Seeing 'into' the world: The artist's experience of the imagination in everyday life

The purpose of this qualitative study was to illuminate the artist's subjective experience of the imagination in everyday life, with the ultimate goal of facilitating artists' self-understanding and personal development. "Artist" is defined in this study as a working professional who has been paid for original and/or interpretive creative work in one or more of the five major disciplines in the fine arts: creative writing, dance, music, theatre, and visual art. The investigation focused on the experience of the adult artist who is psychologically relatively healthy and functional, and on everyday life, as distinguished generally from the processes of creating art. The research methodology used was a transcendental phenomenological model, a systematic procedure for discovering the essential structures inherent in a human phenomenon through direct examination of individuals' reported immediate, lived experiences. In-depth interviews were conducted with eight professional artists, men and women representing a breadth of disciplines and backgrounds. In the interviews, which were videotaped, the artists provided full and vivid descriptions of their personal experiences as related to the research topic. The data were subsequently analyzed and synthesized, ultimately revealing the following major themes: Overarching Theme: Seeing "into" the world: the apprehension, in everyday life, of various and multiple facets, details, structures, relationships, depths, and/or dimensions of reality (within and sometimes across domains). Core Theme 1: An awareness of the interconnectedness of all things, along with an intense attraction to the unknown. Core Theme 2: A textural experience of the imagination as continuous, spacious, in-between, intensifying, and generative. Core Theme 3: Everyday effects of the imagination on the artist's life that include vivid sense impressions and a vulnerability to being "pulled" away from physical reality. Core Theme 4: The importance of maintaining balance and remaining grounded in reality. The findings are discussed in the context of traditional and recent philosophical and aesthetic theories of the imagination, and in relationship to selected psychological research on imagery, personality, and cognition. General recommendations are offered for implementing the findings in counseling practice with healthy artist populations, and topics are suggested for potential future research.