"The Imaginary:
A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination" by Jean-Paul Sartre, summary

This book is a philosophical exploration of human fantasy using Husserl’s method. The mental image here is stripped of its status as a material image within the cranium; it emerges as a special act of consciousness, positing its object through the prism of absence. The philosopher wrote this work in the late 1930s in France, based on an early manuscript of "The Image," completing the manuscript before the outbreak of World War II and publishing it as a separate book in Paris in 1940.

The work concludes the three-part cycle of the thinker’s early psychological treatises devoted to the internal structure of the human psyche. "Imagination" appeared in 1936. The second installment was "Outline of a Theory of Emotions" in 1939, and the 1940 publication finally concludes the trilogy.

Four signs of an image

The reflective method purifies the understanding of the psyche from the ancient illusion of immanence, which ascribed to the mind a storehouse of tiny copies of external things. An object is revealed from the outside. The wooden wicker chair in front of the desk remains in the physical room; only the observer’s gaze changes. An image is a relationship.

Phenomenological analysis reveals four fundamental properties of figurative consciousness: intentional nature, the phenomenon of quasi-observation, the positing of an object through non-existence, and the internal spontaneity of creation. Cognition here is paradoxical. During perception, a real cube rotates into an infinite series of facets, a granite façade reveals new roughness; a mental object gives the viewer exactly as many qualities as were originally invested in it by knowledge. Trying to imagine the façade of the Pantheon, one is unable to count the number of columns of the portico. Counting is impossible here.

The fourfold denial of present existence determines the way in which the imaginary world appears to the human eye out of nowhere. Pierre strolls through Berlin. A distant friend is assumed to exist in a distant space, a centaur is declared a non-existent myth, a departed acquaintance appears as an absent morning guest; the horseman in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving is held by the observer in a state of complete neutralization of his existential status. Perception passively encounters the surrounding world. From within, the figurative structure lives with a continuous creative impulse of will, experiencing itself as a transparent wave among other waves of spiritual activity.

The Family of Analogues and the Matter of Imagination

Wishing to resurrect the features of an absent friend, a person successively processes a whole chain of diverse material media with varying degrees of sensory richness, richness, and plastic expressiveness. A photograph provides precise proportions. A skilled caricaturist boldly distorts anatomical features for the sake of ultimate expressiveness; on the stage, the parodist Francone dons a straw boater, protrudes her lower lip, and transforms the female figure into a recognizable Maurice Chevalier. On stage, the actress’s body becomes an animated analogue. Acting imitation transforms the physical lines of makeup into a transparent conduit for the absent figure of the singer.

Matter gradually becomes impoverished. Bizarre cracks in plaster, damp patches on old wallpaper, or flickering flames of fire are caught by the wandering human gaze. A damp spot expresses nothing. A living eyeball, with its arbitrary movements, traces the contours of a sitting dog; entoptic reflections and phosphenes flickering in the darkness before closed eyelids are bound by a half-asleep, captive thought into the shimmering teeth of a saw. At a dead end, the enchanted consciousness finds itself shackled. The sleeping observer loses critical distance, transforming random flickers of the optic nerve into dramatic visions of galloping horsemen.

The mental analogue is devoid of a substrate. Introspection searches in vain for a sensory residue after the thought fades, forcing the researcher to turn to the probabilistic hypotheses of experimental psychology. Degenerate knowledge comes to the rescue. A pure concept descends to the sensory level of anticipation of a visual impression, connects with the kinesthetic microscopic contractions of the eye muscles, and deeply absorbs the body’s affective reaction, creating the phantom presence of a beloved face right in the middle of nowhere. The index finger traces a figure eight. Kinesthetic sensations of the trajectory of movement in the air replace the missing visual line on the retina. A bodily trace maintains form. Inner speech unfolds through the hidden movement of the vocal cords, providing articulate support for thought. Silently, guttural impulses create a sign.

The familiar logical laws of strict objective identity completely collapse in the space of the imagination. The imaginary object appears as a syncretic tangle of qualities, where the fingers of a hand are visible from the outside through opaque cloth, and the image of yesterday’s bank clerk merges inextricably with the figure of a street policeman. A hybrid phantom emerges. The surrounding spatial coordinates are internalized, transforming distance and magnitude into inseparable properties of the unreal body itself before the mind’s eye. Fantasy produces paradoxical forms. The observer experiences a profound indistinguishability of properties, uniting in an instantaneous synthesis mutually exclusive visual perspectives of the same spectral being.

