ABSTRACT
Imagination accompanies people throughout their lives and it can play a crucial role in shaping the course of their lives. This chapter examines the development of imagination over the lifecourse. The microgenetic level of imaginative analysis is transposed into the ontogenetic level. The chapter shows how the capacity to imagine develops with age, and a given person's imagination develops along their lifecourse. It also explores how the trajectory of individuals is, in part, guided by their own imagination. The continuity hypothesis sees play and imagination as basically the same activity; in play the activity is visible and in imagination the play has become internalized, under social demands, into fantasy, daydreaming and imagination. The recursive hypothesis admits, like the continuity hypothesis, that although some patterns of play are progressively internalized into imagination, imagination seems actually to appear in elementary forms very early as well, like in the parallel hypothesis.
