You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This is a talk influenced by the work of Don Meltzer and presented in a spoken form. Fisher's theme is that patients who are stuck in concrete thinking are not able to imagine not because they lack imagination but because they do not notice its presence. ‘This not noticing the presence of imagination means that there are only competing “facts” which call for adjudication and action, not thinking’ (p. 102). And equally importantly therapists can be drawn into these ‘competing “realities”’.
From this insight Fisher discourses on A Midsummer Night's Dream—‘one of our culture's defining explorations of imagination’, inviting us to ‘try to imagine seeing imagination at work in all perception’ (pp. 103, 102). The references to this play are a little tantalizing and left me feeling that what I was reading was an outline of a theme which the author would one day develop into a book; the theme being the way imagination is linked to symbolism, illusion and reality. He briefly discusses the part imagination plays in ‘falling in love’ where ‘what we see and hear and feel is shaped and formed and given a local habitation by the mind's conscious and unconscious fantasy’ (p. 105).
In the next section the author touches on how imagination is present in perception and evidenced most noticeably in art, but perhaps least imaginatively in conceptual art, with its tedious didacticism. There follows a presentation of Bion's thinking about Alpha-function and Beta-elements, which Fisher ties into the development of the individual. One of his special interests here is the role of imaging in imagination which he describes developmentally: ‘the mother images with and for her baby, making it possible for her baby to begin noticing what is important’ (p. 108). His theme though is not only the birth of imagination, but also the death of imagination.
The final section of the paper investigates why and how imaging stops and what contributes to its rebirth. Essentially Fisher argues the Kleinian case