Social Imaginaries and Therapeutic Self-Work: The Ethics of the Embodied Imagination

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of the social imaginary as a means for understanding how bodies and worlds interact in the production of therapeutic spaces. The ‘body that imagines’ is discussed through an engagement with Foucault's writing on subjectivation and Spinoza's theory of knowledge and the imagination. This focus on the ‘body that imagines’ allows a consideration of social imaginaries as processual and collective entities, and reveals how imaginaries are worked on and through, and invested in affectively by bodies. Two case studies consider the employment and negotiation of social imaginaries in constituting a relation to the self through the embodied experience of walking along a coastal footpath. These imaginaries contribute to a therapeutic framing of specific assemblages of bodies and landscapes. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the subject's capacity to work with and through imaginaries is central to both the production of meaningful space and a politics and ethics of the self.