A report prepared by Anna Abraham

On the miserably cold and wet day that was the 16th of March of this year in West Yorkshire, a group of grownups, mostly strangers to one another, assembled together at Leeds Beckett University. The gathering was decidedly mixed, with people hailing from a variety of educational and sociocultural backgrounds, and included members of each circle of the academic world from first year undergraduates to seasoned professors. The congregation had two things in common. All studied, worked or lived in North England. And everyone was there to learn about the human imagination.

A post by Anna Abraham.

A 1969 treatise by Jeremy Walker begins as follows. “One of the most striking features of nearly all philosophical psychologies has been their failure to deal at all adequately with imagination … This 'conspiracy of silence' is puzzling, and I can think of no hypothesis to account for it. For it cannot be denied that imagination is a power, or web of powers, which plays a central part in the structure of human activity and consciousness; and so a failure to consider this power adequately must lead to a philosopher's giving a distorted, or one-sided, account of the distinctively human. For the powers of imagination are clearly related in a close and complex way with the other central human powers, such as belief, the passions, intention and the will. And it follows that any philosopher who systematically underplays the role of imagination must at some point introduce a corresponding distortion into his account of, say, the role of belief or the role of intention in human affairs” (Walker, 1969: 575).

Substitute the term ‘philosopher’ with ‘psychologist’ in this passage, and the accusation holds water. Down to the present day.