Perhaps many readers have had the experience of not just thinking about a dead friend or family member, but holding an inner dialogue or argument with the departed individual, or imagining their responses to one’s actions or beliefs, or maintaining a practice previously shared with the deceased because it was shared with the deceased. In doing so, a living person may be said to maintain a relationship with a deceased person. Some philosophers might resist this, on the grounds that, even if the dead were relata when living, the meaningful, actual relationship one had to an individual who lived ended when the individual died, and therefore a deceased person cannot be a relata in a particular, personal relationship. On that view, dead people are not relata, and relationships with them are not “real” relationships.Footnote 12 They are merely memories, and one’s inner dialogues mere fancies.
Although they rarely cite each other, both psychologists and philosophers have advanced reasons to reject the view of relationships with dead individuals as merely metaphorical, or dispositions toward dead relata as merely fanciful. To provide a sketch of arguments in both traditions and demonstrate their relevance to each other, I turn first to the scholarship of psychologists and bereavement scholars regarding imaginal relationships, defined below. I relate their account of imaginal relationships with the dead to the work of philosopher Sue Campbell on the ongoing processes involved in remembering one’s dead, and Niall Connolly and Palle Yourgrau on the metaphysics of dead non-/entities. I argue that ongoing activities of remembering and imagination inform the real relationship; in short, just because a relationship with the dead is imaginal, doesn’t mean it isn’t very real.
Psychologists demonstrate an interest in the therapeutic benefits to bereaved individuals of imaginal relationships with the deadFootnote 13; the very presence of arguments for therapeutic benefits may be a reason for some skeptical philosophers to discount the possibility that the relationship has any metaphysical reality. Although philosophers have good reasons to be suspicious of inferring a thing’s existence from the good feelings that result from thinking it exists, I plea the reader’s patience and ask only that skeptics of good feeling suspend their usual suspicions. Psychologists may be motivated by their duty to attend to therapeutically beneficial practices, but the reverse argument also holds that from a practice’s good consequences, one is not yet justified in inferring that the results are the product of delusion.
Psychological work on imaginal relationships has been most concertedly developed in the past twenty years; the consensus appears to be that imaginal relationships are both therapeutically beneficial and the product of actual experiences, although some authors suggest that controversy remains as to whether all imaginal relationships are imaginary, even pathological.Footnote 14 Mary Watkins is credited with early “use of the word imaginal in preference to imagined or imaginary.”Footnote 15 As Mary Gergen states, in her endorsement of Watkins’ account, “Whereas the latter two words suggest something fictional or frivolous, imaginal suggests other, more consequential possibilities.”Footnote 16 Watkins develops a detailed account of imaginal dialogues as entailing imaginative development; arguing that the imagination is derivative of and helpful to the real, she appeals to George Herbert Mead’s view that imaginal dialogues are constitutive of reason.Footnote 17 Watkins advocates a Meadian view that self-awareness includes robust appreciation of how others see us, and Watkins persuasively establishes that the imaginal work of adding interpretive content to what one perceives or knows about others’ perceptions is not contrary to rational thought, but actually in service of rationality, and not imaginary, but developed imaginally on the basis of known actualities.
If anything, it is more rational to imaginatively interpret the indicators of others as to what they think of oneself than it is to proceed as though one cannot imagine what anyone thinks. Just in the course of writing this paper, I have considered the questions of recent interlocutors, and done the imaginal work of considering why their questions took the form they did, and how they might respond to my responses. I carry on an internal dialogue in the course of reasoning my way to a more accurate essay. To refer to our internal dialogues when writing philosophy as ‘imaginary’ dialogues would connote something more unhooked from material realities than our writing processes actually are. Watkins’ offer of the term ‘imaginal dialogue’ captures better the sense that our dialogical thinking processes are not fictional creations so much as interpretive narratives based on experiences with real persons. The internal dialogues of philosophical writers may involve creative thinking, but we wouldn’t describe the results as fictions. After all, we’re trying to get something right. It is more appropriate to describe our internal dialogues as involving imaginal content.
