Invisible Guest – Mary Watkins

(William Hazlitt, quoted in Abrams, 1953, 245) The imagination, far from being a domain of self-centered wishes, was for Shelley and others the organ by which the individual could exercise sympathy, understanding, and moral goodness by identifying himself with others. The multiplicity of developmental courses suggested in the literature concerning imaginai dialogues results from theorists’ advo­ cating different teloi as primary: the development of abstract thought, of social discourse, or of adaptation to reality.

These different teloi, of course, would lead one to select different series of changes during childhood to focus on. For instance, the child first knows the imaginai other (the doll, the imaginary companion) through her own activities. The imaginai other is at first a passive recipient of the child’s attention and action. Only gradually does the doll become animated and act as an agent in its own right. Also at first, the doll is used to represent either the child herself or people the child knows intimately—brother, sister, mother, father.

Then there is a shift to people the child knows less well (mailman, teacher), then to people the child has heard of but never met, and finally to totally imaginary beings. Thus characters are gradually released from being props to the ego’s actions and pale reflections of the already known.

As characters become animated and autonomous it is possible to find out about the details of their relationships and their world, not just how they impinge on the self. If we follow these lines of development we find ourselves rehearsing not for Piaget’s scientific audience, not for actual social discourse, and not for action or a harsh reality, but rather, as Hillman has said, we find ourselves rehearsing for imaginai life itself—that other life where we are also housed, clothed, and cared for.

Analytic Press, Hillsdale, NJ, 1986, Sigo Press, Boston, 1990, and Spring Publications, Inc., 2000. This Human Development Books REPRINT EDITION is identical in all respects to the 2000 Third edition, except for this copyrights page and a new ISBN. Cover design by white.room productions, New York Cover image: Wooden god from the Austral Islands, representing A’a, the principal deity of Rurutu.

Inside the detachable back is a cavity where smaller images may be kept. Photograph by David Finn, from Henry Moore at the British Museum. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1982 (reproduced with permission of the photographer). To Bernard Kaplan mentor, friend CONTENTS Preface…………………………………………………………………..i Introduction……………………………………………………………1 PARTI Themes in Contemporary Psychological Approaches to the Functions and Development of Imaginai Dialogues 1 Imaginai Dialogues and Reason…………………………………11 2 Reality and the Imagination………………………………………..21 3 Seeing Imaginai Dialogues as Primitive……………………37 PART II A Critique of Contemporary Psychological Approaches to Imaginai Dialogues 4 Imaginai Dialogues and Reason…………………………………49 5 Imagination as Reality………………………………………………….59 6 The Impact of Conceptions of Development on Approaching Imaginai Dialogues………………………………81 PART III Re-Conceiving a Developmental Theory of Imaginai Dialogues “The Characters Speak Because They Want to Speak:” The Autonomy of the Imaginai Other…………………….93 8 The Dialogues Between Multiple Characters; The Monologues of Multiple Personality………………..

107 9 Character Development: The Articulation of the Imaginai Other………………………………………………….113 10 Relativizing the Ego and the Birth of Dialogue………121 PART IV Therapeutic Implications: Entertaining I Voices 11 The Voices of Hallucination………………………………………135 12 The Fish-Lady and the Little Girl: Case History Told From the Points of View of the Characters……155 Epilogue………………………………………………………………..177 Afterword………………………………………………………………179 References………………………………………………………………191 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My warmest thanks to friends and colleagues who took the time to read some or all of this text, to share with me their thoughts, criticisms, and encouragement: Bernard Kaplan, Leonard Cirillo, Seymour Wapner; Patricia Berry, Stuart Cane, Edward Casey, Joseph de Rivera, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mary Helen Sullivan, James Hillman, Gail Hornstein, Joan Klagsbrun, Eleanor Starke Kobrin, Lyndy Pye, Charles Scott, Randolph Severson, Angelyn Spignesi, Paul Stepansky, and Stanley Sultan.

I am grateful to Robert Romanyshyn for writing the preface to this new editon. My debts to fellow writers— so numerous— are noted in my text, though such references do not begin to display adequate gratitude for the companionship and conversation the reading of such works provide as one is trying to understand.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: a67d08cdc0801cc3
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 62,778,984 bytes (59.871 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 215
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 362.64 minutes
• Total Words: 72,529
• Total Characters: 451,533
• Average Words per Page: 337.34
• Average Characters per Page: 2100.15

Most Frequent Words

imaginai (534), one (344), dialogues (293), reality (281), thought (203), child (203), others (199), speech (187), self (178), development (168), new (156), between (154), play (151), characters (141), like (141), dialogue (140), world (137), real (130), view (117), voices (116), imagination (114), experience (113), developmental (107), character (107), see (105), little (99), york (96), often (96), seen (96), time (94), laura (94), ego (91), theory (87), point (87), external (83), figures (82), work (80), life (80), voice (79), rather (77), piaget (75), social (75), different (73), psychological (70), first (70), way (70), multiplicity (70), process (69), child’s (69), form (67), children (66), part (65), even (65), know (65), psychology (64), mind (63), also (62), people (61), thus (59), relation (57), nature (57), two (57), himself (57), feel (57), hallucinations (56), itself (55), one’s (55), things (55), given (54), function (54), always (53), words (53), well (53), don’t (53), actual (52), autonomy (51), language (51), now (50), reason (50), another (49), sense (49), speak (48), become (48), contemporary (47), imaginary (47), present (47), internal (47), mead (47), object (47), becomes (47), many (46), thoughts (46), without (46), role (46), make (46), want (45), person (45), say (45), approaches (44), hallucination (44).

PDF Download