---
title: "The 'Instinct' of Imagination: A Neuro-Ethological Approach to the Evolution of the Reflective Mind and Its Application to Psychotherapy"
author: "Antonio Alcaro and Stefano Carta"
year: 2019
shelf: "the-body"
purchase_url: "https://bookshop.org/search?keywords=Instinct+of+Imagination+Alcaro+Carta"
in_stock: false
related: []
collections: []
content_type: "book-commentary"
key_takeaways:
  - "Alcaro and Carta reconceive imagination not as a higher cognitive faculty layered atop instinct but as itself an instinctual capacity—a biologically evolved \"instinct of imagination\" that performs the same adaptive, species-preserving function as any tropism or reflex, thereby grounding Jung's instinct-image spectrum in contemporary affective neuroscience."
  - "The book's neuro-ethological framework resolves a tension that has persisted from Jung through Hillman: whether the archetypal image is a phenomenological given or a biological emergent, by demonstrating that subcortical affective circuits generate proto-imaginal activity before cortical elaboration, making the image primordial rather than derivative."
  - "By rooting the reflective mind in the SEEKING system of Jaak Panksepp's affective neuroscience, Alcaro and Carta provide psychotherapy with a neurobiological warrant for treating imaginative engagement not as a technique added to treatment but as the restoration of a primary organismic capacity that psychopathology has disrupted."
references: []
glossary_terms:
  - "imagination"
  - "instinct"
  - "hillman"
  - "seeking-system"
  - "archetypal"
scholar_prompts:
  - "How does Alcaro and Carta's identification of the SEEKING system as the neurobiological substrate of imagination reframe Hillman's claim in *Pan and the Nightmare* that instinct is \"more a metaphor, even if in conceptual dress, than a concept\"?"
  - "In what ways does the \"instinct of imagination\" thesis challenge or support Giegerich's argument in *The Soul's Logical Life* that imagination is \"structurally blind\" to the logical element constituting its historical situation?"
  - "How might Bosnak's concept of \"embodied imagination\" in *Embodiment* be deepened by Alcaro and Carta's demonstration that proto-imaginal activity originates in subcortical affective circuits rather than in cortical representational systems?"
seo_title: "The 'Instinct' of Imagination by Antonio Alcaro and Stefano Carta | Seba"
seo_description: "Scholarly commentary on Alcaro and Carta's neuro-ethological account of imagination — REM sleep, the Default Mode Network, and Jung's feeling-toned complexes."
---

**Imagination Is Not Sublimation but a Primary Biological Instinct**

Alcaro and Carta's central provocation is grammatical as much as theoretical: the scare quotes around "instinct" in their title signal that they are neither reducing imagination to reflex nor merely borrowing the term metaphorically. They are claiming that imagination operates *as* an instinct—an evolved, phylogenetically ancient capacity that organizes the organism's engagement with its environment before any cortical, reflective elaboration occurs. This move directly extends Jung's insight that "instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation," and that the psyche's fantasy images are "nothing other, at bottom, than the imagination of the instincts." Where Jung posited a spectrum running from the infrared pole of compulsive instinctual behavior to the ultraviolet pole of the archetypal image, he left the mechanism of their unity philosophically asserted but neurobiologically ungrounded. Alcaro and Carta supply the missing substrate: Jaak Panksepp's seven primary-process affective systems, and above all the SEEKING system—an appetitive, exploratory drive rooted in mesolimbic dopaminergic circuits—which they identify as the neurobiological engine of imagination itself. The SEEKING system does not merely motivate the organism to find food or mates; it generates anticipatory representations, proto-images of what-might-be, that constitute the earliest form of imaginative activity. Imagination, on this account, is not a sublimation of desire (the Freudian position Jung explicitly rejected) but the very form desire takes as it orients toward possibility.

