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It might at first appear as something of an oddity that the figure of ‘the uninvited guest’, upon which my reading of James Fisher's impressive text will concentrate, is the imagination. I think it is not usual in psychoanalytic work, clinical or theoretical, for the practitioner to ascribe his findings to the work of his or her imagination. It has, of course, been acceptable to attribute findings to work that is derived from conscious and unconscious sources. But, from Freud onwards, it might be said that it would have been positively catastrophic for any psychoanalyst to examine carefully the contribution of the imagination to the production of his thinking, his findings, his writing.
And yet it is in this sense that I see one of the many meanings that the phrase ‘the uninvited guest’ has here and in other contexts, that is, the unacknowledged and unexamined presence in the Mind and in the mind of all psychoanalytic thinkers from Freud onwards, of the imaginative powers. Charles Rycroft, an exponent of the imagination in his thinking and writing, became an absent, perhaps uninvited and unwanted guest at the psychoanalytic feast as the years progressed, precisely because he argued, in Margaret Arden's words, ‘that unconscious imaginative processes underlie the development and maintenance of a sense of reality just as much as they do neuroses’ (Arden 2000). Rycroft does have an entry on ‘Imagination’ in his A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, a little and famous work that has spawned innumerable others. This entry lies alongside the more readily used psychoanalytic term, fantasy/phantasy (conscious and unconscious) which we familiarly use to direct ourselves to the internal world. Rycroft writes of the imagination as ‘the process or faculty of conceiving representations of objects, events, etc., not actually present’ (as does the OED). He distinguishes the process of the imagination as producing ‘results which are either (a) imaginary, in the sense of being fict