Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1979"

Imaginary companions in childhood and adult creativity.

Abstract: Case material is presented to illustrate the thesis that the ability to create an imaginary companion during childhood is an early expression of the special ego aptitudes found in creative individuals in adult life. Such "companions" allow these children to attempt to master creatively a variety of narcissistic mortifications suffered in reality and to displace unacceptable affects. In creative adults who had imaginary companions in childhood, the early fantasies serve as an organizing schema in memory for the childhood traumata. Stimuli in adult life which evoke the earlier traumata may revive the original imaginary companion fantasies. These then serve as nodal bases for the creation of specific adult works of art.

Ideology, Fiction, Narrative

Abstract: In ideology men do indeed express, not the relation between them and their conditions of existence, but the way they live the relation between them and their conditions of existence: this presupposes both a real relation and an "imaginary," "lived" relation. Ideology, then, is the expression of the relation between men and their "world." that is, the (overdetermined) unity of the real relation and the imaginary relation between them and their real conditions of existence. In ideology the real relation is inevitably invested in the imaginary relation, a relation that expresses a will (conservative, conformist, reformist or revolutionary), a hope or a nostalgia, rather than describing a reality. Louis Althusser, For Marx

The imaginary universality of particular interests’: The ‘tradition’ of the civil service in German history

Abstract: This essay started life as part of a joint discussion of the status of the army and the bureaucracy in imperial Germany.' The choice of this partnership was not, of course, arbitrary. Both institutions have enjoyed an equivalent historical visibility: they shared the centre of the Prussian stage for a century or so before I848; they presided over and eventually symbolized the achievement of German unification; and ultimately they suffered a common eclipse of their inherited character in the course of the slow disintegration of that unity after I9I8. The aim of this original discussion was twofold. On the one hand, we wanted to explore the relationship between the two institutions and the conceptual contents with which they have frequently been filled in association with the Prusso-German state, namely army/militarism, and bureaucracy/authoritarianism. The second purpose was to venture some comments on the debate on continuity in post-Bismarckian German history a debate itself now so long-running that it might almost stand as a candidate for the same treatment.2 Clearly, these two issues are closely related, for they raise from different angles similar questions about the chronicity of institutions and ideologies. As I shall argue in this essay, the concept of 'the civil service' in German historiography seems to have achieved an extraordinary degree of autonomy from its historical actuality far more so than in the case of the army. Among its other effects, this emancipation from the concrete has contributed to the consolidation of an exposition of the Nazi state in terms of rather static institutional relations, which I have

Problems and Advances in the Theory of Ideology

Abstract: This chapter began as a talk given at the first Communist University of Cambridge (1976). It was transcribed and produced in pamphlet form by Cambridge University Communist Party. The reason for reprinting it here is that although it is almost exclusively expositional it does emphasise and clarify a number of points in Althusser’s work which are frequently overlooked or which are found difficult to follow, especially the concept of the ‘imaginary relation’. The pamphlet enjoyed considerable success as an introduction and several readers suggested to me that it should be more readily available.

Characterising Self-deception

Abstract: In the introduction to the second volume of his collected papers Ryle tells us that though he himself was 'not qualified to be a real logician' he had realised that 'advances in Logic would and should result in the re-shaping of the questions, answers and especially the arguments of philosophers'. His view was that 'brokers were needed . . . to facilitate transactions between Logic and the philosophy of mind, between Logic and the theory of Sense/Nonsense and even between Logic and the should-be theory of pedagogy' (pp. vii-viii). Two obvious places in which we can see his brokership in action are his celebrated articles 'Systematically Misleading Expressions' (I932) and 'Categories' (I938). The first is largely an exploration of Russell's idea of an incomplete symbol and the second an application of his notion of a propositional function. It is no less clear that Russell's inventions are operating in the article 'Imaginary Objects' (I933). They generate there a view about characters in literature which, despite the fact that Russell's theory of descriptions is not now much in favour, seems still to be widely held. In Ryle's view, when a novelist creates one of his characters what in effect he does is to compose a complex description and then maintain that someone of whom it is a description did, or had done to him, whatever in the novel he is supposed to have done, or had done to him.

Updike's A Month of Sundays and the Language of the Unconscious

Abstract: Evidence from John Updike's New Yorker book reviewing reveals his interest in gaining familiarity with structuralist literary criticism and encourages one to undertake a structuralist interpretation of Updike's 1975 novel A Month of Sundays. This novel has as its protagonist an irresponsible Midwestern Protestant clergyman sent by his church for a month of meditation to a Southwestern desert retreat, where he composes sermons as a form of therapy and self-analysis. The introspective writing he produces, including four full sermons as part of the novel's text, contains Freudian slips, puns, other word games, and glosses on all of these that invite an interpretation derived from Jacques Lacan's structuralist psychoanalysis. Four pairs of oppositional terms can be borrowed from Lacan and applied to A Month of Sundays: language and the unconscious, self and other, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, and the penis and the phallus. Many examples of linguistic displacement and condensation appear in the novel that illustrate Lacan's theory of the correspondence between the structures of language and the unconscious, and that reveal the pastor's problems with sex and religion handled therapeutically through language. The opposition of self and other takes shape in the novel in the clergyman's failure to grow beyond the isolation and defensiveness of his childish ego state. The tension between the Imaginary and the Symbolic is shown in the pastor's inability to leave the Imaginary stage, which is characterized by the ego's need to imitate an Other, and to enter the Symbolic stage, where one learns to replace imitation with empathetic projection. As a result, he never learns to differentiate between penis and phallus, and persists in romanticizing women rather than learning that erotic relationships involving the symbolic phallus exchange do not have to be physical-sexual. This Lacanian analysis is balanced by reference to two pairs of terms from Jacques Derrida-the spoken versus the written word and absence versus presence-and the six pairs of terms are translated briefly into the

Learning from the Imaginary.

Abstract: Much educational practice is based on the view that children can advance their moral “understanding by exploring the imaginary worlds of creative writers, or by creating their own imaginary worlds. It is here argued that it is a mistake to rely on such explorations as a source either of moral didactic or of morally important knowledge about people. There are, however, grounds for believing that they can contribute importantly to moral education by extending children's vision of moral possibilities and perhaps byincreasing their skill in coming to understand people.