From Fantasy to Imagination: A Cultural History and a Moral for Cultural Psychology

By doing history of psychology, we occasionally find areas of inquiry that have been forgotten in contemporary psychological language. One of these themes is fantasy. In this lecture I present some major contributions to fantasy before the establishment of scientific psychology. The exploration will begin with J.W. Goethe’s (1810) fourfold conception of the human soul: fantasy [Einbildungskraft], sensuality [Sinnlichkeit], rationality [Vernunft] and intellect [Verstand], whose roots can be traced back to Nicholas of Cusa’s De Docta Ignorantia (1440). Nicholas of Cusa introduces through the term intuitio [Anschauung] a sort of “wise ignorance”, i.e. a special kind of knowledge without grounding [visio sine comprehensione]. The mystic-theological tradition of the intuitio is extended toward a modern framework through Giambattista Vico’s fantasia (1725), understood as the main key to enter into the singularity of any human creation. In the context of the Romantic revolt against modern science and the hegemony of rationality, Goethe’s (1810) model of soul attempts to integrate the knowledge of intuition, via fantasia, while maintaining the rational capacities of human beings. Goethe criticizes the lack of fantasy and sensuality of his fellow scientists. Goethe’s plea for a holistic thinking in modern science implies the formation of the less developed fantasy and sensuality. Schiller’s Letters on Aesthetic Education should be framed in this spirit. Thus, during the first part of 19th century the human sciences (anthropology and psychology were indistinguishable at that time) embraced the non-intellectual faculties, primordially fantasy. As a consequence, the history of psychology (before its scientification) is indissolubly intertwined with the history of aesthetics. By middle of 19th century, the introduction of quantification implied the massive abandonment of nonrational human dimensions: vital forces, empathy, tendencies, physiognomic sensibilities, intuition and fantasy, among others. While some of these were still developed in other disciplines —such as the emerging phenomenology and psychoanalysis— some others were radically abandoned. Such was the case of fantasy: It was transmuted into an intellectual process of representing and operating on unreal objects in front of the mind’s eye —the imagination. The connection with vital feelings and aesthetics was lost. Not surprisingly, the original fantasy survives in literary theory and aesthetics rather than in psychology. Thus, the fate of fantasy in psychology is a fractal reflection of the fate of the whole dimension of internal experience: abandonment or transmutation. The challenge for cultural psychology is to recover the forgotten dimensions of the human being, whose roots connect psychology to anthropology rather than to epistemology.