Perception, Imagination, and Reality1

The relation of perception to reality has posed a problem for philosophers and scientists for all the millennia that man has been a thinking animal. It remains an unsolved problem today, though we may have new questions to ask about it and new words in which to ask them. My thesis is directed to the questions that psycho-analysis may raise in this connexion, and specifically to the role of the imagination in the interrelationship of perception and reality.

I am placing my questions in the context of the larger problem of the nature of the imaginative process, which I believe deserves closer psycho-analytic scrutiny than it has received. The term imagination is used very loosely in psycho-analytic writings, and has a different meaning for every author. It would be an endless task to attempt to reconcile the various uses of the term imagination, and I can only hope to make clear the sense in which I use it, to examine certain psychological phenomena which are usually subsumed under the rubric of imagination, and to apply to them the precise tools of psycho-analytic theory, specifically the structural theory and the concepts of instinctual energic vicissitudes.

For the purpose of my discussion I would define imagination as the capacity to form a mental representation of an absent object, an affect, a body function, or an instinctual drive.2 I am here defining a process whose products are images, symbols, fantasies, dreams, ideas, thoughts, and concepts. It is essential to distinguish the process from the products. I recognize that this definition does not follow the usage of everyday language, which makes imagination a phenomenon associated with creativity and unreality, beyond the realm of ordinary thought processes. I have attempted, rather, to consider imagination as a ubiquitous component of human psychic activity unique to man—a point which I elaborated in my earlier study. In that paper I emphasized that imagination is a complex psychic function, itself th