**The Reflective Mind Evolves from Subcortical Affect, Not from Cortical Overlay**

The dominant narrative in cognitive neuroscience positions reflection, self-awareness, and imaginative elaboration as neocortical achievements—late arrivals in phylogeny, riding atop a primitive affective chassis. Alcaro and Carta invert this hierarchy. Drawing on ethological evidence and Panksepp's demonstrations that decorticate animals still exhibit complex affective behaviors, they argue that reflective capacity is already nascent in subcortical affect. The organism that SEEKS is already imagining; the creature in PLAY is already rehearsing alternative scenarios. Reflexio—what Jung called "the cultural instinct par excellence," whose "strength is shown in the power of culture to maintain itself"—does not arrive with the prefrontal cortex. It germinates in the brainstem and develops through layers of increasing elaboration. This is a direct challenge to the computational cognitivism that treats consciousness as information processing and to the Cartesian residue in psychoanalysis that locates mind only where language and representation are already present. Hillman's insistence that "images and instincts are inseparable components of a single spectrum" and that "image and instinct are each other" finds here not philosophical restatement but empirical scaffolding. When Hillman wrote that "the imagination, a great beast, a subtle body, with ourselves inseparably lodged in its belly," he was articulating phenomenologically what Alcaro and Carta demonstrate neuro-ethologically: the imaginal is not post-biological but pre-personal, woven into the organism's most ancient affective circuitry.

**Psychotherapy as the Restoration of an Instinctual Capacity, Not the Application of a Technique**

The clinical implications of the "instinct of imagination" thesis are radical. If imagination is a primary biological function that psychopathology disrupts, then therapy's task is not to teach patients to imagine (as in directed visualization or guided imagery exercises) but to remove the obstacles—trauma, dissociation, affective flattening—that have suppressed an already-present capacity. This reframes the therapeutic relationship itself. The analyst does not introduce imagination from outside; the analyst creates the relational conditions—safety, attunement, affective resonance—in which the patient's SEEKING system can reactivate and begin generating the proto-imaginal activity it was designed to produce. This converges powerfully with Robert Bosnak's concept of embodied imagination, where the image is "of a quasi-physical nature, presenting itself as if it were physical," generating "strong responses in the body, embodied states." Alcaro and Carta would locate the origin of Bosnak's quasi-physical image-presences not in a mystical mundus imaginalis but in the subcortical affective systems that create embodied anticipatory representations before any cortical "mind" takes notice. The two accounts are not contradictory but complementary: Bosnak describes what imagination feels like from within the experience; Alcaro and Carta describe how the organism generates that experience in the first place.

**Against the Disembodied Archetype: Giegerich's Challenge Met on Biological Ground**

Wolfgang Giegerich's critique of archetypal psychology—that imagination is "structurally blind to something like the logic, the element, the 'world' to which the forms and figures belong"—poses a genuine problem for any psychology that privileges image over thought. Alcaro and Carta do not engage Giegerich directly, but their framework provides an implicit response. If imagination is an instinct, it is not merely anima-based reverie floating free of historical and logical context; it is an adaptive function embedded in the organism's concrete situation, shaped by evolutionary pressures, modified by developmental experience, and responsive to the specific environment in which it operates. The image does not hover in a vacuum of phenomenological purity; it arises from the organism's affective assessment of its world, which is always already a historical, embodied, situated world. This does not dissolve Giegerich's critique, but it relocates it: the problem is not that imagination lacks logic but that a purely phenomenological account of imagination lacks the biological dimension that would anchor it in the real conditions of the organism's life.

**Why This Book Matters Now**

For anyone navigating depth psychology today, Alcaro and Carta's work performs a function no other single text accomplishes: it makes Jung's instinct-image spectrum scientifically operational without betraying its psychological depth. It refuses the reductionism that collapses image into neurotransmitter and the idealism that floats archetype free of body. It gives clinicians a language for explaining to colleagues trained in evidence-based frameworks why imaginative work in therapy is not ornamental but addresses a primary biological disruption. And it gives depth psychologists a language for why neuroscience matters—not as a master discourse that explains away soul, but as a discipline that reveals imagination's roots reaching far deeper into animal life than even Jung, who saw the yucca moth's behavior as archetypal, dared to specify.