Imagination and Its Development in Childhood

Abstract

For the old psychology, which viewed all forms of man’s mental activity as associative combinations of accumulated impressions, the problem of imagination was an irresolvable puzzle. This psychology was forced to reduce imagination to other functions. The essential feature that distinguishes imagination from other forms of mental activity is that it does not repeat combinations of accumulated impressions but builds a new series of impressions from them. The very foundation of the activity that we refer to as imagination is the introduction of something new into the flow of our impressions, the transformation of these impressions such that something new, an image that did not previously exist, emerges. The problem of imagination was therefore inherently irresolvable for associative psychology since it represented all activity as a combination of elements and images that are already present in consciousness.