Visual Imagery

Visual imagery occupies a contested but pivotal position across the depth-psychology corpus, where it functions simultaneously as a neurological phenomenon, a therapeutic medium, a pathway to the unconscious, and a vehicle of visionary or transpersonal experience. Damasio grounds the discussion in neuroscience, demonstrating that imagery tasks recruit the same cortical architectures as actual perception, and that focal lesions destroy both perceptual and imaginative capacities in tandem — a finding with profound implications for understanding how the mind constructs inner life. Schore extends this into developmental and clinical territory, arguing that the right hemisphere is specifically dominant for the processing and representation of emotional stimuli using imagery, and that early visuoemotional associations stored in the orbital prefrontal cortex underwrite affect regulation across the lifespan. McNiff approaches visual imagery from an art-therapeutic standpoint, insisting that images must be met on their own terms rather than translated into verbal concepts — a position aligned with Jung’s active imagination and Hillman’s poetic hospitality toward psychic figures. Solms and Bulkeley attend to the role of imagery in dreaming, while Huxley maps the ‘visionary’ register of imagery induced by altered states. McGovern links psychedelic visual imagery to 5-HT2A receptor activation and shifts in cortical dynamics. Armstrong traces the theological ambivalence toward sensuous and visual imagery across mystical traditions. The central tension across all these voices is whether imagery is primarily a representational tool — a way the brain encodes knowledge — or an autonomous psychic reality that carries meaning beyond representation.

In the library 15 passages

imagery tasks in modalities such as visual and auditory usually evoke brain activity patterns that overlap to a considerable extent with the patterns observed during actual perception

Damasio establishes that visual imagery and perception share overlapping neural substrates, and that lesion evidence — including the inability to imagine color after occipitotemporal damage — confirms that recall partially reinstates activity at original sensory sites.

Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010thesis

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Kosslyn (1988) and Sergent (1989) suggest that this hemisphere plays a special role in processing visual imagery. Safer (1981) proposes that the right hemisphere is dominant for the processing and representation of emotional stimuli using imagery

Schore marshals neuropsychological evidence to argue that visual imagery is a right-hemispheric specialty, linking it directly to emotional conditioning, affect representation, and early developmental learning.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994thesis

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Images are not stored as facsimile pictures of things, or events, or words, or sentences. The brain does not file Polaroid pictures of people, objects, landscapes

Damasio argues that visual imagery is not stored but reconstructed from dispositional records, challenging any naive pictorialist or facsimile model of mental representation.

Damasio, Antonio R., Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, 1994thesis

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from the very beginning of my work with art and healing, I discovered how limiting verbal explanations could be. I explored ways of responding to art with more art

McNiff argues that visual art imagery demands engagement through further image-making and imaginative amplification rather than verbal reduction, positioning the image as a self-sufficient therapeutic and psychic reality.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004thesis

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the ability of the visual memory (internal image) of the expressive face of the imprinted object to trigger the infant’s interoceptive, autonomic reaction to this input

Schore demonstrates that internal visual images of caregivers’ faces function as autonomous triggers of autonomic and emotional responses, bridging external perception and internalized representation in infant development.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting

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The treatment of impaired right brain affect regulation calls for a greater focus on the powerful nonverbal influences on the communications of primitive affects in the psychotherapeutic relationship. This work necessitates the mobilization of primary process modes that are highly visual

Schore contends that clinical work with primitive emotional disorders requires activating highly visual primary-process modes, making visual imagery a technical instrument of psychotherapeutic repair.

Schore, Allan N., Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self: The Neurobiology of Emotional Development, 1994supporting

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By immediately labeling a red picture as aggressive or a black picture as depressive, we sacrifice a more in-depth exploration of our thoughts and feelings about red and black

McNiff argues that premature symbolic reduction of visual imagery forecloses the aesthetic and therapeutic engagement that images are capable of generating when encountered on their own sensory terms.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

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visual imagery or hallucinations during the acute psychedelic experience seemingly result from the impact of activation of 5-HT2A receptors. This activation, in turn, enhances excitability of layer 5 pyramidal cells in the cortex

McGovern provides a neurochemical account of psychedelic visual imagery, locating its genesis in serotonergic receptor activation and the resulting shift toward distributed, desegregated cortical dynamics.

McGovern, Hugh, Eigenmodes of the Deep Unconscious: The Neuropsychology of Jungian Archetypes and Psychedelic Experience, 2025supporting

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Landscapes, as we have seen, are a regular feature of the visionary experience. Descriptions of visionary landscapes occur in the ancient literature of folklore and religion

Huxley situates visual imagery at the intersection of art history and altered states, arguing that certain modes of landscape representation function as ‘vision-inducing’ forms that reliably evoke the mind’s deeper visionary register.

Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception, 1954supporting

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throughout the poem, Dante gradually purges the narrative of sensuous and visual imagery. The vividly physical descriptions of Hell give way to the difficult, emotional climb

Armstrong reads Dante’s progressive abandonment of sensuous visual imagery as a theological procedure, in which the reduction of pictorial representation marks the soul’s approach to a transcendence that exceeds imagination.

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God, 1993supporting

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all of our memories, inherited from evolution and available at birth or acquired through learning thereafter—exist in our brains in dispositional form, waiting to become explicit images or actions

Damasio frames visual imagery as the enacted, explicit form of otherwise implicit and unconscious dispositional memory records, making image formation the threshold between latent knowledge and conscious experience.

Damasio, Antonio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain, 2010supporting

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Rather than interrogating images and trying to decipher ‘what they mean,’ I suggest welcoming them and simply reflecting on their expressive qualities

McNiff, drawing on Hillman and Jung, advocates a hospitality toward visual images that replaces interpretive interrogation with a phenomenological dwelling in the image’s expressive presence.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004supporting

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Lanius, Hopper, and Menon (2003) observed widely different subjective, heart rate, brain activation responses to traumatic script-driven imagery

Ogden draws on neuroimaging evidence showing that script-driven traumatic imagery produces dramatically divergent physiological and brain-activation responses, underscoring the somatic power of internally generated visual imagery in trauma.

Ogden, Pat, Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy, 2006supporting

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heroic figures of man’s visionary experience have appeared in the religious art of every culture. Sometimes they are shown at rest, sometimes in historical or mythological action

Huxley identifies a class of archetypal visual imagery — static, luminous, superhuman figures — that recurs across religious traditions as expression of the mind’s visionary depths.

Huxley, Aldous, The Doors of Perception, 1954aside

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To receive the benefits of aesthetic contemplation it is necessary to take the time to look attentively and to gaze with heightened visual awareness

McNiff positions deliberate, disciplined visual attention as a contemplative and therapeutic practice analogous to meditation, through which images yield their healing and transformative energies.

McNiff, Shaun, Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul, 2004aside

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