Imaginary life

Imaginary life is a mode of psychic existence organized around irreal objects and the feelings and conduct directed toward them. Its decisive feature is not that imagined things are mistaken for real ones, but that consciousness can use them to escape reality’s demands: imagined objects answer desire without the resistance, surprise, and consequences that accompany actual life. The resulting freedom is also a limitation, since the imagined world is controllable precisely because it is poor, fixed, and unable to exceed the wishes that formed it.

Definition and structure

The account of Imaginary life begins with a distinction between the imaging attitude and ordinary perception. Images do not simply intrude as accidental substitutes for words or thoughts; they arise through a distinctive, purposive attitude. Thought takes an imaged form when it seeks intuition, trying to bring an object before consciousness and, in a sense, possess it. Yet this effort cannot turn the image into a real thing. The object remains irreal, and the response to it is correspondingly a Quasi-observation: love, hate, and desire directed toward it are also quasi-feelings rather than ordinary relations to present objects.

This difference divides not only objects but whole ways of acting. An imagined action and its real counterpart are separated by a change in the situation: preparing to act in imagination does not guarantee that the same motives will survive contact with reality. What seemed compelling in the imagined scene may alter or disappear when the real object is present. The distinction is therefore not between two versions of the same world, one more vivid than the other, but between irreducible kinds of objects, feelings, and conduct. The Imaginary life names the wider pattern of living in relation to the first kind.

Preference and escape from reality

People may be arranged, the account proposes, according to whether they prefer an imaginary or a real life. This preference is more than choosing beautiful or luxurious images over an unsatisfying present. A person who prefers the imaginary adopts its feelings and conduct because they are imaginary, and seeks to flee not only real-life disappointments such as poverty, disappointed love, or business failure, but reality’s very form: its presence, its independence from the subject, and the need to adapt conduct to objects that cannot be exhausted by perception.

Reality also requires a plasticity that fixed imagining does not. The arrival of Annie, for example, cannot simply fulfil an image made to correspond to desire: the actual person exceeds that image and calls for a new adjustment. What was wanted in imagination is not necessarily what can be received in reality. The dreamer who imagines being a king would not necessarily accept an actual monarchy, even one in which his wishes were granted, because real circumstances bring consequences and demands for adaptation that the imagined wish leaves out.

The preference for the imaginary is thus not adequately described as a search for richer or more seductive scenes. It is a refusal of the openness of the real, where objects can resist, surprise, and redirect feeling. Imagined feeling, by contrast, can remain solemn and fixed, returning in a familiar form rather than changing in response to what happens. This distinction makes escape a matter of structure as well as content: the desired refuge is a way of experiencing in which events need not overtake or revise the subject’s expectations.

Repetition and the limits of the imagined world

The imagined world may look, from outside, like a torrent of varied scenes. The account instead describes the world of the schizophrenic as poor and meticulous: the same scenes recur in detail, accompanied by a ceremonial whose elements are settled in advance. Nothing in it can escape, resist, or surprise. Imagined objects have an essential poverty that allows them to satisfy feeling docilely, without guiding or deceiving it; they can also disappear when the dreamer’s caprice ends and carry only the consequences assigned to them.

This controlled repetition complicates the idea that imagination compensates for a monotonous reality with a more dazzling alternative. Its scenes are constrained by their dependence on the person who forms them. The dreamer can select feelings and corresponding objects as though choosing from a store of props, but this apparent range does not produce the openness of actual experience. The same control that makes the scenes accommodating makes them unable to develop beyond their established pattern. Repeated amorous scenes, in this account, are not explained only by disappointment in real love; they also indicate an impaired capacity to love, since actual love would involve another person who exceeds the desired image.

A reported crisis described by Marie B gives a compact example of awareness within an imagined world. She said that she had taken herself to be the Queen of Spain while knowing at some level that this was not true. Her comparison was to a child playing with a doll while wishing to be persuaded that it was alive, and to an actor entering a role without being wholly convinced. The episode shows that immersion and recognition of irreality need not simply cancel one another: the person may inhabit an enchanted imaginary world while retaining some awareness of its status.

From imaginary life to hallucination

The analysis distinguishes such recognition from the harder problem of hallucination. If a hallucinator takes an image for a perception, that need not mean that an image is literally projected outward into the perceived world. An image already has an object presented as external to consciousness, but it is given as irreal; a perceived object, by contrast, makes a claim to reality. The question is how a patient can believe in an image’s reality when the image is constituted as irreal, not merely where the image appears to be located.

The distinction between imaging consciousness and perception is treated as essential even when consciousness is morbid. The spontaneity involved in forming an irreal object is bound up with a non-thetic awareness of that spontaneity; the analysis therefore resists explaining hallucination as a simple loss of awareness that an image is being produced. Reports of where a hallucination occurred also require caution. The proposed account is that perception may collapse provisionally during an attack and return afterward, allowing the patient to locate the remembered scene in the surrounding world. A report of a devil seen in a room, for example, does not by itself establish that the patient fused the image’s space with the space of perception at the time.

The account connects more thoroughgoing hallucination with disintegration of personal synthesis rather than with a straightforward decision to treat an image as real. Auditory or visual imaging consciousness may appear as a sudden spasm, while the patient’s overall attitude changes: a voice produced through the patient’s own mouth may be experienced as belonging to someone else. In genuine hallucinations, the proposed disturbance goes further. Concentrated, oriented thought gives way to scattered connection and a levelling down of consciousness; perception becomes dark and foggy, and subject and object recede together. The resulting partial psychic systems are anti-thematic: they cannot be held at a distance and examined as ordinary thoughts can. Their furtive, ungraspable character marks a breakdown in the personal organization that would otherwise make observation and reflection possible. Imaginary life therefore supplies a framework for distinguishing controlled irreal experience from hallucination, while the analysis of hallucination exposes how fragile the organization of ordinary experience can become.