--- title: "What did Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei say about imagination?" description: "Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei is a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University whose *Imagination: A Very Short Introduction* (2023) describes imagination as a many-sided power that lets us \"escape from, without ever leaving, our ordinary life\", and that does not only invent but…" url: "https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/wiki/what-did-jennifer-gosetti-ferencei-say-about-imagination/" updated: "2026-11-10" category: People tags: - "co-creation" - empathy - imagination - Imagination A Very Short Introduction - "Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei" - mythos and logos - negative capability - phenomenology - productive imagination - real not imaginary - reproductive imagination - "seeing-as" - The Life of Imagination - "the Lion-Man" - wonder --- # What did Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei say about imagination? Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei is a philosopher at Johns Hopkins University whose *Imagination: A Very Short Introduction* (2023) describes imagination as a many-sided power that lets us "escape from, without ever leaving, our ordinary life", and that does not only invent but helps us see and understand what is real. She stresses that it cuts both ways, since the same power feeds empathy and discovery, and false hope and prejudice. Therapeutic Shamanism shares her view that imagination can serve the truth, and draws a line she does not draw, between using imagination and the shamanic realms being imaginary. ## Who is Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei? She is Professor and William Kurrelmeyer Chair in German, and Professor in Philosophy, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Her research covers continental philosophy, phenomenology, aesthetics and the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of imagination, and literary ecology. Her books include *Heidegger, Hölderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language* (2004), *The Ecstatic Quotidian* (2007), *The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World* (2018), *On Being and Becoming: An Existentialist Approach to Life* (2020) and *Imagination: A Very Short Introduction* (2023). She has also published poetry and a translation of [Martin Heidegger](/wiki/who-was-martin-heidegger-and-what-did-he-mean-by-being/).^[1](#note-1) 1. "Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei", faculty page, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Johns Hopkins University. ## What is imagination, on her account? "An activity of consciousness, whether wilfully directed or passively experienced, that presents images or ideas of what is not immediately given in perception, and may potentially transform them." It can happen in the mind alone, or through making things and through language.^[2](#note-2) Through it, she writes, we can escape from our ordinary life without ever leaving it, and see that life in a new light.^[3](#note-3) Imagination, in her view, is not one faculty but many. It does not always involve pictures in the mind, and people vary widely in how much they visualise. She separates the reproductive imagination, which recalls and recombines what we have already met, from the productive imagination, which brings something genuinely new into being. And she describes four main modes: inner imaging in any of the senses, pretending and thinking 'what if', seeing one thing as another, and creativity.^[4](#note-4) 1. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, *Imagination: A Very Short Introduction* (Oxford University Press, 2023), Chapter One, "What is imagination?". 2. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, *Imagination: A Very Short Introduction* (Oxford University Press, 2023), Chapter One. 3. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, *Imagination: A Very Short Introduction* (Oxford University Press, 2023), Chapter One. ## Does imagination deceive us, or help us see? Both, and she takes both seriously. Imagination can feed false hopes and outsized fears, and is, in her phrase, "the currency of conspiracy theories"; combined with cultural anxieties it can feed prejudice. For much of Western history it was distrusted for confusing fantasy with perception, from [Plato](/wiki/what-did-plato-teach-about-the-living-cosmos-and-why-did-he-downgrade-the-material-world/), who placed it at the bottom of his ladder of knowledge, to [Descartes](/wiki/what-did-descartes-teach-about-mind-and-body-and-why-do-animists-reject-the-split/), who demoted it beneath reason.^[5](#note-5) Yet the same power may be needed to understand reality at all. Aristotle held that the mind never thinks without an image; Einstein credited imagination with his discoveries. In her account imagination "augments reality by endowing it with distinctly human meaning", through seeing-as, metaphor, story and the models of science, and so opens up possibilities in what is real instead of only escaping it.^[6](#note-6) It is also the medium of empathy, which, she writes, "can be cultivated by deliberate effort to imagine the perspective of another".^[7](#note-7) 1. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, *Imagination: A Very Short Introduction* (Oxford University Press, 2023), Chapters One and Three. 2. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, *Imagination: A Very Short Introduction* (Oxford University Press, 2023), Chapters One and Five, "The augmentation of reality". 3. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, *Imagination: A Very Short Introduction* (Oxford University Press, 2023), Chapter Three, "From divine madness to cognitive power". ## Where does imagination come from? From deep in the human past, on her account. She treats it as an evolved and embodied capacity, which has shaped human thinking for around fifty thousand years. Her examples include the Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, a half-human, half-lion figure carved from mammoth tusk about forty thousand years ago and described as the earliest known symbolic artefact, and the painted Shaft scene at Lascaux, with its bird-headed man. For the Lascaux scene she lists several proposed readings, a shamanic one among them, without choosing between them.