The Ethical Imagination

Exploring Fantasy and Desire in Analytical Psychology

Sean Fitzpatrick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815378174
• eBook ISBN: 9781351233057
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What do we do with our fantasies? Are there right and wrong ways to imagine, feel, think, or desire? Do we have our fantasies, or do they have us? In The Ethical Imagination: Exploring Fantasy and Desire in Analytical Psychology, Sean Fitzpatrick explores how our obligation to the Other extends to our most intimate spaces.

Informed by Jungian psychology and the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, Fitzpatrick imagines an ethical approach that can negotiate the delicate and porous boundary between inner and outer, personal and collective fantasy. Combining both theory and practice, the book examines theorists of the imagination, such as Plato, Coleridge, Sartre, and Richard Kearney, explores stories from contemporary culture, such as Jimmy Carter and New York's "Cannibal Cop", and includes encounters in the consulting room. The Ethical Imagination explores how these questions have been asked in different ways across culture and history, and Fitzpatrick examines the impact of our modern, digital world on ethics and imagination. In this original examination of the ethical status of our imagination, this book illustrates how our greatest innovations, works of art, and acts of compassion emerge from the human imagination, but so also do our horrific atrocities. Fitzpatrick compellingly demonstrates that what and how we imagine matters.

Unique and innovative, this book will be of immense interest to Jungian psychotherapists, analytical psychologists, and other mental health professionals interested in the ethics, the imagination, and clinical work with fantasy. It will also be an important book for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, philosophy, religious studies, and ethics.

Chapter 1

Introduction

What do we do with our fantasies? Are there right and wrong ways to imagine, things we should or should not think, feel, or desire? Is it foolish or wise to believe that our fantasies have enduring personal and collective influence?

In perhaps the most influential sentence on this subject in the Western canon, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew gave us this perspective from Jesus:

I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. (Matthew 5:28, New Oxford Annotated Bible)

That verse had a singular moment of contemporary cultural relevance in 1976, when American presidential candidate Jimmy Carter was interviewed by Playboy magazine. After suggesting that “Christ set some almost impossible standards for us,” Carter admitted that “I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times” (Scheer, 1976, p. 86). This was a strange, unprompted admission by a political figure with a great deal to lose. Carter continued,

Christ says, don’t consider yourself better than someone else because one guy screws a whole bunch of women while the other guy is loyal to his wife. The guy who’s loyal to his wife ought not to be condescending or proud because of the relative degree of sinfulness. (p. 86)

Almost 40 years separates us from what Time magazine called an “uncomfortable moment for America” (Top 10, 2013). Carter’s well-intended candor reflects the convoluted lines of moral reasoning and perhaps psychological suffering that follow from traditional interpretations of scripture. Jesus appears to have made a moral equivalence between an intrapsychic experience of lust and sexual experiences between adults. In the calculus of sin and salvation, Jesus’ new message superseded the Old Testament prohibition on extramarital sex. Just wanting it, it seems, also is sinful. The real sin Carter indicted is pride and the tendency to assume positions of moral superiority. If one accepts the initial premise, all of us sin; it is who we are, and this interpretation of Christian teaching implies that we must constantly be at war with ourselves. Who we are is always already unacceptable. How we could possibly change is a mystery. They are “almost impossibly high standards” (Scheer, 1976, p. 86) by which to live one’s life.

What is lust? How does it appear? Where is it located? In what dimensions do we track its presence? Contemporary discourses—psychological, biological, philosophical, sociological, theological, literary, economic—register it differently. We are forever removed from the social and linguistic contexts of Jesus’ remarks. The techniques of literary criticism foster doubt in the provenance of many of his scripturally recorded teachings. When Carter cited this passage, he imagined its meaning afresh, even as he likely believed himself to be referring to a stable, enduring truth. Carter’s words appeared in a publication that is deeply concerned with evoking, celebrating, relieving, and even attempting to fix lust in contemporary discourse in a particular philosophical way. Pages away were images of naked women, photographed and airbrushed into heightened, stylized abstractions, symbolic images of lust, for the sake of lust—the ostensible reasons most readers bought the magazine.

