The World of Images and the Image of the World

Abstract

The image as a psychological concept has a history of more than two thousand, five hundred years. Attempts to eliminate it from the system of psychological categories, such as those undertaken at the beginning of the 20th century during the anti-mentalist rebellion, ended, to use the apt expression of R. Holt (1972), with a "return from exile" and the restoration of full citizens' rights to the concept, even in such an extreme current as behaviorism (Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1965). For all the wide spectrum of different approaches to an understanding of the image and its role or place in a number of other psychological phenomena, two aspects stand out as fundamental for materialist psychology: the subordinate nature of the image with respect to objective reality, and the active involvement of the subject in the process of constructing an image. The former flows directly from a materialist answer to the basic question of philosophy, and the second enables us to overcome a mechanistic conception of man as a contemplative being such as is characteristic of all varieties of metaphysical materialism. It should be pointed out especially that one of the most important and at the same time one of the most difficult aspects of the struggle for Marxist psychology is to provide theoretical and empirical underpinnings to postulates concerning the active nature of a mental image. Openly idealistic attitudes in various approaches to an understanding of the mind have become for many scientists a synonym for the unscientific nature of such an approach; mechanistic and essentially adaptive or reactive models of man are often presented as the only scientific approach to the study of the mind. This is connected with the fact that the validity of the above-formulated theses is completely rooted in philosophical and concrete scientific methodology whereas, with respect to particular psychological theories that might be employed as a basis for developing methodological techniques for an empirical investigation of man as an active being, the fact is that such theories have either simply not yet been constructed or the concepts used in these theories have not been sufficiently tried in operation.