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Imagination and its Pathologies edited by James Phillips and James Morley. MIT: MIT Press, 2003. ISBN 0 262 16214 8.
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Bell, V. |
| Copyright Year | 2003 |
| Abstract | John Lennon once said “Reality leaves a lot to the imagination”. It is therefore unsurprising that some people perceive the world in ways that differ considerably from what society considers to be consensual reality. In some cases a person’s reality can be so markedly different that it may become a source of deep personal distress or even becomes a source of concern to other people, usually because of their strange actions produced from within a seemingly private world. In the West, at least, such people are likely to be labelled as mentally ill, and their thoughts classified as pathological. If we agree with John Lennon’s assessment of the role of the imagination in constructing reality (as many scholars of the mind have), imagination would seem to be a good candidate for the source of distressing departures from everyday reality. Imagination and its Pathologies aims to tackle exactly this issue, and the editors have gathered psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts and philosophers to charge headlong into the fray. Accordingly, the book is in three parts, discussing philosophy, psychoanalysis and applied and clinical aspects of pathologies of the imagination. The philosophical approach is generally phenomenological in the sense of favouring the view that the experience can be understood solely as it presents itself to our conscious selves, without the distortion of theories or assumptions from other disciplines. Although atypical of much of the opening section, I found the first chapter particularly illuminating. It analyses imagination from the perspective of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who argued that many philosophical dilemmas are derived from underlying problems with the use of language, making the issues more apparent than real. The initial chapter highlights the fact that we use the word ‘imagine’ to represent a whole host of experiences from creating internal sensory impressions (“I imagine feeling the sun against my face”), to expressing belief or disbelief in something (“I can’t imagine that happening”). Of course there are many more examples, but it is worth remembering that we are not always talking about the same thing when we discuss imagination. Whilst Freudians may see imagination largely in terms of wish fulfilment fantasy, cognitive and brain scientists (such as |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://vaughanbell.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/bell_2003_humannature.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/phillips.pdf |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
