What imagination can teach us about higher mental functions
pp. 149-164
in: Jaan Valsiner, Giuseppina Marsico, Nandita Chaudhary, Virginia Dazzani (eds), Psychology as the science of human being, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
The chapter uses the history of the concept of imagination as example of how psychology creates a normative model of mental processes that affects our understanding of development. Following the traditional hierarchy of psychological functions, with abstract rationality on top, we fail to understand psychological life as it develops in its manifold manifestations. In such a way, we have neglected the role of imagination as higher mental function despite large evidence. In the second part, the chapter presents a new way of understanding imagination. Imagination is neither bringing us in fictional world where we can find relief to the disquieting spectacle of the world, nor a sandbox in which we can play with alternative futures. It is one of the higher mental functions that makes the world how we experience it and how we are striving to experience it. The imaginative process plays a self-regulative function toward the ambivalent nature of experience and uncertainty of change during development, through semiotic elaboration of meaning in both linguistic and iconic form.