The title needs translating before the book can be read. "Phantasy" here is not the fantastical, and has nothing to do with fairies or escapism; it is the Progress translator's stiff rendering of the Russian fantaziya, which means simply the imagination. I. M. Roset's subject is the creative act — the mental operation by which a person produces something that was not there before: a new image, an unforeseen solution, a metaphor, a scientific hypothesis, a child's invented word. Read the title as The Psychology of Imagination and the strangeness of the object comes into focus. This is a full-dress Soviet scientific monograph, published in Moscow for export in English, on the psychology of creative freedom — the faculty by which the mind refuses the given and makes the new. It was produced in a state that had built an entire apparatus to prevent exactly that, in art and letters, from happening in public. The book never notices the contradiction. Watching it not notice is one of the reasons to keep it in print.
First, its date, which is not the date on the spine. The English edition is 1984, but 1984 is only when Progress got the translation out. The text is older. Its bibliography — nearly three hundred items, the great majority of them Western — runs thick through the 1960s, thins in the early 1970s, and effectively stops: a single 1978 title (Luk's Psikhologiya tvorchestva), two of 1979, nothing after. Roset himself describes the Western "creative boom of the 1950s-70s" as already spent, its energy dissipated into a saturated market of "stock-in-trade recipes for stimulating creativity." This is a manuscript of the late 1970s in a 1984 jacket — a Brezhnev-era book, conceived in the years of stagnation, reaching English readers in the interregnum between Andropov's death and Gorbachev's arrival. Nothing in it dates from the world it was published into; there is no politics in it at all, no Congress, no five-year plan, no single Soviet name of the living. Its date shows only in two places: the age of its sources, and the Cold War geometry of its argument about where imagination is free and where it is not.
Who wrote it, and what was it for? Roset was a working academic psychologist, not an apparatus functionary. The internal evidence is plain: he published through Byelorussian and all-Union scientific channels — his earlier book What Is Heuristics came out in Minsk in 1969 — and his own list of papers, running from candidate's theses in 1963 through a string of psychological congresses into the mid-1970s, is the record of a genuine research career. He reads French, German and English psychology in the original and cites it copiously and, for the most part, fairly. The book was commissioned into Progress's respectable end: the export of real Soviet science, evidence to a Western scientific readership that Soviet psychology was a full participant in an international conversation rather than a closed ideological shop. On its own terms it makes that case. This is, by the standards of this series, a volume weighted heavily toward what can be rescued. Most of it is scholarship, and much of the scholarship is good.
The doctrine first, because it is the reason the book exists. Roset's thesis is materialist and rests on activity: imagination is not a special faculty, not a spark, not a visitation, but a form of mental work. His formal definition is deliberately wide — "we regard phantasy as any productive mental activity regardless of the sphere of its application" — and its point is polemical. It refuses to hand the creative act to any of the traditions that had made it a mystery. On one flank stands the idealist account, from Plato's divine inspiration through to Henri Bergson, whose élan vital Roset treats as the type-case of explaining creativity by an "extraordinary spontaneous creative power" that "controls all biological, psychological and historical processes" — which is to say, by naming the mystery grandly and stopping. On the other flank stands psychoanalysis, with its subconscious founts and its Jungian archetypes, which Roset files under the same error: a source of imagination placed beyond investigation and therefore beyond disproof. Against both he sets the materialist principle of cognition — "we draw our knowledge from the actual objective world around us" — and the corollary he takes from the empiricist tradition and from Soviet activity psychology alike: that the materials of any fantasy, however wild, are drawn from reality and recombined. He opens his historical survey not with Plato but with Lucretius, approvingly: the Epicurean who explained the centaur as the accidental adhesion of the images of man and horse, "a complete, though extremely naive, theory of phantasy," and pointedly materialist in "objecting to idealist Plato who maintained that only deities were endowed with the ability to create."
What lifts the book above routine ideological psychology is that Roset does not simply denounce his idealist and Freudian opponents; he weighs them. Psychoanalysis, he notes pointedly, was the one great modern school that "never underestimated the significance of phantasy," when the behaviourists and the Gestalt theorists ignored it entirely — and he grants the reductionist tradition its due, crediting it with a real motive: a wish "to rely on concrete and real data rather than on semi-mystical deep-rooted forces." His quarrel with recombination is not that it is materialist but that it is not enough. The classical picture — the mind as a kaleidoscope of stored elements, shaken into fresh designs, Livingston Welch subtracting the gold from a watch and adding it to a mountain to arrive at "a golden mountain, an object that I have never seen" — Roset shows to be, for all its mechanical clarity, "experimentally unfounded speculation," unable to predict which combination a mind will actually reach or why the genuinely new should ever emerge from mere reshuffling.
