Imaginary Dimension Research Articles

Children as Mystics, Activists, Sages, and Holy Fools: Understanding the Spirituality of Children and Its Significance for Clinical Work

Children as Mystics, Activists, Sages, and Holy Fools: Understanding the Spirituality of Children and Its Significance for Clinical Work

Finding a place in a dislocated world: reflections on depression

This essay considers the experience of depression resulting from an inability to find a genuine place in the world. The author suggests that depression means being in a ‘no-place’, and to escape from it a real place must be found. He draws on his own experience and that of others, developing a wider idea of ‘place’ beyond the purely physical, and uses storytelling to give his ideas an imaginative dimension. He describes the traditional medical approach to depression, and rejects this as inadequate — seeing it instead as an emotional, spiritual and existential crisis. The example of ‘third culture kids’ shows how the loss of a place can have traumatic consequences in later life, but such a loss does not inevitably lead to trauma. In finding a place and helping others to do so, we need to see ‘place’in a larger way — one that recognizes the flux of life and the volatility of today's world. Copyright © 2005 Whurr Publishers Ltd.

Da necessidade à demanda: produzindo sujeitos

O texto visa mostrar parte da complexidade social atual - através dos conceitos de modernidade e pós-modernidade - enquanto possível produtora de subjetividades afetadas ou condicionadas pela dificuldade na constituição da dimensão simbólica e imaginária do sujeito e também as estratégias que se vislumbram, para a Psicologia, no sentido de poder incidir e intervir sobre essas questões.

America's Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word. By Jeffory A. Clymer. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. xiv, 277 pp. Cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8078-2792-4. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5460-3.)

In the first sentence of his epilogue, Jeffory A. Clymer says that in this book he argues that a particular way of imagining certain acts of violence as “terrorism” emerged in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, and that the imaginative dimensions of terrorism in this period, as well as its closely related material history, were intimately connected to the way industrial capitalism evolved and was narrated for Americans. (p. 211) This sentence is indeed an excellent microcosm of this book, and especially what is wrong with it: Clymer has great difficulty in writing simply and clearly, and, as a result, no matter how many times his book (or this sentence) is read, it is difficult to determine what he is trying to say (and, sometimes, literally what he is talking about). Drawing primarily on a pastiche of literary sources (including some of the lesser-known works of Henry James and Jack London) and contemporary newspaper and media accounts from the era between two traumatic, and never solved, American bombings—the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago and a 1920 explosion outside J. P. Morgan's Wall Street offices, which killed thirty-eight people—Clymer does demonstrate that overwhelming fears of terrorism in American society have long predated 9/11. He also correctly suggests (mostly by indirection) that the “establishment” has long succeeded in diverting attention away from its own, often institutionalized, far greater excesses, such as racism (including winking at, if not overtly participating in, lynchings and other violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan) and brutal labor exploitation, by focusing media and public attention on easily understandable fears of completely unpredictable acts of terrorism.

"A Disgrace to the Map of Israel": The Wilderness Journey of the Citizen-Soldier in Amos Oz's A Perfect Peace

