ABSTRACT
Psychoanalytic literature tends to subsume imagination under the heading of phantasy, and it has a similar difficulty in deciding whether phantasy is escapist or creative, defensive or adaptive. Imagination can keep you in your world dreaming up things to keep you feeling fine—so can education. Of particular interest for us is the empathic imagination, empathy being "the power of projecting one's personality into, and so fully understanding the object of, contemplation". Imaginative literature, novels and such, help us to be empathic and imaginative. People with more empathic imagination are less likely to be experienced as bullying: people with less empathic imagination are more likely to be experienced as bullying. An architect or town-planner is called imaginative because of what he does with bricks and mortar. He may be quite unimaginative and ignorant about the people who will use what he builds.
