scientific versus humanistic means. Scientific method is distinguished from scientism and reductionism, and recent developments in complexity theory and neurophenomenology are presented as promising alternatives approaches to engaging the human imagination.

Chapter 1

Chasing imagination

The great physicist Albert Einstein is often attributed the celebrated aphorism that imagination is more important than knowledge. The full context of the quote, which comes from a published interview, offers a bit more nuance: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research” (2009/1931, p. 97). Despite Einstein’s endorsement on the matter, nearly a century later imagination remains a challenging concept to reconcile with methods and understandings of quantitative science.

Imagination, after all, is a subjectively experienced phenomenon, complex and protean in its play of content and meaning; by its very nature, it resists reductive methods and understandings. Outside the sphere of science, a long humanist discourse on imagination extends from modern depth psychology backward through Romantic philosophy to find roots in Ancient Greece. The expansive imagination described in both depth psychology and Romantic philosophy speaks of the deep interior of personal meaning, the mystery of creative genius, and even reaches for visions of the cosmogonic. Meanwhile, modern neuroscience, widely recognized as a powerful authority on the human condition, has approached the subject of imagination haltingly (Richardson, 2011). Imagination in the laboratory of neuroscience, poked and prodded and reduced into measurable “objective” frameworks and methodologies, is understandably difficult to define and contain.

Nevertheless, the revolutionary explosion of neuroscientific knowledge in recent decades has not failed to probe into this tricky topic. As might be expected from a predominantly quantitative methodology, the neuroscience of imagination has largely been conducted by the study of its component parts. For example, “imagination” is the term often used to describe “mental time travel,” the process of envisioning a potential future scenario (Debus, 2014). The data produced from such study contributes to the neuroscience of imagination, but this remains one small aspect of what depth psychology and Romantic philosophy understand by the term. Likewise, studies of the way the visual cortex is recruited in forming mental images (Kosslyn, Ganis, & Thompson, 2001) offer another model for understanding imagination, through still only partial. Additional rich veins of data may be found in the neuroscience of dreams and the neuroscience of creativity, two broad fields in themselves that overlap with imagination without fully containing it. Each one of these areas holds a small piece of the puzzle, offering insight into how the brain and nervous system supports and interacts with imaginal experience.

One of the chief tasks of this book is to undertake a synthesis of the fragmented pieces of neurobiological research into imagination. But even with such a synthesis, I will argue that what neuroscience can tell us about imagination is only part of the story. Science, by most accounts, can only speak to that which can be consistently controlled and measured, and the full breadth and depth of human experience simply does not fit into these constraints. Imagination is emblematic of this fact: it is an experience of pure possibility, a protean matrix from which whole worlds can be born. To study the brain science of imagination is a worthy goal and doing so will teach us a great deal. But the phenomenon of imagination itself is a subject so large and complex that if we are to truly do it justice, we must equally draw from the rich discourse in the humanities that has existed for thousands of years. This book is an attempt to do just that: to address the complexity of imaginal phenomenon through an integration of scientific and humanistic perspectives.

Throughout this book, a number of disciplines will be woven into this narrative of imagination: historical, philosophical, psychological, and cultural. In doing so, the purpose is not to create a definitive fusion of all humanistic accounts of imagination—such an endeavor would be neither desirable nor entirely possible. Rather, the purpose is to weave together a sufficiently robust account that demonstrates how such humanistic understanding is constructed and to bring it into dialog with scientific discourse. The history of imagination presented here is but one such history, one version of the story, a piece of the larger truth that nevertheless gives some indication of the whole. Other histories may be written that emphasize different elements, or go into greater detail. It is in the nature of the humanities to welcome multiple perspectives, multiple acts of synthesis, which may then be brought into varying degrees of dialog and integration with scientific accounts. This particular project is about that latter step: an attempt at dialog and integration of scientific and humanistic understandings of imagination.

Defining imagination

Because the pages ahead will flesh out imagination as a dynamic, living phenomenon of consciousness, I hesitate to reduce it to a single linguistic definition at the outset. Indeed, Chapters 3 and 4 will explore this phenomenon historically and etymologically, and my sincere hope is that the more an unfamiliar reader engages with these evolving conceptions and descriptions of imagination throughout history, the clearer it will become that imagination is better imagined than defined. I am aware this seeming tautology will be unsatisfying to those of a more rational persuasion, and for that reason a working definition will be provided. But in doing so I maintain that the imagination defined abstractly by language is not the imagination as experienced in-the-world. That our linguistic labels can at times occlude us from the non-linguistic reality they reference is summed up in Alfred Korzybski’s popular aphorism, “the map is not the territory,” and later reformulated by philosopher Alan Watt’s assertion that the “menu is not the meal” (1957, p. ix). So it is with the phenomenon of imagination—to restrict it to a narrow linguistic definition from the outset may in fact obscure the dynamic lived experience that the word signifies.