^[8](#note-8) She ends with creativity and wonder. Wonder strikes us with difference from what we already know, suspends our habits of thought and wakes up a sense of possibility, and creativity, she notes, is "an important ingredient in human happiness". She commends Keats's 'negative capability', the ability to abide in uncertainty, mystery and doubt without needing to settle them.^[9](#note-9) See [What is awe, and why is it good for us?](/wiki/what-is-awe-and-why-is-it-good-for-us/) 1. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, *Imagination: A Very Short Introduction* (Oxford University Press, 2023), Chapter Two, "Imagination in human evolution". 2. Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, *Imagination: A Very Short Introduction* (Oxford University Press, 2023), Chapter Six, "Creativity from invention to wonder". ## How does her work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? Most closely in refusing to treat imagination as the opposite of truth. Shamanic journeying uses imagination, and that is fine. When a beginner's left brain says 'you just made that up', the answer is that it is true you made it up, but there is no such thing as 'just' making things up. Novelists and composers make things up too, and what they make can be true and important.^[10](#note-10) Imagination is how we make sense of something real. A journey done properly is not just a figment of our imagination, like a guided visualisation, but an experience of something that exists independent of us.^[11](#note-11) See [Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?](/wiki/is-shamanic-journeying-imagination-and-how-are-journeys-co-created/) Her productive imagination, which shapes what we perceive, meets the teaching on co-creation. What we experience in the shamanic realms is a mixture of what is there independent of us and what we need to bring to it in order to make sense of it.^[12](#note-12) And her double edge has its shamanic counterpart. What matters in a journey is faithfulness. A great journey is one that is a true representation, coming from spirit and not from the shaman's own artistic licence.^[13](#note-13) Imagination can serve the truth, or it can wander off into a story full of our own stuff, which is why stalking what we bring matters. See [What are hollowing-out and stalking our stories?](/wiki/what-is-hollowing-out/) Her imagined perspective of another meets shamanic empathy, which goes further still. To feel empathy we open ourselves to experiencing being the 'other', [shapeshifting](/wiki/what-are-transformation-practices-and-shapeshifting/) into them to a degree, and that reaches beyond humans to the more-than-human world.^[14](#note-14) 1. Paul Francis, [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/), Chapter Four, "What colour is the cover?". 2. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter Two, "Co-Creation and the Hero's Journey". 3. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter Two, "Is the Lower-World Really a Place of Love and Healing?". 4. Paul Francis, [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/), Chapter Six, "Can't We Just Ask Our Guides?". 5. Paul Francis, [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/), Chapter Seven, "Rediscovering Our Empathy". ## Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? On what imagination can reach. Gosetti-Ferencei writes as a philosopher of human consciousness, and every mode of imagining she describes is an activity of the human mind. Inspiration, which earlier ages credited to the Muses, she re-reads as arising from a whole web of mind, body and surroundings. Where shamanism comes up at all, as one proposed reading of the Lascaux Shaft scene, she records it beside the other readings without choosing between them, and she does not take up the question of spirits or other realms. Therapeutic Shamanism holds that the shamanic realms are real places, full of real beings, and that saying journeys are just imagination and subjective runs contrary to, and denies, shamans' actual experiences.^[15](#note-15) At the start much of a journey is made up, perhaps as much as ninety per cent of it. Yet looking things up afterwards shows that some of it definitely was not made up, because it turns out to be astonishingly relevant, and as people go on journeying they worry less about whether they are making things up and learn to surrender and trust the process.^[16](#note-16) Using imagination to describe and work with what is there is not the same as what is there being imaginary. A journey is mythos**Mythos.** Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. [More about this](/wiki/what-is-mythos/), metaphorically true, a co-created rendering of something real, never a literal report.^[17](#note-17) See [What is shamanic journeying?](/wiki/what-is-shamanic-journeying/) 1. Paul Francis, [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/), Chapter Three, "Real, Not Imaginary". 2. Paul Francis, [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/), Chapter Four, "Preparing to Do an Actual Journey". 3. Paul Francis, [*Finding Your Deep Soul*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/finding-your-deep-soul/), Chapter One, "Research, Then Journey". - [Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?](/wiki/is-shamanic-journeying-imagination-and-how-are-journeys-co-created/) - [What is shamanic journeying?](/wiki/what-is-shamanic-journeying/) - [What are hollowing-out and stalking our stories?](/wiki/what-is-hollowing-out/) - [What did Paul Ricoeur teach about narrative identity?](/wiki/what-did-paul-ricoeur-teach-about-narrative-identity/) - [What is awe, and why is it good for us?](/wiki/what-is-awe-and-why-is-it-good-for-us/) - [What did Hans Vaihinger mean by the philosophy of "as if"?](/wiki/what-did-hans-vaihinger-mean-by-the-philosophy-of-as-if/) - [*The Shamanic Journey*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/the-shamanic-journey/) (Chapters Three and Four, real and imaginary) - [*Rewilding Yourself*](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/book/rewilding-yourself/) (Chapter Two, co-creation) - [First-Steps](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/learn-shamanism-online/) - [all courses](https://www.therapeutic-shamanism.co.uk/shamanic-courses/)