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Although few terms in psychology can have more varied and coloured meanings than ‘imagery’, it is important to remember that the history of imagery (relating to dreams, visions, daydreams, memory, thought, learning etc.) goes back to Greek antiquity and that it has been in and out of fashion. In modern times Galton, Jaensch, Freud, and Jung have all been keenly interested while behaviourists, like J. B. Watson, said there was no such thing.
At present ‘imagery’ is very much ‘in’, as this volume shows. Small wonder, then, that with so many meanings and applications a book on the subject should prove some-what bewildering to the reader. It is much better than the proverbial curate's egg (‘good in parts’); in fact there are no bad parts, but it just fails to become an egg at all. Yet the ‘demand characteristics’ of a laboratory test, i.e. the tendencies for subjects to perform and report as they believe to be appropriate, are of the very nature of the scientist's objection to analysis, i.e. that it is based on suggestion.
The ingenuity of modern psychologists like Sheehan and Neisser in designing their experiments so as to be free from bias is truly admirable. To what extent experimental psychology can ever succeed in ironing out this in-built trap seems dubious. Each design has to be preceded by a hypothesis which, in my view, expresses a preconception. True, it is then open to proof or disproof, i.e. the experimental outcome remains in the balance. But, taking a long-term view, so many hypotheses have come and gone that my doubt about the preconception creeping into the interpretation of experimental results from inner space (as it were) has not been dispelled. (I believe the technical term for this phenomenon