Nevertheless, a provisional definition of the term, as it will be investigated in this book, is thus: Imagination is the generation of meaningful, coherent images and narratives arising in consciousness. As such this definition excludes meaningless, incoherent images that may arise in phenomenological experience as “mental noise.” It is true that what may appear as “mental noise” initially may prove to have a meaningful and coherent place in a larger imaginal pattern. But to whatever degree that is the case, it is the eventual emergence of coherence in the imaginal field that is the subject of investigation, regardless of whether it initially seemed meaningless or not. For example, the clearly perceived image of a powerful goddess with bright eyes, flowing black hair, dressed in ornate gold armor and holding a rune-etched broadsword can be understood as a coherent whole from which multiple meaningful interpretations can be derived. By contrast a “noisy” collection of scattered images of a woman, a sword, runes, celestial light in the sky, and developed biceps have potential coherence and meaning, but remain largely incoherent and unintegrated, and thus unrealized in this regard.

This working definition further raises the question of how “meaning” is to be understood. Leaving aside the hall of mirrors that discourse on the meaning of “meaning” portends, I suggest instead a broad and inclusive understanding of the term. We can speak of a spectrum of meanings, ranging from simple linguistic understanding to more holistic accounts as found in the hermeneutic philosophies of Dilthey and Heidegger (i.e., living a meaningful life). By way of example, imagine the image of a red bird in a tree. If we can produce a simple linguistic meaning from the image (i.e., the sentence: “a red bird in a tree”) that will suffice as a bare minimum of recognized meaning in the image. Beyond this, the image can contain any number of additional meaningful factors: emotional, cultural, personal, historical, spiritual, and so on. To whatever degree an individual is able to produce meaning from engaging with the image, we can speak of it as a meaningful image. This is a highly subjective affair, and rightly so: from a humanistic perspective, meaning is multitudinous, not singular. The image might trigger a childhood memory with a strong emotional charge in one person. The red bird might have symbolic or cultural significance for another. Red might represent passion or vitality to an aesthetically minded pedestrian, or have a specific mythic connotation to a member of an indigenous culture. The specific form of the image matters as well: is the image fixed or moving? Is it photo-realistic or does it resemble a particular school of art? If the image is moving (as imagination is prone to do), what is the bird doing, what is its style and quality of movement, what does it seem to want? What else is happening around the bird? What happens next? Each of these factors contribute to a greater aggregate of complex meanings inhering in the experienced image. The more complexity and coherence the image exhibits, the more “meaningful” it becomes.

This approach to imagination is in sharp contrast to the cognitive– behavioral notion of “propositional imagination” that dominated psychological research in the twentieth century. Propositional imagination was understood as a cognitive process whereby the mind posits an as-if or what-if scenario as a matter of logic and reason, and as such does not necessarily involve any images at all (Moore, 2010). For example, the mind might posit: “if I go to the park, I might see a red bird,” a possible scenario that can be understood entirely in conceptual, abstract linguistic terms—as data—without necessarily engaging mental images of the park or the red bird whatsoever. This sort of dry, linear conception of the human mind may seem quite foreign to depth psychologists, for whom image is primary. But to a generation of positivistic psychologists interested primarily in behavior and computer models of cognition, propositional imagination was adequate to their scope of research. Suffice to say, the notion of propositional imagination is ancillary to this book. It interests me only insofar as it is implicated in the working definition given above—that is, the generation of meaningful, coherent images and narratives arising in consciousness. With regards to imagining the red bird in the tree, this book is primarily concerned with the phenomenological experience of the imaginal red bird and tree, not the propositional logic that posits its possible occurrence.

It should further be clarified that to speak of images does not imply exclusively visual experience, although visual experience may prove an important point of departure. Image is here understood as a multisensory phenomenon, incorporating not only visual images, but also sound (as in “musical imagination”), smell, touch, taste—one can image the smell of a rose, or the caress of a lover. This understanding of image is born out in depth psychology (Hillman, 1979a) and is common in neuroscientific literature (see Agnati, Guidolin, Battistin, Pagnoni, & Fuxe, 2013; Damasio, 1999; Moore, 2010). Furthermore, imagination may involve a schema of multiple sensory forms, forming a complex aggregate of experience, as is often seen in dreams. In contrast to strictly linguistic experience, where multiple streams of data are reduced to an abstract word or linear syntax of multiple words, imaginal experience allows “data” to be experienced as complex, aggregate wholes expressed through multiple, simultaneously perceived channels of perception.