Symbols and traps of thinking

Abstract human thought often takes the form of a unique symbolic schema, unfolding elusive conceptual relationships as spatial lines of force or colorful blobs. Flach explored these schemas. The concept of compromise presented itself to the subjects as the interpenetration of two gelatinous bodies of a dirty green hue; the oppressed proletariat was perceived as a dark, boundless, turbulent ocean; the decadent poetic world of Charles Baudelaire flared as an elongated spot of caustic vitriol against a dark background. The schema acts as a direct presenter of the essence.

The material embodiment of an idea carries the danger of pure thought slipping into crude analogies. The spring is visually compressed. The thinker, attempting to justify the inevitability of the victory of the oppressed classes, imagines a steel coil under a heavy press and borrows the apparent persuasiveness of a deduction from the physical laws of elasticity, replacing social dynamics with alien material behavior. A symbol visually deceives the thought of its creator. Perception and fantasy are decisively mutually exclusive: the reader of a novel sees the printed lines of text only at pauses in the imaginary action. Reading interrupts contemplation.

Any attempt to simultaneously maintain the sensory reality of the page and the fictional drama of the book characters instantly destroys the figurative structure.

The unreality of the object and the experience of dreaming

The inhabitants of a fantasy world inevitably exist in a special, qualitative space without distinct parts, remaining completely deaf to the harsh laws of physical causality of the material environment. A ghost cannot be moved by hand. The love for his departed lover, Annie, quickly degenerates into a dry pattern, frozen in the immobile ritual of letters, and loses the inexhaustible depth that the living presence of a real, unpredictable person of flesh and blood once brought. Now the feeling plays out its own former tenderness. The unreal recipient obeys the dreamer’s every whim, returning only its own reflection without the slightest resistance from matter. The psychopath chooses solitude.

Hallucinatory psychosis arises from the disintegration of a coherent personality, when isolated speech motor automatisms spontaneously flare up at the periphery of attention. The patient hears other people’s voices. The patient’s own internal spontaneity is alienated in the external influence syndrome, transforming unexpected snatches of obscene curses into obsessive telephone stalking, like three phantom clouds that appeared at the edge of vision under the influence of mescaline. Suddenly, the phenomenon denies the very possibility of observation. The vision instantly disappears at the first attempt at direct, reflexive concentration, leaving behind only a trace in memory.

At night, the dream completely enchants the sleeper. The oneiric consciousness loses the very category of reality, condemning the person to experience the unfolding fatal fiction from within their own fictional character. There is no choice. Hiding from a pursuing counterfeiter inside an armored room, the sleeping philosopher sees himself frozen with fear and separately observes from outside the flame of an oxygen torch inexorably cutting through the steel wall of the shelter. At a dead end, the nightmare ends at the very limit of possibility. When the imagination encounters the blade of the guillotine or the sleeper is deafened by a real knock on the door, the spell of the oneiric world instantly crumbles to dust.

Awakening brings back the real burden. The liberated mind experiences the characteristic nausea of contact with a rough reality, demanding continuous bodily adaptation to an endless stream of unpredictable things. Illusion dissipates without a trace. All that remains is a vague memory of blind wandering among the flickering shadows of an imaginary world, where the slightest grain of genuine physical existence was completely absent. In reality, one encounters things again. All imaginary life dissolves upon encountering true space, returning consciousness to its strict responsibility to existence.

Freedom of consciousness and the nature of art

The faculty of imagination reveals itself as a fundamental manifestation of transcendental human freedom, allowing the mind to continually maintain the necessary distance from the present material environment. The world is reduced to nothingness. The concrete historical situation of the thinking individual’s presence amidst things serves as a constant incentive for the generation of a unique, unreal object that decisively transcends this practical reality in the direction of what is lacking within it. Freedom constitutes a genuine horizon of meaning.

The aesthetic object belongs entirely to the imaginary realm, remaining fundamentally inaccessible to the physical influences of the material environment. The canvas serves as a material analogue. The oil paints on the canvas are liable to perish in an accidental fire; the depicted monarch Charles VIII exists in his own unreal light, completely devoid of spatial dependence on the exhibition hall. Beethoven’s symphony is unreal. The Seventh Symphony unfolds in its own closed time; the actual bows of the Parisian orchestra merely provide a sonic analogue of the work being performed. Beauty belongs to a world of pure fantasy. The listener leaves the concert hall with a feeling of awakening from a dream, as the silent instruments return them to the dense concerns of everyday life. The music fades into silence.