A Disgrace to the Map of Israel":The Wilderness Journey of the Citizen-Soldier in Amos Oz's A Perfect Peace Ranen Omer-Sherman (bio) The act of departure is the bravest and most beautiful of all. A selfish happiness perhaps, but it is happiness—for him who knows how to appreciate it. To be alone, to have no needs, to be unknown, a stranger and at home everywhere and to march, solitary and great, to the conquest of the world. —Isabelle Eberhardt When it comes to Israeli literature, even before the advent of "post-Zionist" discourse, the writer's encounter with the timeless desert disrupts certain polarities and essentializing gestures of mainstream Zionist conventions. The desert, with its sands and stark visual display of erosion, is the site that a surprising number of Israeli writers use to explore the difference between national loyalty and diasporic dreaming. In the novels of Amos Oz (b. 1939), who calls the small Negev town of Arad home, the desert serves potentially as a transformative space that lays bare the cracks in the individual's commitment to national identity. In the Hebraic imagination, long before the collective journey of the people under Moses, Abraham's self-exile from Ur into boundless desert space embodies the brave individuation of one [End Page 97] who transcends the concept of the tribal norms into which he was born. It is as if almost in spite of itself, by privileging anecdotal narratives of protest and spiritual restlessness alongside the law and ritual, the Bible credits the desert as the site of a supreme skepticism that unsettles all nationalist complacency. Given the powerful residual traces of this counter-narrative in the Jewish literary tradition, it seems worth addressing its role as a catalyst for the literary imagination of Oz.1 Relevant to this is critic Joseph Cohen's astute argument about Oz's delicate relation to serving both art and politics in the context of contemporary Israeli reality. Cohen notes Oz's powerful capacity for "bypassing polemicism to move upward to a substantially higher plateau of metapolitical writing. ... Oz is nothing less than a modern mythmaker who has been highly successful in taking the exoticism of Israel's location in the desert and Mediterranean Sea, a country already saturated with a biblical, mystical, apocalyptic and miraculous history, and combining it with the myriad realities of contemporary life" (179). In short, the desert is unrivalled as a formidable influence in the mythopoetic dimensions of Oz's imagination. Yet rather than being seduced by an escapist mystical vision, the novelist is drawn to the desert as a source for clarity in framing complex national realities. Oz, who has for many years lived close to the desert, embraces the biblical sense of the wilderness as a site of "translation" rather than a consolatory haven of inner mystical retreat. His characters often flee homogenous and complacent insularity—they question the classic kibbutz ideology that Zionism touted as one of its proudest achievements and hedonistically long for a distinct sense of independent selfhood. Thus Oz offers a highly complex response to Israel's existential difficulties. Consciously, he distances himself from an earlier generation's collectively sanctioned ideas.2 Nowhere is this more evident than in the novel A Perfect Peace,3 which bears witness to a significant cultural rupture. The solidarity with the collective that had characterized the Palmach generation of the late forties and early fifties is no longer a sacrosanct assumption of Israel's artists and intellectuals. In this novel, a young man, raised in the shadow of his father's deep faith in the socialist Zionist revolution, fully wakens to the reality that his comfort is centered on a community of dispossessed Arabs, and suffers a violent existential crisis. In Oz's apparent challenge to the colonialist dimension of the Zionist enterprise, he seems to anticipate boldly what has been identified as the post-Zionist spirit of Israel's youngest writers. Yet ultimately, the reader cannot be certain whether Oz is prepared to fully sanction the political implications of his character's angry questioning. [End Page 98] Perhaps the most widely read novelist among his generation, a formidable influence among the...

Romanticism and transcendence: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the religious imagination

Grounded in the thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, this text explores the religious dimensions of imagination in the Romantic tradition, both theoretically and in the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge. J. Barth suggests that we may look to Coleridge for the theoretical grounding of the view of religious imagination proposed in this book, but that it is in Wordsworth above all that we see this imagination at work. Barth first discusses the relationship between and religion, arguing that the Romantic imagination - with the symbolic import of its very nature - has religious implications. He studies the role of religious experience in Wordsworth, using Prelude as a privileged source. After comparing the conception of humanity and God in Wordsworth and Coleridge, Barth considers the role of religious experience and imagery in two of Coleridge's central poetic texts, Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. Barth examines the continuing role of the Romantic idea of the religious imagination today and concludes this book by linking it with the thought of theologian Karl Rahner and literary critic George Steiner. Romanticism and Transcendence brings together literary theory, poetry and religious experience, areas that are inter-related but are not often seen in relationship. By exploring levels of Wordsworth and Coleridge's poetry that are often ignored, Barth provides a poignant understanding of how and why the imagination was so important to their sense of poetry. He also demonstrates how rich with religious value and meaning poetry itself can be. The interdisciplinary nature of this study should make it useful not only to Wordsworth and Coleridge scholars and other romantic specialists, but also to anyone concerned with the intellectual history of the 19th century and to theologians in general.