A further distinction is in order between the specific use of the terms imagination, imaginary, and imaginal. Where imagination is the phenomenon itself, we often use “imaginary” as an adjective to describe a thing as pertaining to or existing in imagination—for example, an “imaginary friend.” The term imaginary is problematic, as it has come to have a strong connotation of “false” or “unreal.” Henri Corbin (1972) has instead introduced the term “imaginal” as an alternative adjective that connotes something that is not unreal, but rather represents an ontological reality of a different order. James Hillman and others have since adopted the term to refer to the ontological ground of the psyche: the non-physical but phenomenologically real world of subjective experience. Philosophically speaking, this stance might be akin to “neutral monism” or “dual aspect monism” theories of consciousness (see Chalmers, 2002), though neither Corbin nor Hillman engaged those terminologies or philosophical debates explicitly. Rather, they described the imaginal as an intermediary experiential space between physical reality and mental abstraction.

To further flesh out the concept of the imaginal, recall the above example of the goddess with a sword: in the moment when this image arises in consciousness, the subjective experience of the image is phenomenologically real as a content of consciousness. That is, it is a real “inner” experience even if it has no external referent. Any emotional charge, cognitive interpretation, or psychological meanings that emerge along with this image are incorporated in the imaginal reality of the phenomenon. To assert that this imaginal experience of the goddess is ontologically real and psychologically meaningful is not necessarily to assert that the goddess exists as a metaphysical entity—that is another question entirely. Rather, we recognize that whatever else she may or may not be, she exists as an imaginal reality, real to consciousness and potentially significant to psyche. Of course, there is more to Corbin’s formulation than this brief sketch allows, and there is evidence that he disapproved of Hillman’s purely psychological adoption of the term. Corbin’s contributions and their onto-logical implications will be explored further in Chapter 5 on imaginal psychology. (The ontological and epistemological considerations of the current research will be further discussed in Chapter 2 on method.)

Among the most important and powerful uses of the term “imagination” in common parlance is the function of imagination to open up possibilities. This is perhaps best exemplified in John Lennon’s words, “imagine all the people living life in peace”—a song that invokes in the listener a vision of a better world. We find some sense of this in Einstein’s “imagination is more important than knowledge,” and a great many other places besides. Here “imagination” references a human capacity to go beyond limiting beliefs and rigid worldviews, to experience something new and more expansive, and thus to discover new solutions and avenues forward. This vital function of imagination is largely compatible with the working definition provided above: when we imagine new possibilities in all their fullness, they will very often come to us in the form of vivid, complex imagery. I will maintain, however, that this imagination of possibilities is not the only way imagination can be psychologically meaningful. In depth psychology, imagination is also a way to engage the present, to access the fullness of the human psyche, and to experience the self in a deeper way.

It should be noted that throughout this work, imagination is treated as an inherent and inborn psychological capacity, much like thinking or reasoning or empathy. There is considerable evidence that other intelligent non-human species have some degree of imaginative capacity—neuroscientist Rodolpho Llinas (2001) suggests that image-making is actually one of the primary functions of the nervous system of all animal life. Following this argument, I take the position that the basic capacity of imagination is something that all humans initially possess. It may be rightly objected that factors such as personal trauma or socio-economic conditions may interfere with these capacities. I certainly agree and would applaud more research done into these important areas. That said, an inquiry into factors that inhibit or interfere with imagination will not be the focus of the present work. Likewise, it should be clarified that although this book focuses on the story of imagination in Western civilization it in no way privileges Western conceptions of imagination as being exceptional or superior to conceptions of imagination that have arisen from other cultural traditions. Here, too, there is much fruitful research yet to be done.

Imagination and depth psychology

This book makes use of depth psychology as one of its primary frameworks for understanding and engaging the phenomenon of imagination. One good reason for doing so is that depth psychology is arguably the branch of psychology that has maintained the most focus on the importance of imagination historically. As such, it provides sophisticated theoretical frameworks for imagination as a psychological phenomenon that are lacking in more reductionist approaches. Depth psychology is also useful in that it integrates much of the philosophical discourse on imagination that preceded it. All of this will be outlined in detail in Chapter 5, but in the meantime a brief description of depth psychology may prove helpful.

For the unfamiliar reader, depth psychology is a field of theory and practice that began in the early twentieth century with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, chiefly characterized by a study of the dynamic relationship between the conscious mind and unconscious contents of the psyche. Modern depth psychology in general is profoundly interested in bringing phenomenology and qualitative methods back into the foreground of psychological research. Depth psychologists are also more prone to advocate for the use of metaphor and imagery when exploring the full spectrum of human experience. Both Freud and Jung drew on mythopoeic language to express their understanding of psyche (“soul,” to return to the original Greek). Jung in particular followed this myth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: Introduction
• PART II: Imagination as phenomenon
• PART III: The neuroscience of imagination
• PART IV: The imagination of neuroscience
• References
• Index