Gaston Bachelard was a French philosopher and phenomenologist who wrote and taught from the 1920’s until his death in 1962. The extent of the influence of his ideas is difficult to gauge and he is little known in the U.S., but in my mind he is essential to anyone who wishes to deeply understand human psychology and the power of imagination in life.

Bachelard wrote extensively about imagination and reverie. He uses these two words almost interchangeably and he treats imagination as a psychological foundation, much in the way Freud treated eros and death as foundations. The Poetics of Space, The Poetics of Reverie, and Fragments of A Poetics of Fire are among the several books in which he explores the imagination, by examining how poets imagine the subject at hand: space, fire, water, earth, reverie and so on.

Steeped as we have become in the ethos of psychoanalysis, self-help and psychotropic drug intervention, it is hard to conceive how radical Bachelard’s ideas about psychology really are. Bachelard uses two remarkable arguments to justify his positioning of the imagination as prior to the ego and more central to human nature than the fear of death.

The first is that the thing we ordinarily call the self is essentially unshaped. Says Bachelard, “ Life within us is neither an essence to be touched at will nor a containable entity. The human being is a swarm of beings. Human beings are never fixed in space or time as others think, and are not to be found even where they themselves tell others to inquire.” (Fragments of a Poetics of Fire)

It’s as if eros, sexuality, family, work, even death and grief are pieces of clay in the hands of imagination; they are passive and shapeless until brought under the power of imagination and given dimension.

I find this idea rather liberating. It has been invaluable to me on several occasions over the past five years, as I constructed new direction in my life out of divorce, the death of my father, a complete change of career and the relinquishment of my role as a parent, as my children have come of age.

Giving your life and your fate over to the power of your imagination has the remarkable effect of balancing your being. Living becomes an experience of satisfaction. I’ll come back to this in a later post, as I go into Bachelard’s second argument for the primacy of imagination.