Imagination,Cognition and Personality

This paper presents a theoretical and methodological approach to studying the ways in which psychotherapy patients create and interpret mental representations of their therapists and the psychotherapeutic process both during therapy and after termination. A network of measures, The Therapist Representation Inventory, was developed to specify the interrelationships between the stylistic, functional and formal properties of such symbolic evocations across different states of consciousness and in different situations. It includes a method of examining the ability to formulate a concept of the psychotherapist and guidelines for interpreting both the thematic content and conceptual level of that object representation. The second scale measures the ability to specify the formal properties of therapist representations, as distinct from their particular contents. The third instrument seeks to identify the functions which therapist “introjects” serve for a given individual. Normative data, based upon a sample of 206 psychotherapists who themselves have been patients in psychotherapy and/or psychoanalysis indicate that the vividness of the representation and the use of the representation for the purpose of continuing the therapeutic dialogue are significantly correlated with self-perceived improvement.

Research pertaining to the phenomenology of hypnotic (suggested) visual hallucinations is reviewed within a cognitive-social psychological framework. Suggested hallucinations are conceptualized as cognitive-social enactments; as imaginings generated by co-operative subjects to meet the social demands of the experimental test situation. These imaginings differ from corresponding perceptions even in highly responsive (i.e., susceptible) subjects, and when provided with the opportunity to do so, the majority of subjects describe such experiences as “imagined” rather than as “seen.” The few subjects who report that they “saw” the suggested object and believed that it was actually there appear to be highly absorbed in their imaginings. Consequently, they fail to attend to information that contradicts the status of their imaginings as external (i.e., “real”) happenings. Responsiveness to hallucination suggestions is no more strongly facilitated by hypnotic procedures than by short instructions aimed at ensuring subjects' cooperation and positive motivation. There is no support for the hypothesis that hallucinations in hypnotic subjects reflect the operation of a hypothetical hypnotic state.

Much experimentation in the twentieth-century novel has concentrated on diminishing the importance of narrative. In part this course of action reflects the artistic necessity to do things differently, but more significantly it represents artistic response to the intellectual currents of the time. Specifically, philosophical and scientific challenges to traditional concepts of chronology, of cause-and-effect, of the limits of powers of perception, of the relationship between conscious and unconscious states of knowing have made discernible impressions on the novelist's management of his materials. The total effect has been to enhance his sense of being master of the world he creates, a gamesman for whom not truth or even verisimilitude is of first importance but the delight of the game, the pleasure in virtuosity.

The feminist novel specifically celebrates the triumph of the individual consciousness in all of its sensory, emotional, cognitive, and imaginative activities-as an authentic source of reality and of wisdom. In the process of the feminist narrative, the protagonist typically emerges into consciousness, asserting the validity of her own sensory data and perceptions over the established social structures of thought. Her new awareness surfaces when its conventional antithesis becomes unbearably incongruous with her own experiential and perceptual data or when the social modes of thinking threaten to destroy her. In order to bring the unconscious contents into consciousness, to extricate herself psychologically from the socializing forces, which are judgmental, restrictive, and inauthentic in essence, the feminist protagonist employs her own experience, introspection, investigation, memory, and fantasy.