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“My imagination makes me human and makes me a fool. It gives me all the world and exiles me from it.” On January 17, 2008, Kilborne began his Scientific Meeting Presentation with this quote from Ursala Le Guin (1990), which succinctly captures the paradoxical and powerful quality of the imagination, a topic he noted is seldom spoken about in analytic work. Kilborne, a professor at UCLA and the Sorbonne, as well as a visiting professor at the University of Moscow and a training and supervising analyst in Istanbul, has published extensively in fields as various as anthropology, literature and psychoanalysis. Kilborne1 draws on literature and the visual arts to elaborate the role of imagination and illusion in both psychoanalysis and “our humanistic tradition.”
Kilborne presented a clinical moment of a highly intellectualized schizoid patient who mentioned Rilke and his Letters to a Young Poet. “The patient mused, ‘what happened to the letters of Kappus, the young poet?’ [Kilborne] replied ‘that Kappus might have been a figment of Rilke's imagination so that he would write the book.’ “This appeared to be a breakthrough in this patient's concrete thinking as the patient “thereafter referred to ‘Kappus moments’ to designate similar inhibitions in understanding.”
Kilborne proceeded to discuss how illusion in our humanistic tradition can be “a resource for understanding crimps in imagination of our patients and ourselves as analysts.” Specifically, he considered the notion of “perspective in the visual arts as an expression of our fascination with constructed illusions that can then be counted up to convey ‘visual truths.’ “For instance, “perspective makes a flat surface seem three dimensional. And then we take the illusion to be a representation of what we see in reality.” Similarly, he noted that when we look in the mirror, we have the illusion that the face looking back at us is the same size as the face doing the looking, while the image is necessarily half the size of o