As imagination gives vitality to form, form keeps imagination from driving us into psychosis. This is the ultimate necessity of limits. Artists are the ones who have the capacity to see original visions. They typically have powerful imaginations and, at the same time, a sufficiently developed sense of form to avoid being led into the catastrophic

Such behavior is indicative of what life is when imaginative powers are cut off. The limits have always to be kept clear and visible. Lacking the ability to shift forms, these patients found their world radically truncated. Any ‘limitless” existence was experienced by them as being highly dangerous.

Imagination is the outreaching of mind. It is the individual’s capacity to accept the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images, and every other sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to “dream dreams and see visions,” to consider diverse possibilities, and to endure the tension involved

Dionysian versus the Apollonian.

We should remember, moreover, that all spontaneity carries with it its own form. Anything expressed in language, for example, carries the forms given to it by that language. How different a poem originally written in English sounds when translated into the exquisite music of the French language or into the profound and powerful sentiments of the

The organic aspect of form causes it to grow on its own; it speaks to us down through the ages revealing new meaning to each generation. Centuries later we may find meaning in it that even the author did not know was there.

On the one hand, when an individual insists on his or her own subjectivity and follows exclusively his or her own imagination, we have a person whose flights of fancy may be interesting but who never really relates to the objective world. When, on the other hand, an individual insists that there is nothing “there” except empirical reality, we have

As Immanuel Kant insisted, we not only know the world, but the world at the same time conforms to our ways of knowing.

People must recover the “lost” aspects of their personalities, lost under a pile of inhibitions, if they are to become integrated in any effective sense.