What does this particular passage from Jesus’ life—and a president’s preoccupation with it—reflect about our myths of the imagination and its ethical status in the contemporary moment? We do not have to locate lust in the imagination; it might be equally useful to talk about it as a physiological experience, in terms that distill a complex phenomenon into clean, quantifiable clinical observations: elevated heart rate, dilated pupils, changes in temperature, increases in the production of fluids. To invoke an abstract concept such as imagination could lead us down materialist rabbit-holes. Why use imagination when we could talk about specific neural processes? Imagination seems an evocative but imprecise, outdated catchall that specialist inquiry has rendered an antique bit of poetry. Just to know to what it refers is difficult; as illuminated by Iris Murdoch (1986) in a philosophical context, imagination is a tough notion to define. Does it refer to a kind of experience? An action one can take? A complex but ultimately reducible biological process? The German word for imagination, Einbildungskraft, means literally the power to create a picture or image. We explore this problem in some detail throughout this work,¹ particularly within the discourse of analytical psychology.

We would be deluded if we were to believe that an MRI machine and decades of detailed neural mapping would provide us anything close to the meaning of our experience of the imagination. The myth of scientism—the naïve belief that scientific inquiry serves not only as a tool but as a comprehensive system of meaning and the ultimate answer to all of our problems—underlies this fantasy that the notion of imagination (indeed, of much psychological language) might be replaced by conceptual vocabulary on a materialist register. Indeed, all of our conceptual systems are imaginal, networks of symbols that have greater or lesser energy the more or less they are found to be valuable in coming to terms with contemporary experience. We will return to this idea; social constructionist thought and broader postmodern epistemological critiques necessarily inform this viewpoint. The starting point for our conversation is the simple observation that, like all discourses, psychology emerged in certain social, philosophical, historical, economic, and political contexts.

Jesus’ admonition refers to what he called the “heart” or the symbolic inner nexus and engine of psychic energy. We might understand this heart to be the metaphoric locus of our fantasy of ourselves, or the place in which all human experience ultimately occurs. Imagination is without doubt a space constructed in discourse; we imagine imagination into being, and various eras in Western discourse have conceptualized imagination in varying ways.² It is a discursive space elaborated in careful detail by the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung and the tradition of writers in analytical psychology that emerged from his thought. Jung wrote that “every psychic process is an image and an imagining” (Jung, 1969b, para. 889), which is a proposition that undergirds his psychology. So analytical psychology takes the imagination very seriously, as is reflected in the title of Avens’ (1980) work: Imagination Is Reality.

Matthew’s Jesus seems to have agreed with Avens’ proposition. Intrapsychic experiences are morally equivalent to actions in the world. Jimmy Carter’s reading of this is in one sense representative of traditional Christian approaches to the subject.³ We are responsible for what we imagine, not just for what we do. Jesus’ teaching seems to correct an implied inclination toward understanding inner experience as separate from reality. It can be interpreted as suggesting that we have control over our intrapsychic experience. Indeed, it often has been interpreted that way, with harshly punitive implications. It can also be interpreted to suggest that we engage in internal acts that have moral import and spiritual significance.

Though the context is loaded—undoubtedly, Carter at least unconsciously struggled with the conflict between his Christian beliefs and his experience of sexual desire—he is more interested in reading this passage as a warning about pride. Though it would run counter to mainstream readings, we could understand Matthew’s Jesus to have emancipated us from the pursuit of moral superiority. If one’s imagining an act has the same moral consequence as doing it, we cannot ever be better than anyone else. Across the millennia, Jesus might be winking at us: Do you seriously believe you can stop yourself from having lustful thoughts? Give it up, buddy. That road leads to obsession and compulsion. No one is perfect. This last implication is undoubtedly present in Christian moral theory—with the glum addition that we must strive toward perfection and are thus existentially shackled to failure.

