IMAGINATION AND CHARACTER

Imagination is one of the greatest of all human faculties. Without it life would be dull, and life would be dangerous. It is our capacity to imagine that warns us of danger and goads us to walk away from it.  

Our memories are products of our imagination. It is our imagination that enables us to recreate the past and create the future. Without imagination creativity would dry up – and when that happens life becomes absolutely drab, if at all it survives. It is imagination that produces endless possibilities.

Jungian Analyst James Hillman argues that “character and imagination are inseparable” (Force of Character, p. 182). Imagination is not images. Imagination is presence. And we see character as the presence, not just the image of a person.

Our body, Hillman, points out, is not just a composite of anatomical structures. It is also an imaginative structure. It is the imaginative body that creates “dance and sculpture, and impels the rhythms of oratory, music, and writing.” (p. 184).

The character of a person is a “complexity of images.” So “to know you I must imagine you, absorb your images,” writes Hillman. “To stay connected with you, I must stay imaginatively interested, not in the process of our relationship or in my feelings for you, but in my imaginings of you. The connection through imagination yields an extraordinary closeness. Where imagination focuses intently on the character of the other—as it does between opposing generals, guard and hostage, analyst and patient—love follows.

“The human connection may benefit from exhortations to love one another, but for a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships last not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining.” (pp. 185-186)