Honest fictions: A study of the people in fiction and psychotherapy

Anderson, N. D. (2000). Honest fictions: A study of the people in fiction and psychotherapy. (Doctoral dissertation, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2000). UMI no. 3008504

Twenty-five years ago, the philosopher Colin Radford posed a philosophical riddle, which he considered insoluble: in order to feel emotions toward someone, it went, one has to believe in the existence of an object of these feelings. Because we know fictional characters not to exist, when we experience emotions toward them, we are caught in irrationality. Some responses to Radford's riddle have seen fictional characters as tools for make-believe which possess no ontological status de dicto, and others have attributed some kind of ontological reality to characters de re. The current study takes a de re position and is, above all, an argument for the centrality of the imaginal within psychology, literature, and life generally. It questions the assumptions of Radford's riddle by arguing that we are mistaken when we define imaginal creatures negatively in terms of actual people and that we may more profitably see actual people are fictions. We have habitually made a dualism of reality and fiction—including characters in novels, the people in dreams or medieval paintings, and images emerging in psychotherapeutic transference. However, as a historically unfolding species, we have, in other ways, begun to move out of the largely non-participating consciousness we have inhabited since the Enlightenment and into a consciousness of imaginal participation with phenomena. In so doing, we acknowledge the perspectival, en-storied nature of our lives, the way actual life rests upon a foundation of day-dreaming and imagination, and we sense the poverty of subject-object modes of thinking and of atomistic cosmology. As radical individualism is relativized, we see that we attain consciousness only within intersubjective fields, wherein actual people and imaginal creatures co-imagine and co-create one another. This study is in part an argument for seeing the imaginal as autonomous, and for the recognition that we participate in the imaginal directly, but perspectivally, and is an examination of foundations for finding the narrative voice of psychological research.