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Imagination, defined as the unique capacity of the human organism to evoke a mental representation of an absent object, affect, function, or instinctual drive, enters into all aspects of psychic activity whether adaptation to reality, normal mentation, pathological mental processes, or artistic creativity. Only by imagination can a memory trace be manipulated and resynthesized to form a new image. This capacity to imagine is developed gradually in the infant through stages well described by Piaget until, by age sixteen to eighteen months, he is capable of forming true mental representations. This relatively late acquisition throws open to question the analytic dictum that the earliest response of an infant to frustration is hallucinatory wish fulfilment. With imaginative capacity, human mental functioning acquires its unique characteristic: perception of the external world, inner drives, and affects are all registered in the mind by psychic representations. Instinctual drive energy is thus necessarily always directed toward psychic representations of objects, not toward the objects themselves. And the imaginative process is interposed either as primary process imagination aimed at facilitating discharge, or as secondary process imagination aimed at delaying discharge for purposes of enhanced ego control. The imaginative process, operating in all human psychic activities above the level of a reflex response to a noxious stimulus, is basically the same whether the resultant product be hallucination, fantasy, dream, thought, or symptom. In this regard thought is a product of mentation plus imagination, reflecting in its own hierarchy of development the increasing complexity of the imaginative capacity until, in its most evolved forms, it becomes the most advanced expression of the imagination it serves. In the analytic setting it is the imaginative capacity of patient and analyst, operating interactively, upon which the phenomena of transference, countertrans