Imaginary object

The imaginary object is the distinctive correlate of image-consciousness: consciousness intends a person or thing through an image, yet does not encounter that object as a hidden picture inside the mind. It appears as an object in its own right, under the condition of irreality. This distinction explains both the image’s unusual freedom to gather incompatible aspects and the sharp difference between imagining something and perceiving it. It also frames the problem of hallucination: the difficulty is not simply how an inner image gets projected outward, but how an object essentially given as irreal can be believed to be real.

Definition and mode of existence

An imaginary object is not a recollected sensation revived in consciousness. It belongs to a specific form of consciousness, irreducible to perception and to the sum of separate mental ingredients. Knowledge, affectivity, and movement can be distinguished for purposes of analysis, but the image arises as a synthesis with a new sense: consciousness is directed toward an object as though it were present, while the object remains irreal. The object is therefore not identical with the lines, colors, or other material through which it is intended. Those elements may help present it, but the object they make accessible has a distinct mode of existence.

This distinction also separates the imaginary object from the perceived thing. An object of perception occupies a determinate position in shared space and time, and its qualities are individuated: it cannot, in the same respect, be itself and something else. The imaginary object does not necessarily meet these conditions. It can be intended as a familiar person or thing without being fixed as one unique appearance at one indivisible moment. Its relation to the image’s materials allows several aspects or identities to remain active together.

How images organize their objects

The formation of a schematic face shows how an imaginary object can emerge from lines that do not, by themselves, depict a complete face. Viewed perceptually, three segments, a separate point, and a sinuous line can be organized into unrelated forms against the sheet. In an imaging attitude, the segments can instead be read as forehead, eyebrow, and nose, with the point as an eye and the sinuous line as mouth and chin. The paper itself changes its role: space to one side is taken as filled volume, while space to the other functions as empty ground. The viewer also supplies a missing connection between separate groups of marks through the directed movement of the eyes.

The lines alone do not account for the resulting figure. When perceived forms impose movements, as in the Müller-Lyer illusion, eye movements can be attributed to the figure as real qualities; the segments acquire apparent extension and direction. Schematic images work differently. They do not provide a rule that compels a particular movement. Knowledge guides the eyes through the marks, and those movements are projected onto them as hypothetical directions. If an image crystallizes, the viewer sees a person in the lines while remaining aware that the lines have been organized through a freely initiated act. The movements projected onto the marks, rather than the marks considered alone, are representative elements in the consciousness of the schematic drawing.

This account helps distinguish an image from a perceptual object that serves as a sign. Gestalt studies associated with Köhler, Wertheimer, and Koffka offer a way to investigate how formal structures can persist as a perceiver’s position changes. But the imaginary figure is not merely a perceived arrangement with a newly noticed direction: its formation depends on an imaging intention and on movements treated as imaged properties. The imaginary object is the correlate of that distinct synthesis, not just another real quality discovered in the lines.

Multiplicity, identity, and the image’s whole

Affectivity can make the same image material available to more than one object. In a dream, one person may appear as several at once because a shared affective content supports a plurality of identities before knowledge has settled the image into one. Similar mixtures can occur in waking life. A face may seem familiar because it combines, without initially distinguishing them, the face of a bank employee and that of a police officer. An image of a red stone building may likewise be valid for a building in Saint-Etienne and another in Paris. Such formations do not simply fail to depict one object accurately; they show that the imaginary object need not obey the principle of identity in the way a perceived object does.

An image can also present aspects that perception could not assemble in a single view. A thimble may be imagined as seen from its exterior and interior at once. A hand clasping an armchair can appear with its palm and fingers visible through the chair’s opaque arm; an imagined hand on a knee can include both sides of the hand and fabric, as well as the knee through the cloth. These are not ordinary simultaneous views of a physically transparent object. The image intends the object as a whole, drawing on intellectual and affective experience rather than restricting itself to one perceptual angle.

What is successive in perception can thus be simultaneous in the image. A person may be imagined in a particular place, on a particular day, or in particular clothes, while other intentions bring along additional attitudes and aspects that complicate that specification. The intended person is not merely one isolated appearance but a synthesis of aspects. This does not mean that the image is reducible to a heap of contradictory details. Its unity belongs to the image-consciousness that gathers them into a meaningful whole, even when the object’s features could not be reconciled in perception.

Perception and the limits of imaging

The imaginary object does not function as an extra image inserted into perception to supply qualities that the senses fail to register. Perception already includes unformulated intentions about the thing before it: an ashtray is perceived with an implied underside, support on a table, and material qualities that may not presently be seen. Such intentions enrich the perceived object without positing a separate object. They remain fused with perception, unlike an imaging consciousness, which intends its object in a distinct, irreal mode. The perceived table and an irreal image of Pierre therefore alternate as correlates of radically different attitudes rather than combining into one perception.

The distinction matters because perceiving more than is directly seen does not require treating the unperceived aspects as imaginary objects. Formal structures, implicit knowledge, and inferences can contribute to perception while remaining attached to the perceived thing. Husserl’s account of perception as consciousness’s presence to a spatiotemporal object helps describe this richness, but it does not erase the difference between constituting an aspect of a perceived object and forming an imaginary one.

Hallucination and belief in reality

Hallucination puts pressure on the difference between an object’s irreality and a subject’s belief. The object of an image is already external to consciousness in its own irreal space; it is not an internal item that a patient must project into the shared perceptual world. Nor can the constitutive thesis of the image simply be removed: the imaginary object is given as irreal, and the spontaneity involved in forming it belongs to the image-consciousness itself. The central problem is how a patient comes to believe in the reality of something whose mode of givenness is irreality.

The account therefore treats hallucination not as a straightforward fusion of image-space and perceptual space. A reported location may be supplied after an attack, when the perceived world has returned, and the patient’s description of where an apparition occurred does not by itself establish that the two spaces were experienced together. Reports also require caution: a patient may sometimes interrupt threatening voices by concentrating on speech, and a soldier whose delirium was not redirected by changes in a room could briefly stop when a doctor called to him at close range and told him to wipe his nose. These observations suggest an alternation between perception and delirium rather than a stable blending of their objects.

In more thoroughgoing hallucinations, the account locates the change in a disintegration of personal synthesis. A patient may know that the voice is produced through the patient’s own mouth yet experience the speaking as belonging to someone else; knowledge of the mechanism does not secure control over the global attitude through which the hallucination is realized. When personal consciousness and oriented thought falter, perception may become dim, and partial, contradictory systems can appear without a stable centre able to observe or examine them. The imaginary object remains central to this explanation, but hallucination is not merely an unusually vivid image: it involves a disturbed relation among imaging, belief, perception, and the synthesis that ordinarily organizes consciousness.