Autonomy Re-Imagined

Iwould like to extend the concept of dignity, a term usually understood with regard to individuals, to family and kinship relationships. At stake in this extension is our freedom not to fall prey to drives that prevent us from being able to express our desire, pursue it, and rationally evaluate it. This understanding of dignity is a re-interpretation of its meaning that can only be made with the help of psychoanalytic theory, and more especially, the interventions that have been made in that body of theory by feminist analysts and theorists. Psychoanalysis defends dignity as the moral mandate in which all of us are viewed as subjects who, in principle, can articulate their desire as well as morally evaluate their ends. The articulation of desire has always been assumed as necessary for moral freedom and responsibility. Indeed, much political philosophy takes it for granted that we act as actively desiring subjects who simply shape our own lives.1 Of course, some of the earliest critiques of canonical political theory offered by feminists argued that it was easy to make this assumption because the subjects in the purview of the theory were not all human beings, but straight white men of a certain class background.2 As I have defined it within the legal sphere (Cornell, Imaginary), the imaginary domain is the moral and psychic right to represent and articulate the meaning of our desire and our sexuality within the ethical framework of respect for the dignity of all others. This domain is imaginary in the sense that it is irreducible to actual space. But it is also imaginary in a psychoanalytic sense: our assumed identities have an imaginary dimension since they are shaped through our identification with primordial others. Without these identities, we cannot envision who we are. Our identifications with others as they have imagined and continue to imagine us thus form our self-image. These identifications color the way in which we envision ourselves, but they do not determine the reach of our imagination in dreaming up who else we might be. We must thus distinguish the imaginary from the radical imagination in which we envision new worlds and configure what has otherwise remained invisible. The radical imagination demands some degree of psychic separation. Otherwise our dreams of who we might become, both individually and collectively, would be captured by unconscious claims on us. Another reason for my psychoanalytic conception of the imaginary is that I defend feminism as an ego ideal. We form ego ideals by envisioning ourselves either through real or imagined others. Since ego ideals are formed through our primordial, pre-oedipal identifications, they carry with them unconscious material that we cannot fully elucidate. Indeed, we can never exactly know how these ideals are formed out of our identifications. Because we are not conscious of how our identifications have shaped these ideals, it is thus futile to think there is an easily accessible genealogical path that, if followed, will return us to the psychic origins of our identifications. What this means, interestingly enough, is that we cannot simply debunk ego ideals without at the same time appealing to some other ideal, even if that ideal is that we should ideally be suspicious of all ego ideals. Such suspicion is undoubtedly an ego ideal of how we should be. We imagine either that we reach an ideal or that we can become what the ideal holds out for us as a possibility. Feminism envisions how we might be as free and equal persons in our day-to-day lives. As an ego ideal, it cannot be imposed. Nor can we say that one must act or be a certain way in order to be a feminist. To make such impositions undermines the power of feminism as an ego ideal. To understand feminism psychically is to defend its spirit of generosity because each woman or man will internalize it as an ideal in her or his own way. This

A noção lacaniana da subversão do sujeito

O presente trabalho visa elaborar a idéia de sujeito em Lacan. Inicialmente, determinado pelo "aspecto social", em seguida pela "dimensão imaginária", e por último, pela "dimensão da linguagem", subvertido assim ao significante. Após ter feito essa digressão, esclarece-se, a medida do possível, a idéia lacaniana do sujeito, através da análise da noção de subversão do sujeito. A análise dessa noção consiste, basicamente, em um comentário do texto "Subversão do Sujeito e Dialética do Desejo no Inconsciente Freudiano".

La cadena tecnológica operativa como una herramienta teórica y metodológica. Una perspectiva desde los planteamientos de la arqueología del paisaje

We will focus on two main topics: first, the special approach to the Technological Chain (TC) that we have used to study NW Iberian protohistoric and prehistoric pottery from a landscape archaeology viewpoint; and second, the specific problems that we found while trying to perform such work. Regarding the first point, we believe that the most innovative issue is that the TC is not only seen as a mere descriptive tool for technological facts, but we have tried to relate such facts with the social context in which they occur. As a result of it, we have divided the TC into three deeply intertwined aspects: the technical aspects or technological chain, the social aspects or conceptual chain, and the final result of those processes, uiQ final product, which comprises the last link in the chain. Concerning the second point, we have found important obstacles in trying to get to the technological aspects, because the necessary auxiliary techniques are not always readily available. Also, gaining knowledge of the imaginary dimension is even more difficult, as we approach it solely from its material demonstration.

The Significance of Exoteric and Esoteric Imagination in Psychological Development

The author proposes two forms of imagination inherent in the psychological development of the individual. These complementary aspects are an exoteric, secular dimension of imagination and an esoteric, transcendent dimension. Both are essential, but it is the latter spiritual imagination that is the catalyst in transcending the everyday as well as achieving ultimate goals. The author explores the relationship between transcendent imagination and its pervasive influence on the achievement of valued goals by evaluating educational attainment among Americans of Italian descent as a function of esoteric imagination. Although this group has achieved economic parity with other immigrant groups, it still lags behind in occupational and educational attainment. The conclusion drawn is that when an individual possesses a heightened sense of transcendent imagination, that person is able to break away from conventional roles by envisioning creative possibilities that come from within the psyche rather than the surrounding social milieu.

