Abstract
Since the days of the ancient Greeks or of the Chinese philosophers who flourished in the same period approximately 2500 years ago, it has been apparent that human beings have recognized the existence of a special experience which we label imagination. The ability to reproduce faces of persons, snatches of dialogue, or objects no longer immediately available to the primary senses and then to reshape further the memories of these experiences into new and complex forms has been described by a variety of writers in the past millennium. The attempt to formalize our understanding of the imagination and to attribute to it a major and critical role as a part of human functioning has emerged, however, more clearly in the period known as the Enlightenment as Engell (1981) has ably documented. While Shakespeare makes numerous references to “fancy,” “dreams,” and is full of insight about such processes, he presents imagination from the perspective of the story he is telling and the characterization therein.
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Singer, J.L. (1983). Towards the Scientific Study of Imagination. In: Shorr, J.E., Sobel-Whittington, G., Robin, P., Connella, J.A. (eds) Theoretical and Clinical Applications. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-1179-9_1
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