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Imagination as Expansion of Experience

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Abstract

This paper proposes a developmental view on imagination: from this perspective, imagination can be seen as triggered by some disrupting event, which generates a disjunction from the person’s unfolding experience of the “real” world, and as unfolding as a loop, which eventually comes back to the actual experience. Examining recent and classical theorization of imagination in psychology, the paper opposes a deficitary view of imagination to an expansive notion of imagination. The paper explores Piaget, Vygotsky, Harris and Pelaprat & Cole consider: 1) What does provoke a “rupture” or disjunction? 2) What are the psychological processes involved in the imaginary loop? 3) What nourishes such processes? 4) What are the consequences of such imaginary loop, or what does it enable doing? The paper proposes to adopt an expansive view of imagination, as Vygotsky proposed—a perspective that has been under-explored empirically since his seminal work. To stimulate such sociocultural psychology of imagination, two empirical examples are provided, one showing how children make sense of metaphor in an experimental setting, the other showing a young person using a novel met at school as symbolic resource.

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Notes

  1. Plato (427–346 bc) considered imagination as the lowest degree of knowledge. In the 16 and 16th centuries, authors mostly mistrust its dangers: imagination is seen as “the mad in the house [la folle du logis] (…) fertile source of aberration and illusion” (Malebranche 1990).

  2. Kant saw imagination as one middle term between perception and concept, as bridging term between actions and thinking. He proposed to distinguish on the one side “reproductive imagination”, the capacity to represent objects in their absence, thus linking perception and memory, and on the other, “productive or creative imagination”, freely operating on the basis of reality and combining images in a new way. This distinction was then taken on later by many thinkers, in particular by Ribot (1900/2007) in the field of psychology.

  3. « (…) l’évolution ultérieure de l’imagination symbolique consistera précisément en son amoindrissement au profit de moyens de représentation plus adaptés au réel (…) Au fond, l’enfant n’a pas d’imagination, et celle que le sens commun lui attribue se réduit à l’incohérence et surtout à l’assimilation subjective dont témoignent ses transpositions. (p.138) (…) Mais pourquoi existe-t-il une assimilation du réel au moi, au lieu que l’univers soit d’emblée assimilé à la pensée logique et expérimentale ? Tout simplement parce que cette pensée n’est pas encore construite durant la petite enfance. (p. 175) » (Piaget 1994a, b).

  4. « Le syncrétisme est la tendance spontanée des enfants à percevoir par visions globales au lieu de discerner les détails, à trouver des analogies immédiatement, sans analyse, entre des objets et des mots étrangers les uns aux autres, à lier entre eux des phénomènes naturels hétérogènes, à trouver une raison à tout événement même fortuit, bref c’est la tendance à tout lier à tout (…). » (Piaget 1978, p. 9)

  5. « On peut distinguer parmi [les fonctions cognitives] deux grandes catégories (…) de la connaissance : l’aspect figuratif et l’aspect opératif. Le premier tend à atteindre les aspects figuraux de la réalité. L’aspect opératif caractérise au contraire les formes d’expérience cognitive ou de déduction consistant à modifier l’objet de manière à atteindre les transformations comme telles. » (Piaget 1999, p. 22–23)

  6. « Pour une pensée égocentrique, le jeu tient en somme lieu de loi suprême. C’est l’un des mérites de la psychanalyse d’avoir montré que l’autisme ne connaît pas l’adaptation au réel, parce que, pour le moi, le plaisir est le seul ressort. La pensée autistique a ainsi pour unique fonction de donner aux besoins et aux intérêts une satisfaction immédiate et sans contrôle, en déformant le réel pour l’adapter au moi » (Piaget 1978, p.193).

  7. SYRES project (Symbolic resources in secondary school), by T. Zittoun and M. Grossen, and the collaboration of O. Lempen, C. Matthey, S. Padiglia and J. Ros, supported by the Swiss National Fund.

  8. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic analysis goes in the same direction; for him, creativity in the discourse can occur through metaphors which are themselves embedded in language which has the capacity to trigger specific meanings—therefore his notion of “canonicity of sense”; however, his analysis is not sociocultural.

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Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their careful and useful work, as well as their students’ questions, which allowed improving a first version of this text.

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  1. Institut de psychologie et éducation, FLSH, Université de Neuchâtel, Louis Agassiz 1, CH - 2000, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

    Tania Zittoun

  2. University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Frédéric Cerchia

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  1. Tania Zittoun
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Correspondence to Tania Zittoun.

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Zittoun, T., Cerchia, F. Imagination as Expansion of Experience. Integr. psych. behav. 47, 305–324 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-013-9234-2

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