Table Of ContentIMAGINATIVE PARTICIPATION
IMAGINATIVE
PARTICIPATION
The Career of an Organizing Concept
in a Multidisciplinary Context
by
BEDRICH BAUMANN
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. 1975
© 1975 by Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
OriginalIy published byM artinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlandins 1975
AII rights reserved, including the righl to Iranalate or
to reproduce this book or parIs thereof in any form
ISBN 978-94-017-4626-7 ISBN 978-94-017-4871-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-4871-1
"When man lives at all, he lives in his ima
gination, and through it, in the minds of
other men"
R. PARK
"If one says that all one is interested in is
the study of behaviour ""pure and simple"",
then one is not studying persons"
R.D. LAING
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe so much to so many. In the process of conceiving this study,
of its growth in format and substance, down to its completion, many
people have helped in multiple ways.
I am happy to record my great indebtedness to R.F. Dymond's
"Empathic Ability, an Exploratory Study", an unpublished Ph. D.
thesis presented to Cornell University in 1949, and to this university for
having put a copy of the thesis at my disposal.
Acknowledgments are due to the editor of History and Theory (1963),
Wesleyan University Press, Connecticut, for permission to quote from
M. Walzer's article "Puritanism as a Revolutionary Ideology", and to
Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., for permission to quote from
E.P. Torrance's Guiding Creative Talent. (1964).
I am obliged to Miss Mary Rakoczy who proofread the first version
of my manuscript, and to Ian Coulter, as student at the University of
Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and later as colleague at
Laurentian University, for the thoughtful and critical way in which
he read the early writing.
My colleagues and the Department of Sociology at the Laurentian have
aided me in many ways, enabling me to work without interruption,
themselves shouldering many tasks which would have otherwise fallen
as trees across my path.
Near the end of my ordeal I was fortunate to have found that my
friend and colleague John Rutherford was as intensely engaged in the
cause of social science as he is in that of history. To him I am indebted
for much perceptive and assiduous mental labour. His reading of my
work and the encouragement he gave helped me to rewrite my approxi
mative English and to make revisions in the Introduction, Chapters I,
2, 7 and the Conclusion.
Last but not least, special mention is reserved for my wife Vera, who
VIII ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
did all the typing. She has seen my work through since the beginning
with a patience, an empathy and an understanding that belies her
manuscript widowhood.
I am grateful for a patient and careful checking of my manuscript,
whose original version left much to be desired, by the editors of Martinus
Nijhoff, The Hague.
There is a limit beyond which the aid and timely advice rendered
by these and other people cannot be carried. I am, as author, alone
responsible for the presentation and interpretation of all findings,
ideas and insights, as well as for what defects and limitations the final
manuscript bears.
Laurentian University
Sudbury, Ontario
November 1973 BEDRICH BAUMANN
CONTENTS
Introduction. XI
Part one
1) Multidisciplinary Context of Sociology and Social Psychology 1
2) Problems of Theory and Method: Sensitizing Concepts,
Personal Documents 26
Part two
3) Verstehen and Related Constructs 37
4) Role-Taking and Related Concepts 56
5) Processes Involved in, and Related to, Role-Taking 79
a) Empathy 83
b) Sympathy • 87
c) Internalization 88
d) Identification 90
e) Projection 91
f) Sensitivity . 91
g) Insight . 92
6) Imagination . 95
Part three
7) Imaginative Participation in History . 112
8) Imaginative Participation in Literature and Drama 141
9) Imaginative Participation in Psychiatry 163
Conclusion . 185
INTRODUCTION
I am Czech. In 1948 I graduated from ancient Charles' University
at Prague. In 1970 I came to Canada, the country of my choice, from
New Zealand where I had taught two years at the University of Canter
bury in Christchurch. This work was begun after I left Europe. It is
intended as contribution to contemporary sociological and social psy
chological theory, or theories.
For a very long time in my native country I was intellectually a Jack
of-all-trades. Before coming to sociology I spent two decades of study
and research in the fields of philosophy, history and imaginative literature.
Looking back I view this not as wasted time, but as an extraordinary
introduction to the study of society, of man in society and of society
in man. There are many links between these areas of scientific inquiry
which I would not have been able to make had I not had this multi
disciplinary experience.
In each of my lives, past and present, I have been for a number of
reasons marginal to my fellow men, marginal in several respects. In my
native land I refused to conform to the line of the ruling political party.
I became a "non-person" in all that implies in a totalitarian regime.
In New Zealand, and later in Canada, I found myself a member of a
minuscule ethnic group. The difficulties experienced have been a mixed
blessing. On one hand my lack of linguistic sophistication as well as
other problems of misadaptation posed and gave birth to numerous
personal dilemmas, some of which have reinforced my understanding
of some eminent self, language, role, identity, and marginality analysts.
As a consequence these and related concepts became gradually filled
with the substance of life in new lands amidst my discovery of new
peoples and new friends. On the other hand, I was able to look at many
problems outside Europe from the privileged position of a "stranger"
(G. Simmel).
XII INTRODUCTION
Although this work represents several years of intensive study away
from Europe, I remain European. In a way I feel hopelessly ethnocentric.
This does not prevent me from acknowledging my indebtedness to two
distinctively American sources which have shaped my growth both
in research and in teaching : to the writings of George H. Mead, and
to those of his successor at the University of Chicago, Herbert Blumer.
The central topic of this study is role-taking, a concept found in the
borderland between sociology and social psychology. In utility of appli
cation and in implications it is multidisciplinary.
Part I (chapter 1,2) outlines the theoretical and methodological orien
tation of the author. Sociology and social psychology, which provide
the main disciplinary frames of reference, are regarded as closely related
to philosophy, history, art and literature. Sensitizing concepts and
personal documents are considered as privileged instruments on how
scientists approach, analyse and interpret subjective reality, a component,
integral part of which is imagination.
Part II (chapter 3) discusses Verstehen, the definition of the situation,
and related constructs which mark a significant shift on the part of the
classics of sociology from the emphasis on objective aspects of social
reality to its subjective dimensions. These constructs form a basis for
the complex processes which the present writer has chosen to term
imaginative participation. The concept serves a double function.
Role-taking is examined in its relation with other processes of imagi
native participation (chapter 4,5), since imagination is the concept
toward which they converge (chapter 6). In this respect the concept of
imaginative participation is dealt with as an organizing concept (R. Bain).
In Part III the career of imaginative participation as a sensitizing
concept (H. Blumer) is traced in selected problem areas of history and
literature, and, still more selectively, in those of psychiatry (chapter 7,8,9).
The concluding chapter of the study attempts to assess in more general
terms the assets and the liabilities involved in the main ideas and insights
under discussion.
Underlying this study is the conviction that "reality" is an ongoing
accomplishment of the concerted activities of both social scientists and
daily life. This is in contrast to certain versions or rather interpretations
of Durkheim which would have it that sociology's fundamental aim
is the search for an objective reality composed of "facts". What people
generally call "reality" is for the writer-much as for other, more
excellent authors-a working orientation over which there is a high
degree of consensus. In other words, reality is largely a social process,
