Imagination Studies in the Era of Neurosciences
Imagination Studies in the Era of Neurosciences

Summary/Abstract: Comparative religions and literature in general, and French imagination studies (recherches sur l’imaginaire) in special, have explained the existence of thematic invariants through two theories, that of influences and that of epigenesis. Starting from neo-Kantian assumptions about the presence of a priori schemata or innate “symbolic forms” of the human psyche, C. G. Jung, Gaston Bachelard, Northrop Frye, Gilbert Durand, Mircea Eliade or Joseph Campbell among others devised genuine archetypal maps of the collective imaginary. Nonetheless, contemporary research based on analytical philosophy, cognitivism, semiotics or discourse theory has criticized such assumptions as being speculative and indemonstrable. My study aims to present new arguments relating to the existence of inherited “primitives,” of image schemas and mental maps, according to the latest research in evolutionary psychology (Joseph Carroll), neurosciences (George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner), and cognitivism (Leonard Talmy, P. N. Johnson-Laird, Teun A. van Dijk). This would give anthropological, religious and imagination studies an up-to-date psychological and neurological frame of explanation.

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