But Roset is too good a psychologist to rest where much Soviet writing rested, on recombination alone. The larger half of his book is an argument that recombination — the mind as kaleidoscope, shaking known elements into new patterns — cannot be the whole story, because a kaleidoscope only rearranges and never genuinely surprises. Here is his own contribution, and it is distinctive enough to name. Roset proposes that productive thought turns on two inner mechanisms of evaluation. In the first, which he calls anaxiomatization, the mind devalues some rule, constraint or established item of information — quietly drops a requirement it had been holding as fixed — and in that loosening a path opens that the rule had closed. In the second, hyperaxiomatization, the mind over-values a result it has reached, fastening onto it. Creativity, on this account, is "active shifting of evaluations": the ordinary furniture of a problem is demoted and promoted until a new arrangement becomes visible. The theory is unusual in taking the errors of thought as its royal road — Roset builds it from what he calls "negative facts," the systematic ways subjects in his experiments got tasks wrong by silently relaxing the instructions, and he argues at the close that he has managed a synthesis earlier theories missed, "combining the recognition of the objective laws of this process with the recognition of the subject's active role." Whether anaxiomatization is a real mechanism or a redescription is a question for psychologists; the terms have not entered the international literature. But the impulse is serious and the experimental work behind it is real, and a reader interested in the history of creativity research will find here a road not taken by the Western mainstream, argued with care.
The experiments that ground the theory have a homely ingenuity worth a moment. In one series Roset asked subjects to supply the opposite of a given word, on the pattern "day–night." Faced with a word that has no clean antonym — "forest" — they did not give up; they produced "desert" and "steppe" and "meadow" and "park," each opposed to forest along some single axis (no vegetation, a different vegetation, a man-made planting) while failing the strict instruction to find a true opposite. "Such answers reveal the subjects' wit," Roset notes, and the wit is the point: under the pressure of a task they could not literally solve, subjects quietly relaxed one constraint of the problem and solved the looser problem that remained — devaluing the demand for an exact opposite, which is anaxiomatization caught in the act. The error is not noise; it is the mechanism showing itself. It is a genuinely elegant way to make an invisible process visible, and it is Roset's own.
So the rescue is large and should be stated without hedging. Roset's command of the Western literature on creativity — Guilford, Torrance, Koestler, the Mednicks, Arnheim, Hadamard on mathematical invention, Lowes on Coleridge — is wide, current for its moment, and handled with respect rather than as a file of enemies. His central negative thesis, that the post-war "creativity" boom mostly redescribed old problems in new words and generated few genuinely new concepts, is a fair and even bracing judgement, and one plenty of Western psychologists came to independently. His insistence that imagination is continuous with thinking rather than a separate romantic faculty, and that it operates on abstract and verbal material and not only on pictures, is sound and well argued against Wundt. His experimental design — probing the intrinsic laws of a process through the shape of its failures — is genuinely ingenious. A reader who wants an intelligent, materialist, activity-based account of the creative act, sceptical of both mysticism and reductionism, will find one here. On the psychology, the book earns its place.
Which is what makes the other thing worth pointing to. This is a monograph about the freedom of the mind to break its own rules, written inside a state whose cultural machinery existed to stop minds from breaking the rules in public — and the book's one sustained encounter with that fact is a chapter in which the suppression of creativity is described at length and located, without exception, in capitalism. The reflexivity is worth handling lightly, because this is a science book and not a political tract, and Roset is not a propagandist by temperament. But the tell is unmistakable once seen, and it sits in his own footnotes.
In the chapter on the social factors of creativity, Roset assembles a long dossier — drawn almost entirely from Western psychologists writing about their own societies — on the forces that crush the creative person. Bourgeois education "turns out conformists"; leisure is passive and regimented to the same end; the whole of modern culture works "to adapt man to conventionalism"; scientific hierarchies resist new ideas from below and from outside; and the deepest obstacle is a society's "disposition for conventionalism and hostility toward the people who deviate from the established mode of thinking." He quotes Diderot's cynic on the newborn genius who must be "strangled to death." Every word of this is offered as a description of the West. And then, in a footnote, Roset guards the border explicitly. His Western sources, he complains, treat these pressures "as universal laws," when in fact "such an extrapolation of the peculiarities of the capitalist formation upon the other socio-political systems is not supported either by facts or logic." The suppression of the deviant mind is a property of capitalism; to imagine it could exist under socialism is an unwarranted extrapolation. He states this in 1984 — or rather writes it in the late 1970s — of the country of the Writers' Union, of Glavlit (the state censorship office), of samizdat (manuscripts self-copied and passed hand to hand because no press would print them), of the writers put on trial, expelled or driven abroad in the very decade his book surveys.
