Imitation and Imagination

How imagination shapes behaviour and the spiritual life

Iain McGilchrist suggests that imitation is a perhaps uniquely human phenomenon saying,

The enormous strength of the human capacity for mimesis is that our brains let us escape from the confines of our own experience and enter directly into the experience of another being: this is the way in which, through human consciousness, we bridge the gap, share in what another feels and does, in what it is like to be that person. This comes about through our ability to transform what we perceive into something directly experience.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p.248

In this sense imitation is not a rote copying of the behaviour of another individual but an imaginative entering in to the experience of another, feeling within oneself what it must be like to be that person. Again, this is very different to the behaviour of animals who presumably have no such interior life at all, or at least nothing so much as the scale upon which human beings posses it.

Why is this sort of imitation different to conformity? Why does it give birth to individuality? Because it is not ‘mechanical reproduction’ but ‘an imaginative inhabiting of the other’ which is different because of ‘an intersubjective betweenness’: ‘The process of mimesis is one of intention, aspiration, attraction and empathy, drawing heavily on the right hemisphere, whereas soothing is the following of disembodied procedures and algorithms’ (p.249). McGilchrist calls the former ‘empathic identification’.

Empathy in this sense is what makes a person morally good or even great: the capacity to enter in to the experiences, the suffering, the challenges, of other people, to understand where they are coming from, what their lives are like, what it feels like to be them. This is a deeper level of empathy beyond what can be verbalised, a sense in which we actually feel (from our own emotional standpoint) something of what it is like, say, to actually be a child: confused, frustrated, lonely, directionless…But in a way that cannot be captured by language precisely because it is a feeling rather than an analytical description. This feeling gives rise I think above all to compassion and out of this compassion acts of love and care become easier.

McGilchrist helps us here by identifying the proper use of the left hemisphere which is to provide analytical insight into people and situations. In this sense, the left hemisphere helps us to verbalise or articulate whatever it is that we wish to reflect upon: the individual’s situation, his suffering, his pain, his lostness. We might sit down and actually think about it in this sense, perhaps write down some notes, perhaps speak to somebody else about it. But that is only part of the process. That “report”, if you like, needs to be “sent back” to the right hemisphere which then incorporates the understanding given by the report into a holistic response: in the sort of case I’ve been thinking of, a feeling compassion, love, prayer, acts of kindness. So it is worth thinking about the sufferings and situations of others if we are willing to allow that left hemispheric thinking to become a right hemispheric response.