Drawing on Watkins’ conception of the imaginal dialogue, psychologists including Gergen have developed arguments for imaginal relationships with deceased loved ones as continued bonds maintained by the living, especially through imaginal content. Maintaining relationships with deceased others, on Gergen’s view, can include imaginal dialogues with the dead, considering what they would think of one’s behavior, identifying with the deceased, and carrying out the wishes that they may have expressed or that one comes to think they would have had. “To talk, laugh, and wonder, to be surprised, upset, hurt, angry, and amused, and to engage in other physical acts could all be a part of imaginal interactions,” Gergen adds.Footnote 18 Sandra Dannenbaum and Richard Kinnier include forms of maintenance such as addressing the deceased as comforting confidants, taking them as role models, using their tools in one’s own work, and even acting in one’s own job as a deceased parent acted in a similar job. They add, “The experience [of cultivation of relationships with the dead] also provided some with a fuller sense of familial connection between generations.”Footnote 19 They cite the example of a respondent who emphasized the personal importance of “the legacy of these deceased persons (whether it be family recipes, moral codes, behavioral expectations, etc.),” suggesting that one’s imaginal relationships both inform and are informed by one’s behaviors in the external world.Footnote 20
Imaginal conversations are a major method of maintaining imaginal relationships in most accounts, but not the sole means. Bereaved individuals report ongoing feelings of closeness with the dead, either cultivated or involuntary senses of a deceased individual’s presence, and activities including (either deliberate or involuntary) verbal address to the dead, visiting gravesites and previously frequented places, intentionally using possessions that belonged to deceased loved ones, and other means and sources of connection. As I address below, it is still the case that not all psychologists agree as to which perceptions of closeness following bereavement are therapeutic, helpful, hallucinatory, even harmful. It is less debatable in the literature that, when done well and with the help of supportive others, imaginal relationships are promoting of mental health and well-being.
I should add that psychologists have not always been so splendid about acknowledging the real and/or ongoing relationships some bereaved persons maintain with dead loved ones. Although the past twenty years seems to have brought about a consensus among psychologists that some bereaved persons’ perceptions of closeness are healthy, normal, to be cultivated at least temporarily, and not necessarily to be let go, much of 20th-century bereavement counseling was dedicated to ending or eradicating these sorts of imaginal relationships the living can have with the dead. As Stroebe et al. explain, “The belief in the importance of severing ties from a deceased loved one found early and important expression in Freud’s work.”Footnote 21 Scott Becker and Roger Knudson identify “the traditional psychoanalytic presupposition that successful mourning requires an emotional detachment (decathexis) from the deceased.”Footnote 22 The view that bonds must be broken and death must be gotten over, they add, “has largely been replaced in contemporary grief research by the recognition that mourners often remain connected to the deceased, and that this attachment is not inherently pathological or maladaptive.”Footnote 23 They identify a consensus among counselors “that the mourner often finds a constructive way of maintaining a meaningful relationship to the deceased through private memories, public memorials, secular and religious rituals, and spiritual beliefs.”Footnote 24 Similarly, Marilyn McCabe points out that until recently, theorists approached grief as a phase or stage of internal and isolatable feeling that can and should be got over. She notes the past predominance of focus on “a definitive ending and a definitive place the deceased can be for the bereaved,” that is, firmly fixed in the past.Footnote 25 She adds, “This emphasis ignores any kind of dynamic, ongoing, imaginative, and emotional process, except to label it as pathological.”Footnote 26
McCabe’s criticism of much phase theory is reminiscent of philosopher Sue Campbell’s account of the “older storehouse model of memory” as archived in a particular location in the brain in response to events.Footnote 27 Campbell says, “The storehouse model represents memories as not only caused by the past, but as singular and stable in meaning… Historically, unstable, shifting, gappy, or contradictory memories have been taken to indicate the presence of a disturbed self, of fragmentation, dissociation, or other psychopathology.”Footnote 28 The reflection or rumination of a survivor on the memories of their dead can be especially opposed by storehouse-adherents as upsetting, when one should be burying the dead literally and mentally in the past. Campbell endorses, in contrast to the storehouse model, a reconstructive account of memory, holding among other things that we “remember from the context of our present needs and interests.”Footnote 29 In both psychological accounts of imaginal relationships, and Campbell’s philosophical account of reconstructive memory, one finds the authors assuming the burden of proof against traditional assumptions that it is pathological to reconstitute memory in order to serve our present needs and interests. Campbell urges philosophers’ sensitivity to those who have suffered harms and losses including bereavement, arguing for trust in victims’ perceptions and moral deference on the part of witnesses.Footnote 30
