In Imagination from Fantasy to Delusion, Lois Oppenheim
illustrates the enhancement of self that creativity affords, the
relationship of imagination to the self as agent. The premise of
this book is twofold: First, that the imaginary is real. Where it
differs from what we commonly take to be reality is in structure
and in form. The imaginary of art, for example, is not illusionary
for it is phenomenologically describable and even depictable, as
demonstrated by the self-reflexive efforts of modernist painters
and writers. No less real than the imaginary of art, and thus
fantasy, is the imaginary of delusion, ascertainable in the very
function it serves. Though fundamentally different, fantasy and
delusion do share a significant feature: a preoccupation with
agency. Second is that change, the enhancement of self through an
increase in agency, is facilitated by the biology of reward: The
pleasure of increased self-cohesion the efficacy acquired through
knowledge of, and the attribution of meaning to, the world is
ultimately the sine qua non of imaginative thought.
Oppenheim emphasizes the idea that imagination generates
knowledge. Our sensory systems, like our higher cognitive
functions, give the human brain knowledge to maintain the
homeostatic balance required for survival and to enrich the sense
of self required for agency. And, she suggests, imagination is a
function of their doing so. Moreover, she explores the construct by
which we apprehend the workings of imagination fantasy and
considers in what the mental imagery that endows it consists, how
fantasy may be transmitted transgenerationally, and how delusion
can be an impediment to imagination while also being a product of
it. Additionally, she likens psychoanalysis to the making of art as
a process of acquiring knowledge and looks at creativity itself as
a coming-to-know.
Throughout this book, there run several opposing threads. The
first is that of the intra- and interpsychic psychoanalytic
paradigms. This theoretical contrast bears on our understanding of
aesthetic experience as sublimatory versus object relational and on
our understanding of the construction of meaning. A second
opposition resides in the notion of agency (with its implication of
self-cohesion) which has everything to do with ego function and,
seemingly, the usefulness of "unconscious fantasy," a cornerstone
of psychoanalysis now thrown into question by the postmodern
favoring of dissociation over repression and other mechanisms of
defense. Last, but no less significant, is the contrast interwoven
between the empiricism of neuroscience and the metaphysics of
philosophical thought. Oppenheim's underlying effort is to explore
the validity of these oppositions, which seem not to hold as
steadfastly as we tend to suppose.
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