Play as a Mode of Empowerment for Women and as a Model for Poetics in the Early Poetry of Nicolas Guillen

FA1 * PART from Primeros poemas (1920-1930), * , t: Xt^ .* Nicolas Guillen's early poetry displays a distincAtJ: A| y tive and positive orientation that has not been *@' > | ^ * adequately characterized by critics. Invoking , A 4^ i % terminology of postmodernism, Antonio BenitezRojo describes it as the discourse of desire in its manifestations as sexual pleasure and as knowledge-power (121). In Marxist terms, Keith Ellis explains it as an uncontainable challenge to status quo because simple and just desire that underprivileged be noticed carried with it profoundly rebellious potential (71). The positive energy, acknowledged in above mentioned approaches, emanates from play which may, in fact, explain qualities that Benitez-Rojo and Ellis admire. For, imaginative dimension of play and its creation of a let's pretend world has power to transform world as it could be into historical reality. As Mikhail Bakhtin explains in Rabelais and His World, laughter and play are literally re-creative of general social order and destiny of individual people (11-12). If

Platono dialoginis kalbėjimas

Plato was a thinker who initiated a specific philosophical discourse in the classical period of Athenian culture. He may rightly be called the creator of the philosophical dialogue as a genuine trend in Greek thought. The present research discloses the specificity of Plato's philosophical discourse by asking these questions: What is the specificity of Plato's dialogical philosophizing? In what sense can we speak of his dialectical path as a fundamental form of philosophical existence and philo- sophical discourse? The specificity of Plato's dialogical speaking becomes clear when the actual use of the conceptual words dialėgesthai, dialektike and dialektikos is analysed. The study shows that the Greek word dialogos, by which Plato's works are usually named, is a derivative from the verb dialėgesthai. This Greek word denotes the primary situation of Plato's philo- sophical thinking. In Plato's texts three semantic components which actualize the meaning of dialėgesthai may be distinguished: 1) 'to speak with somebody', 2) 'to speak about something', and 3) 'to speak in some way'. Plato's dialogical philosophizing is articulated not with the help of formal rules and definite terms, but in keeping with everyday language, Hellenic religious and literary traditions. It is true that the criterion of Plato's philosophizing is a rational argument as well as the imaginative dimension of language. The latter explains the specific property of Plato's philosophy, i.e. the concreteness of his thought. Plato's philosophical text is treated not only as a source of knowledge, but also as a source of spiritual exercise. It is important to stress that Plato's philosophy is the turning point from the fact of saying to the content of saying. In Plato's philosophical language the Greek verb dialėgesthai implies reflection as a decisive step toward an objective thinking of being. Moving in this direction, Plato emphasizes the semantic ambivalence which is characteristic of the word in everyday language. Moreover, the Greek thinker makes a radical division between the true (alethes) and deceptive (pseudės) speech. On the one hand, he implicitly claims that discursive grounding of the word's content must become an indispensable condition for the specificity of philosophical language. On the other hand, Plato stresses the boundaries of philosophical language and claims that some fundamental things in philosophy could not be expressed by any propositional statement. Plato not only created a dramatic and dialogical form of philosophizing, but also opened a way to Aristotle's post-dialogic and non-dramatic form of philosophical discourse. Possibly Aristotle was a thinker who conceptualized Plato's word dialegesthai and related it with the paradigm of formal logic. Plato's dialectic, however, must not be confused with Aristotelian logical argumentation. Nevertheless, the concept of rational and objective truth is the concept that bounds philosophical meaning of Platonic and Aristotelian word „dialectic". This concept historically is rooted in Greek philosophical thinking and is characteristic of the intellectual life of Western world.

John Tyndall, the rhetorician of molecularity. Part one. Crossing the boundary towards the invisible

This paper highlights the way in which Tyndall achieved his broad understanding of the molecular character of physical nature through an examination of the various molecular explanations he put forward in his papers and lectures, and argues that, in Tyndall's writings, one can find a most articulate version of nineteenth-century British molecular discourse. The exploration of those molecular conditions which underlay physical phenomena was central to his research throughout the years, and for this exploration he utilized his imagination, which he believed to be an innate faculty of the human mind. According to Tyndall, the imaginative dimension of science consisted of the creation of mental images of the unseen which enabled scientists to cross the boundary that separated the realm of phenomena from those of causal mechanisms. In his writings he expressed these mental images of the unseen in the distinctive molecular language of his age.

Rhétorique télévisuelle et incarnation politique. Eléments de réflexion

Since television has become one of today's leading media, it gives the body politic — and literally the bodies of the politicians - a level of visibility hitherto unknown in our democracy. In this article we explore this aspect of contemporary political expression through the concept of incarnation and its filmic, physical, symbolic and imaginary dimensions.