The mirror sharpens when Roset reaches the question of freedom directly. His Western authors, he notes, demand "psychological freedom" and "freedom of actions" for the creative person — and he faults them, correctly on his own logic, for stopping short: they "completely ignore not only the political freedom issue which may eventually create all the prerequisites for truly creative activity, but also the need to change the social system." It is exactly right. Political freedom is the precondition of creative freedom; a social order that polices thought will deform it. Roset writes the sentence as an indictment of the West and cannot turn it around. His own theory makes the failure legible. Anaxiomatization — the devaluing of an established rule so the new can appear — is precisely the mental act that Soviet cultural administration was built to forbid in art: the doctrine of socialist realism existed to keep certain "established verities" beyond devaluation. Roset even names conservatism's method in his enemy's society without hearing the echo: reactionary social pressure, he writes, produces "a devaluation of original ideas ... and, at the same time, hightened evaluation of the established verities." That is a definition of a censor's office, and it does not know it is one.
The reply the tradition would make does not need manufacturing, because it was made — by this publisher's own founders and on this series' own shelves. The deepest Marxist statement on the imagination is not one Roset quotes. He cites Marx four times, on abstraction and on language and on imagination as "a great gift," and Lenin once, that imagination "is needed even in mathematics." But he passes over the passage that grounds his whole thesis better than any of them: in Capital, Volume I, on the labour process, where Marx distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees by this — that the architect "raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality." There is the materialist, activity-based theory of imagination in one sentence: imagination as the ideal moment of human labour, the plan before the deed, rooted in practice and answerable to it. Roset's book is a long empirical elaboration of that sentence, and it would have been strengthened, not weakened, by standing on it openly.
On the social question the reply is sharper still, and it is already written in the companion volumes. Georgi Plekhanov, whom the Soviet state canonised as the father of its own aesthetics and whose Selected Philosophical Works this series republishes, laid down in Art and Social Life (1912–13) the principle Roset's footnote denies: that political authority "always prefers the utilitarian view of art," the demand that art serve a purpose set for it, because it wants "to harness all ideologies to the service of the cause which it serves itself" — and that this demand for commanded art is most often the reflex of a "conservative and even reactionary" power. Plekhanov's own psychology of art holds that the artist thinks in images that arise unbidden; and an image that arises unbidden cannot be issued to order. To command it is to abolish it. The suppression of the deviant mind is not, as Roset's footnote insists, a peculiarity of the capitalist formation. It is the oldest habit of power, and the founder on Progress's shelf had already said so. The point is documented in this series' introductions to A. Zis's Foundations of Marxist Aesthetics (Progress, 1977) — which founds a compulsory creative method while noting that no one could say where Marx, Engels or Lenin ever prescribed it — and to Felix Kuznetsov's Of Human Values (Progress, 1980), written by the Moscow Writers' Union secretary who, twelve months before his book on literary conscience appeared, had publicly branded an anthology of uncensored fiction "pornography of the spirit." The Fourth International recorded the machinery as it operated: Ernest Mandel, in "Purge of Soviet Culture" (Fourth International, vol. 10 no. 11, December 1949), catalogued the axioms then binding on Soviet writers — "There are no conflicts in a classless society" — and named the editors removed for letting Akhmatova voice "loneliness ... foreign to Soviet literature." That is anaxiomatization forbidden by decree: the devaluing of an official verity, made a punishable act.
None of this convicts Roset of bad faith, and the introduction should not pretend it does. He was a serious psychologist doing serious work on a real problem, and the parts of his book that stay inside the laboratory are the parts to keep. What the book cannot do is turn its own instrument on the society that produced it. It offers a theory of the free, rule-breaking, deviating imagination, and a diagnosis of the social forces that strangle it, and then rules by footnote that those forces stop at the Soviet frontier. The theory of creative freedom never once meets the standing constraints on creative freedom that surrounded its author as he wrote. Read it for the psychology, which is genuine. Read the footnote for what a science of imagination looks like when it is not permitted to imagine the one case nearest to hand.