The language of reconstructive memory is present in McCabe’s description of her own experience of grieving her mother, one involving “self-nurturing” activities that included “reminiscing and re-evoking Ruthy’s words and shoring up the relationship… It is an imaginal co-construction in that I actively call upon my memories of Ruthy…created in the form of a self-dialogue.”Footnote 31 She concludes, “The relationship with the lost one, which is not relinquished but instead, continues to be reconstituted,… [is] based both on fact” – this person existed, they said such things – “and fantasy” – insofar as some imaginative work is done in one’s internal dialogues and association of activities with the lost one – “but it is the fact that the other was real and lives no more” that makes bereaved persons’ imaginal relationship non-fantasy.Footnote 32 “The very real absence,” McCabe says, “contributes to the internalized presence.”Footnote 33
Of course, the skeptical philosopher may be very sympathetic to McCabe’s account of grief and happily grant that dialogical-selves engage in healthy self-nurturing through imaginal activities, while still maintaining that real relationships are only those relationships between at least two living individuals which are acknowledged and in some way consciously maintained by each relata. On this view, it’s not that there’s no important imaginal activity going on, it’s just that relationship with the dead is imaginal and not real. One might object that only living entities are relata, because only the living can be entities. This has been disputed by philosophers including Niall Connolly and Palle Yourgrau; as Connolly argues in “How the Dead Live,” the dead are sensible objects of statements of relationship; he argues for seeing dead persons as “non-existent objects.”Footnote 34
The living stand in relations to the dead. This is part of the case I want to make for the thesis that the dead are examples of non-existent objects. Some of the facts involving the dead are facts about the relations they stand in to the living.Footnote 35
To say today, for example, that Claudia Card was a philosopher, is to say something about the present in relation to a person who actually lived and died. The arguments on the part of Connelly and Yourgrau, that one can sensibly say “I remember Claudia fondly” because Claudia was a person who lived, are remarkably consonant with McCabe’s emphasis on “the fact that the other was real and lives no more.” As Connolly says, citing Quine, a statement like this is importantly different from the statement, “Pegasus is a winged horse.” Connolly adds, “A pedant, or someone taken to task for suggesting that there are winged horses, will resort to the paraphrase ‘according to the myth, Pegasus is a winged horse.’ Nobody would feel a similar need to paraphrase” the statement that a philosopher lived and died.Footnote 36 Connolly argues that if the dead are nonexistent objects, then we can offer claims about relationships with them: “Yourgrau’s defense of the dead as examples of non-existent objects invokes the relations the living stand in to the dead. John loves Socrates. John’s love is a relation between him and Socrates. A relation is instantiated only if its relata count among the things there are. So there is such a thing as Socrates.”Footnote 37
As Yourgrau says, “There is, [in] Quine’s sense, a ‘notional’ kind of love, which we can feel even for Pegasus. But there is also, clearly, a ‘relational sense’ of ‘love’ according to which it is the object itself that we love; and how could one be expected to maintain this relationship when one of the terms is missing?”Footnote 38 One might object that Yourgrau and Connolly arguably rely on common-language statements of relationship to justify the metaphysics of the dead as relata, a potentially circular argument. Yourgrau admittedly does state the motivation of preserving our intuitions, but defends the notion of dead relata as nonexistent objects using language remarkably similar to McCabe’s in accounting for the non-fantastical relationship she maintains with her mother; he points to the material fact that dead persons were specific and actual, unlike fictional creations. “Just as we are intimate with various existent objects, we, most of us, are familiar with specific past objects (those we know who have died), and we are all used to dealing with the future. If we but let our eyes be opened, we will see that we have all along been trafficking with the nonexistent, as with the existent.”Footnote 39 For McCabe and Yourgrau, as with the theorists above, epistemological stakes hold in place the metaphysics of nonexistent objects and imaginal relationships. “The dead, for example, are a set of nonexistents easier to grasp than the unborn. We can name specific dead people and we know many detailed facts about them,” Yourgrau points out.Footnote 40 (I turn my attention to an example involving the unborn in Part Two.)
Connolly and Yourgrau are largely occupied with establishing a bare metaphysical claim, that statements about one’s disposition toward the dead are relational with respect to objects and their qualities, and not merely statements about internal qualities of one’s own thoughts. I rely on their efforts here because I believe that normative arguments on the part of psychologists, that the bereaved should be affirmed and not pathologized in their imaginal relationships, are provided with metaphysical bases when connected to the work of philosophers who point out that the dead are proper objects after they cease to exist. I maintain that bereaved persons have not just feelings and beliefs about the dead, but continue to uphold relationships of a sort with the dead, and in light of the explorations in Part Two below, I offer reasons in my conclusion for seeing these as real, meaningful, imaginal relationships. I can still imagine skeptical philosophers holding out. Perhaps the relata are (not just ‘were’) real, and perhaps one is engaged in object-targeted imaginal activity, but relata plus imaginal content can result in a real relationship between a castaway and a volleyball, or a real relationship between a celebrity and a stalker. Are these real, meaningful, even loving relationships? The implications of taking imaginal relationships as informative of real relationships with the living or the dead are the subject of the second half of this essay.