Adaptive Defenses
While thrills often involve a bit of anxiety whether the event is enacted or imagined (or a whole lot of anxiety when actually riding on the Maximum XL coaster), there are times when the anxiety is neither wanted nor a source of positive motivation. It is in our defense against anxiety that we make some of our most important uses of imagination. The frightening genie has slipped out of the box, and we must use our imagination to return it to the box. We are about to take a test for a new job and are reminded of our failure to complete a test as teenagers. Our son is two hours late returning home on a Saturday evening. It is snowing outside and he has been driving for only one year. We must imagine away our anxiety in each of these cases.
Many years ago, Anna Freud (1992/2018), the daughter of Sigmund Freud and co-founder of a school of psychoanalysis called ego-psychology, provided a description of several different ways in which we defend against anxiety (putting the genie back in the box). These defensive strategies range from a very primitive denial and repression to a more sophisticated process called sublimination.
When dealing with test-anxiety, we might be inclined to initiate one of the primitive defenses. We can repress our teenage experience by focusing on other times when we were a successful test-taker. Our evening waiting for the arrival of our son might involve redirecting (sublimate) the energy associated with our anxiety to some diverting activity, such as working on a crossword puzzle or preparing a new batch of cookies.
Each of these defensive strategies involves imagination and the creation of something out of nothing. We imagine a test-taking success that we haven’t recalled for many years. We suddenly choose to work on the puzzle or heat up the oven to cook the cookies. At other times, we use our imagination to defensively distort reality, lie to ourselves, or simply ignore what is occurring out in the world. Applying an ego-psychology perspective, we are using ego-functions (perception, cognition, memory) to construct a barrier against intrusive psychic events that are saturated with anxiety. We then find a way to either put the event and anxiety back in the box (repression, denial) or convert the anxiety into something more productive (and leave the event lingering with only minimal attendant anxiety).
Adaptive Adjustments
In this section, I have considered how imagination can help to produce a pleasant effect (thrill), as well as a defense against anxiety. I have also considered how imagination can serve a basic adaptive function in helping us adjust to what we think will occur in the near future; especially what will probably occur that relates to our own immediate actions. As the ego-psychologists would propose, our Ego serves as a critical intermediary between our inner life and the environment (reality) in which we operate. We imagine what will occur out in the “real” world and use this imagined (anticipated) occurrence to adjust our subsequent actions, and our baseline (desired state). Emotions are aroused in association with the perceived reality, the process of adjustment, and the shifting baseline.
