imago

30 Oct 2021 02:15 - 07 Nov 2023 02:40
Open in Logseq
    • I latched onto this term imago from reading A Memory Called Empire, where it meant a specific technology: a digital-neural copy of a personality (usually but not necessarily someone dead) that can be implanted in someone else's brain, and acts as a kind of coach / advisor / mentor figure, with its own agency and personality. The protagonist comes from a small, somewhat marginal culture that uses imagos to preserve and transmit its precious cultural knowledge.
    • The name derives from Jungian psychoanalysis, where of course it was not some kind of brain tech but just something people did, or had. What we would call a mental representation of another person, or a model. Minsky's imprimers seem to be about the same thing. Representations of people, but not mere static symbolic knowledge, more like working models of them which necessarily include a tiny reflection of their soul, and thus are alive in some very real sense.
    • OK, apparently Jung went through a kind of terminological progression:
      • complex → imago → archetype
    • "I have intentionally given primacy to the expression imago over the expression complex, for I wish to endow the psychical fact that I mean to designate by imago, by choosing the technical term, with living independence in the psychic hierarchy, that is, the autonomy that multiple experiences have shown us to be the essential particularity of the complex imbued with affect, and which is cast into relief by the concept of the imago,"
      • – Jung (emph added)
    • RD Laing uses the term, in a mostly perjorative way, as harmful fanatasies that take the place of real relationships, a construct of a "false-self system". This strikes me as naive and I wonder if Jung and others had the same connotation.
    • The self whose relatedness to reality is already tenuous becomes less and less a reality-self, and more and more phantasticized as it becomes more and more engaged in phantastic relationships with its own phantoms (imagos).
      • – Divided Self, p85
    • In psychoanalysis, an idealized image of another person, such as a parent, or of an instinctual object, acquired in infancy and maintained in the unconscious (2) in later life. The concept was introduced in 1911 by Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), who believed that some imagos are derived from archetypes (2) rather than from personal experiences, and it became a key concept of his analytical psychology. In the writings of the British-based Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein (1882–1960), it is a fantastically distorted picture of the real object on which it is based. See also anima, animus (3), idealization.
    • Webster: "an idealized mental image of another person or the self"
    • Is rubberducking a kind of imago? Or an imago seed or something. It is similar in that while it is not the same as having the actual person on hand, it's so often the best we can do...