Riding the Wild Waves of Imagination
An Exploration of the Extremes of the Imaginary Realm (Vol. 4; Issue 2)
Remember those times you feared something horrible happening to you? Or, better, times when your planned adventure exceeded your expectations? These far ends of human experiences share a common theme. They involve the realm of the imaginary. Philosophers, theologians, and anyone with a whit of human experience know this basic truth:
The vast majority of emotional pain is traceable to the abusing imagination.
Jacques Lacan (1978), the obscure, writing-impaired* philosopher and psychoanalyst, splits our perceptions up into three registers. The Symbolic, concerned with anything translatable into words or symbols, is one. The Imaginary, which I explore in today’s newsletter, is another. It is the area of fantasy. Daydreams, nightmares, fantasy literature, or Disney-like cinema—these are the realms of the imaginary. Endlessly fascinating but risking a journey too far afield, the final register, that of the Real, covers experiences neither describable by language nor imaginable. Therein lies the dimension of trauma, terror, trepidation.
But one of the many limits of Lacan, he writes little of human emotions. Therefore, when expanding upon the theme of imaginary outliers, I include feeling states. A few decades ago, psychologists vehemently, if foolishly, argued over the primacy of cognition over emotion, and vice versa. Most consider these distinctions ridiculous, particularly since the new millennium burst upon us.
If you reflect on your experience reading this sentence right now—please close your eyes and reflect—you’ll see yourself immersed in a mixture of these subjective states. Thoughts, feelings, attitudes, values, memories, blood-sugar levels, and other unfolding and dynamically interrelated variables impact you, second-by-second, minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour. That’s why creating a unified psychoanalytic model of mind and method will prove impossible (Karbelnig, 2018, 2022, 2024).
Here’s the deal with venturing into the uttermost limits of our imaginations:
It always increases despair.
I begin with darkness because, as Andrea repeatedly implores, I need to be “less negative” in these missives. Your physician advises you, upon removing a mole from your forehead, it “looks suspicious.” Per usual, you must wait 10 days for the pathology report. You might conclude it will be a melanoma, and that your headache (even though directly related to the biopsy itself) represents a metastasis to the brain. Once you become engrossed in that image, you notice dizziness—yet another symptom of brain cancer. You next think, “Is my will and trust updated?” or “what might I want to do with my last year of life?” Strings of thought associations ensue: the rounds of chemotherapy, the sickness resulting from treatments, the loss of your hair, and the pain your illness will cause in those you love.
Your feelings will range from worry to terror. Your sympathetic nervous system will engage, eliciting cold sweats, racing heartbeat, and elevated blood pressure. You will feel, in a word, AWFUL. Hopefully the pathology report is negative, and you’ll react with immense relief. Interestingly, even if it is melanoma, the actual fact of the matter is that it may never kill you. Or, if it does, it might be 35 years later.
Now, consider the opposite end of the continuum.
You begin planning a trip to Spain, and perhaps you think of Daniel in those lyrics of Elton John’s. They run through your mind so quickly that you forget that Bernie Taupin actually wrote them. He writes,
Daniel is traveling tonight on a plane
I can see the red tail lights heading for Spain…
They say Spain is pretty though I've never been
And Daniel says it's the best place that he's ever seen
Notice how that last phrase, “Daniel says it’s the best place he’s ever seen,” invites in the imaginary. The author misses him, but Daniel is off to a presumably spectacular adventure. Who knows what images you might create: awe-inspiring sunsets, beautiful men and women, romantic dinners with your beloved, walking down Las Ramblas, enjoying Tapas restaurants at 10pm (when Spaniards typically start eating), dancing in Barcelona until 3am, or taking in a bullfight.**
What you never know, of course, if that you might catch pneumonia on the flight on the way there, spend the entire time in a Madrid hospital, and then react with disbelief when you learn the medical care is free (!).
Notice the commonality between the fearful and the fantastic:
They both involve abuses of imagination.
However, and before having fantasies of murdering me, please note these extremes are, for the most part, normal. Life without fantasy would hardly be worth living. We need it, particularly when it comes to thoughts of future pleasures.
Alas, one sign of psychopathology—if that’s even a legitimate word (see Szasz, [1988])—is the extremity of the imaginary. Childhood trauma, encapsulated in affective memory, drives persons into the far frontiers of the imaginary. Either thoughts or feelings can take them back in time, and they find themselves immersed in an almost unbearable memory. Whether desolate or desirable, imagined futures rarely, if ever, end up actually occurring.
The solution, per usual, and oh-so-easy to describe but oh-so-difficult to achieve, lies in mindfulness. If you live in the moment, ingesting the NOW to the maximum extent possible, your proneness to imaginary zeniths lessens. Lao Tzu*** (400 BCE/2006) writes:
If you are depressed, you are living in the past. If you are anxious, you are living in the future. If you are at peace, you are living in the moment.
Alternatively, the billionaire Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffett said:
Past is waste paper, present is newspaper, and future is a question paper!
It is almost unimaginable to live without mental models, but that’s what living in the moment means. I watched myself avoiding the “now” this morning, while taking a brief hike and planting a few plants. I kept thinking about THIS newsletter, about a few additions I wanted to make (and am now making). I caught myself, kinda. You get it. Way too often, we’re imagining the future, or reviewing something about our past. Both mental trips require leaving the instantaneous.
In final conclusion, keep an eye out for imagination-run-wild. Those living in regret imagine exaggerated deficits; those living in fear imagine fearfully exaggerated futures. Like any human propensity, our imaginations are wonderful but subject to misuse. Better to drink in the present moment. The Buddhists say it brings emptiness; the Hindus say it brings oneness; I say it represents an aspirational goal for seekers like me.
*Writing-impaired is my own terribly judgmental view of Lacan; he offers some wonderful ideas but his capacity to communicate them lies beyond the awful.
**On the trip to Spain, motivated in part by the Elton John song combined with my planned set of lectures on “Picasso and Malignant Narcissism,” I took my family of four there years ago. My eldest daughter, a vegan at the time, wanted to see a bullfight. As soon as the first bull was skewered by the Matador, she covered her eyes. Suffice to say we left before the first bullfight ended; it was even more gory than Hemingway (1932) described!
***For the record, this oft-cited quote is actually falsely attributed to Lao Tzu.
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References
Hemingway, E. (1932). Death in the Afternoon. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons.
Karbelnig, A. M. (2018) Addressing psychoanalysis’s post-tower of babel linguistic challenge: a proposal for a cross-theoretical, clinical nomenclature. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 103(1):69-109.
Karbelnig, A. M. (2022). Chasing infinity: Why clinical psychoanalysis’ future lies in pluralism. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 103(1):5-25.
Karbelnig, A. M. (2023). Lover, Exorcist, Critic: Understanding Depth Psychotherapy. London: Phoenix Books.
Lacan, J. (1978). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. J. Miller (Ed.). Trans. A. Sheriden. New York: Norton.
Lao Tzu. (2006). Tao De Ching. Trans. S. Mitchell. New York: Harper. (Original work created in 400 BCE).
Szasz, T. (1988). The Myth of Mental Illness. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.