Imaginal

On a borrowed word, the gap it fills, and why the alternatives distort

The word turns up throughout my writing and I've never stopped to explain it, which is a small failure on my part, because it isn't a word most people have met and the nearest neighbors are all wrong.

Imaginal. Not imaginary. Not imaginative. It's doing a specific job, and the job only becomes visible once you notice what English gives you instead.

The two bad options

Try to describe something that is not materially present but is also not made up. A figure you spoke with. A presence in a dream that had its own weight. The grandmother you talk to on the drive home.

English offers two words and both of them decide the question before you've finished the sentence. Imaginary means not real — it's the word we use for a child's friend and for a threat that turned out not to exist. Imaginative means creative, inventive, something you produced. One says it doesn't count. The other says you made it.

There's no third word. Which means that in ordinary English you cannot describe this experience without simultaneously conceding it was either nothing or your own invention. People feel that constraint even if they've never named it — it's why they tell me about this carefully, and why they call it talking to myself, which isn't accurate and is the only phrasing available.

The missing word and the missing permission are the same problem.

Where the word comes from

I didn't invent it and neither did my field. It comes from Henry Corbin, a French scholar of Islamic philosophy working in the middle of the last century, translating Persian and Arabic sources that described a whole order of experience his own language couldn't carry. Every time he reached for imaginary, the text came out saying something it hadn't said — that these were fantasies, that the mystics had been making things up. So he built a Latin term instead, mundus imaginalis, precisely to keep the material from collapsing into unreality on contact with a European vocabulary.

That history is itself the argument. Corbin didn't need a new word because he had an unusual idea. He needed one because the traditions he was reading had a category that his own language had lost, and the loss showed up as a translation problem. Depth psychology took the word up gratefully afterward, for the same reason.

What the word lets me do

Here is the practical difference, which is most of why I keep it.

If a client tells me about a figure and I call it imaginary, I've told them it doesn't count, and the conversation is over before it starts. If I call it imaginative, I've told them they wrote it — which is exactly the thing we need to find out, and I've answered it in advance. Either word forecloses the only question worth asking.

Imaginal leaves it open. It says: this happened in the imagination, and that tells us nothing yet about whether you authored it. Now we can look. Did it say something you'd have written, or something that came in sideways? Did it decline to give you what you came for? Did your body settle, or did you get that thin relief that doesn't land below the neck?

Those are answerable questions and they're the ones that matter. But you can only ask them if you have a word that doesn't already contain the answer.

It does one more thing, quietly. It marks the imagination as a place where something arrives rather than only a place where things get made. Most of what I do clinically depends on that distinction being available — the resource that becomes a presence, the dream figure who has a stance, the memory that isn't being recalled so much as reentered. All of it happens in the imagination and none of it is invented in any useful sense of the word.

What a missing word actually costs

It's worth being exact about what the loss did, because "the phenomenon disappeared" would be wrong.

Nothing disappeared. People went right on talking to their dead, keeping company with figures, finding presences in dreams that had their own weight. What changed is that it went private. Without a word that doesn't convict you as you say it, the experience stays inside one person, and the natural conclusion is that you're the only one — not because anyone said so, but because nobody ever said otherwise.

Which is what a word actually does. It doesn't create the phenomenon; it makes the phenomenon sayable. And once something is sayable, people find out they're not alone in it, which is usually the thing that most changes what it's like to have. The isolation was never a feature of the experience. It was a feature of the silence around it.

The vocabulary probably didn't go missing on purpose. A culture that treats the imagination as the opposite of reality has no use for a term in the middle, and the word went the way the forms went — the ritual, the liturgy, the elders who knew what this was and wasn't. What's left is the faculty, working exactly as it always did, and a language that can only call it childish or call it a symptom.

I'll admit the repair doesn't seem to have held especially well. Imaginal never quite took, as far as I can tell — it's not a word you meet often, even among people whose work it would serve. I don't know why, and I haven't asked anyone who would. I use it anyway, and I'd rather use a word that never caught on than one that decides the question in advance.

Because you can't be given permission for something you have no way to name.

More on the practice this word makes describable — Talking to Someone Who Isn't There.