Imagination and Its Pathologies Collection of Essays Published by Mit Press
(Mahwah) – Dr. James Morley, associate professor of clinical psychology at Ramapo College of New Jersey and a Ramapo alumnus (1979), and James Phillips of the Yale School of Medicine are co-editors of Imagination and Its Pathologies, published by MIT Press, 2003. It is a collection of essays in the field of philosphical psychopathology on the topic of the relation between imagination and mental illness. The co-editors collected the articles, co-edited the text and co-authored the introduction. Morley also contributed a chapter, “The Imaginary Texture of the Real: Merleau-Ponty on Imagination and Psychopathology.”
From John Locke’s essay, “Concerning Human Understanding,” to the most recent edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, madness has been viewed as a faulty mix of ideas by a deranged and violent imagination. This book shows that the relation of the imagination to pathological phenomena is as diverse and complex as the human condition itself. The imagination has the power not only to react to the world but to recreate it. And that power is double-edged: it is as destructive as it is creative.
Recent advances in genetics and neuroscience have reinforced the empiricist approach in psychiatry, to the neglect of subjective aspects of the pathological experience. This book argues that the study of the imagination and pathology is long overdue, and that such an integration will be both theoretically and clinically fruitful. Because imagination can be creatively integrative as well as pathological, the book emphasizes the holistic, therapeutic dimension of imagination as well as its destructive effects. The areas discussed include philosophical perspectives on pathological imagination, pathological imagination and the psychodynamic tradition, and specific cases of pathological imagination in schizophrenia, juvenile pathology, artistic creativity (Vaslav Nijinsky), and religious expression (St. Anthony).
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