Imagination Gets Its Due. My family and I have been quite taken by Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, an animated series about — what else? — a home full of people’s unwanted imaginary friends, as well as a few sympatico humans. Here is an essay about research establishing the perhaps-surprising prevalence of imaginary friends among a group of 100 7-year olds. The reearchers are among a contingent of psychologists who feel the role of imagination and fantasy in child development has been underestimated, and that it is fundamental. his counters a recent trend suggesting that children’s underestimated ability to build reality-based theories and models of the world around them is their essential cognitive tool; that they are more like little scientists than little dreamers. I think a false dichotomy is being posited. The genius of the French developmental psychologist Jean Piaget was to understand that children’s cognitive development can be understood in terms of alternating stages of extension and consolidation. A reality-based grasp of the world is the platform upon which imaginative and fantastical elaboration is built, and the fantasies in turn extend the child’s viridical understanding and modelling. It sounds abit like what the artists among us do in adult culture, and it is not surprising that at least one of the ‘imagination psychologists’ has been interested in studying this more directly:
Taylor suspects that similar hauntings occur in other jobs in which people predict others’ opinions and behaviors.”
One way to think about what happens in my own sort of work is that the therapist becomes similarly engaged in creating an imaginary version of the client. Many of these have a haunting presence beyond the therapy hour or even the termination of the therapy. And, likewise, the client’s imaginative creation of an idealized version of the therapist as an imaginary companion (I hesitate to say ‘playmate’) is instrumental to the changes brought about by the psychotherapy. The therapist wants to yield the power to control the narrative emerging in the therapy to the therapy patient, and it is often the made-up version the therapist imaginatively creates who takes over the job of composing the patient’s life story.
