Louise Braddock, 'Imagining being someone else'

Central imagining clarifies how identity and identification contribute to the development of character. It can also be used to show how identity plays out in the clinical setting, by tracking transient identifications within the transference.  It is thus a useful philosophical device for ‘translating out’ object relational shifts in the countertransference. 

    Central imagining is imagining being someone from that person’s perspective; in everyday terms it is ‘imagining someone from the inside’. The term ‘central imagining’ is owed to Richard Wollheim and used by him in his philosophical writing on identification. Key to it is his claim that in imagining being another person we imagine what goes on from that person’s point of view; their perspective is integral to the way the scene in which we imagine ‘being them’ presents itself to us. 

    I consider some uses of this thesis, and some problems with it.