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Dr Pruyser wishes to remind psychoanalysts that the imagination cannot be relegated to a minor role in mature psychological functioning, that a rich imagination is an adaptive and creative psychic function. His book seems to have been written for psychoanalysts who have not had a great deal of exposure to culture; and perhaps for non-analysts who doubt that the imagination is sympathetically understood anywhere within the psychoanalytic movement.
Sensing a need for a less 'narrow' theory of the imagination than Freud's, Pruyser finds Winnicott's notion of transitional phenomena helpful in developing a 'psychoanalysis of culture'. Pruyser's account of Winnicott's transitional phenoma is an extensive and sympathetic one. He sees Winnicott's theory as comprising a more generous and complex explanation of the imagination than Freud's: 'Winnicott … speaks of modes of play that do not merely sublimate instinctual impulses but provide a joyous 'ego-relatedness".' The main value of Winnicott's notion, for the author, is that it places the imagination beyond the life of libidinal and aggressive drives and the defences that alter them. Pruyser's primary idea then, is Winnicott's, that 'something in human nature transcends both the primary and secondary process' (p. 111). This 'intermediate area' of the imagination is in direct continuity with 'the play area of the small child who is "lost" in play'; it is the 'illusionistic world' which stands between the autistic and realistic worlds which were set in stark polarity by classical psychoanalysis, and are in need of mediation.
The author believes that psychoanalysis has taken too 'stern' an attitude toward the imagination, and that its periodic substitution of the term fantasy for imagination shows a pejorative attitude. The works Pruyser most refers to in emphasizing this pejorative aspect of psychoanalytic thinking on the imagination are