On the Poverty of Scientism, or: The Ineluctable Roughness of Rationality

If there is one rationality there must be a plurality of them. This conclusion follows, I argue, partly from the extreme and ineradicable vagueness of the fundamental concepts that every would‐be rational explanation must presuppose. Logicistic/scientistic assaults on this vagueness are doomed to fail partly because they are unable to acknowledge the imaginative dimension of rational thought. Being limited to the play of “outward appearances,” scientific investigations are also dependent on “inward imaginings” on their speculative side. The upshot is that schools of philosophy should be characterized by the kind of imaginary they adopt rather than by their logics. In which case, every attempt to get and tell something right about the world is bound to incorporate mythopoeic elements in its explanations.

El mundo alucinante: History and Ideology

Reinaldo Arenas's novels have been considered primarily self-referential rather than correspond- ing to an external historical reality. Yet, even when they seem to be escaping from history, they are recap- tured by it, as the narrative structures that comprise these become meaningful within the context of history. In El mundo alucinante the relationship of Servando to what is represented as reality takes place within circumscribed ideological limits, undermining an interpretation of the text from the point of view of historical relativism. No matter how many times Servando escapes from prison, he continues to find his im- age in the mirror of a dominant ideology in the imaginary dimension of his being. El mundo alucinante thus can be read as a symbolic structure that refers to the interrelationship between ideology, society, and the bour- geois revolutionary subject in Castro's Cuba.

Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Haymarket bombing of 1886 and the making and unmaking of the model town of Pullman - these events in what many considered the quintessential American city forced people across the country to confront the disorder that seemed inevitably to accompany urban growth and social change. In this book, Carl Smith explores the imaginative dimensions of these events as he traces the evolution of beliefs that increasingly linked city, disorder and social reality in the minds of Americans.

Division and Rejection: From the Personification of the Gulf Conflict to the Demonization of Saddam Hussein

This paper analyses the process of exclusion of Saddam Hussein, in a Spanish newspaper, El País, in the period just before the Gulf War. This exclusion procedure is articulated on two axes: division and rejection (Foucault, 1964). `Division' means establishing an inclusive us and an exclusive them, in this case, him. This move therefore entails a personification of the conflict, which produces immediate feelings of identification or rejection, and simplifies how the war is understood. Both effects are reinforced by the second move of the exclusion procedure: `rejection'. Once the two camps are established an imaginary dimension, related to the ideology of consensus and ethnic prejudices, is evoked in order to create an image of Saddam Hussein in which he plays the stranger, the irrational being, the madman, the beast and, ultimately, the personification of evil. These are the villain's attributes in the fairy tale of the just war (Lakoff, 1992), which is the script of the event activated by the newspaper for the conceptualization of the conflict and its protagonists. On the other hand, a positive image is created for a unique and ideological us, in which, as readers, we are included and absorbed.

A Serpent's Guide to Children's `Theories of Mind'

This paper examines the grounding assumptions of the idea that young children have `theories of mind'. Focusing on Leslie's (1987) account, I point out that the `theory of mind' (TOM) approach to the child's mental life is empirically untestable because it must assume without evidence that children `tell the difference' between appearance and reality when dealing with others. This assumption is not only implausible on logical grounds. It also denies the prevalence of fantasy in mental life. From this critique I argue that TOM epitomizes the failure of the dominant form of writing on development in psychology-a Romantic form of writing, based on what I call the `psychological sublime' pioneered by Charles Darwin, which suppresses its own imaginative dimension in circumventing the difficulty of understanding others. I conclude that TOM's limitations are less logical than moral and aesthetic, defining the need for both a poetic and a practical transformation of developmental psychology.

The Romance of the '60s: Self, Community and the Ethical in <i>The Crying of Lot 49</i>

Thomas Pynchon's literary production resides almost entirely within the imaginative dimension of romance, where the everyday is brought into close contact with what is wholly other and ordinary characters become protagonists of the romantic quest, confronting mysterious powers which threaten to take control of their lives. Romance permeates the life of consumer capitalism. Pynchon envisions the true democratization of artistic modernism, in which ordinary citizens–the engineer, the investor, the disk jockey and the housewife–all trapped in suburban solipsism, are driven to develop individual and fantastically elaborate schemes of power and transcendence. Comic reconciliation, in which these many quests might fold into one, is unthinkable. The society which could confirm its identity by such means seems to have disappeared. What remains is a vast productive system integrating its members according to a logic of its own, a logic which from the point of view of the individual appears alien and manipulative. The Crying of Lot 49 is a late version of the quest-romance and an immanent critique of its form, measured against the historical situation of the mid-1960s with its special imaginative possibilities and limits.