Christian conceptualizations of the imagination are almost universally grim. Kearney (1988) noted that the Christianity of the Middle Ages took a prevailing attitude of “prudence or distrust” (p. 138) toward products of the imagination. The imagination was understood as the source of sinful illusion or a mortal hubris that risked the blasphemy of assuming God’s own power of creativity for humanity. The images we create have the potential to occlude our vision of the divine.

This is only part of our cultural inheritance. Imagination also has been seen as the necessary mediating function between sensory experience and pure thought (Aristotle, Kant), a realm of experience distinct and ontologically superior to reality (Ibn ‘Arabi via Henri Corbin), a “synthetic and magical power” (Coleridge, 1984/1814, p. 16), the sine qua non of consciousness (Sartre), and indistinguishable from reality (Derrida). Although we explore both the genealogy of its use in the Western intellectual tradition and its specific appearances in analytical psychology and allied literatures, we must make the obvious, necessary observation that the term imagination is itself imagined as a projection screen for our deepest hopes and fears about human nature. This book’s treatment of imagination is no different.

The same is true of how we will treat ethics. Although specific ethical codes are the products of cultural and historical moments, and they change—often radically—over time, the notion of ethics would appear to have at least superficial stability across history. Ethics guide us in making decisions about how to behave. Etymologically, ethic derives from ancient Latin and Greek words related to the character or disposition of an individual (Ethic, 2014). This movement from a reflection on who individuals fundamentally are, to an articulation of principles by which they might live, is significant, and the tension between them is woven throughout ethical discourse. Codes developed for a collective and applied across all individuals necessarily make poor fits for all situations and all characters. In one of his few direct statements on ethics, Jung (1969a) wrote that “one can hardly think of a single rule that would not have to be reversed under certain conditions” (p. 16). Even the apparently stable category of the ethical, however, has shifted over time and remains a dynamically changing mode of describing human experience. Is it innate or inculcated by society? Is it built on religious foundations or a tool of collective domination by political powers?

The central question of this book is how psychological ethics apply to the imagination. As we explore the nature and potential value of articulating an ethic or ethics of the imagination in this way, we necessarily invent, or perhaps reimagine, our terms. The goal of this project is not to establish a Big Brother of the imagination, nor to outline a neat code by which we could hope to evaluate what is right or wrong in this invented space of the imagination. Instead, we will sketch the complex ways a set of texts have imagined the imagination and ethics. In particular, we will explore how the discourse of analytical psychology reflects contemporary preoccupations with these two ideas, including the way in which the discovery of the unconscious⁴ affects the way we imagine ethics. This project is by its nature an attempt to create an ethical imagination even as we critique such an impulse. Our greatest innovations, works of art, acts of compassion emerge from the human imagination, as do our horrific atrocities. How we imagine matters.

This conversation repeatedly runs the risk of sliding into nebulous ambiguity. This reflects the researcher’s limitations. I also believe it reflects an unavoidable structural necessity. This research discusses interior experience rather than objects readily available for a person to examine. This dissertation is ultimately a fantasy of the imagination or a fantasy of ethics. Materialist rabbit holes abound when one surveys Western philosophical and psychological theory for answers to these questions. So I frame some of these issues with narratives intended to illuminate the real-world implications of these ideas. The therapist’s question—where does the client suffer?—motivates this dissertation in profound and undoubtedly unconscious ways. The theoretical answers I hope to explore are driven by personal and clinical experience. If the starting position is that we imagine all of our experience—as Jung suggested—then all of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Images and ethics in the digital age
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Imagining the imagination
• 3 What do we make of fantasy?
• 4 Imagining ethics
• 5 Eating the liver, killing the tortoise: the ethical and the imaginal
• 6 A dream of the desiring imagination
• 7 The law of the (imaginal) land
• 8 Conclusions
• Index