IMAGINATIVE AND NARRATIVE MANIFESTATIONS OF THE SUBJECT’S LIMINALITY

Abstract

The article presents a theoretical analysis of the imaginative and narrative manifestations of subpersonalities in the structure of liminality of an adult subject based on the study of psychosynthesis as well as provides their classification. As a starting point in the study, the author considers the distinction between personal and subjective levels of liminality, in the development of which liminal states periodically arise. Awareness of these states is an identification uncertainty in which the subject of self-knowledge objectifies the protective and survival subpersonalities through imaginative and narrative forms of expression as an unreflected identification with them. A comparative analysis of the psychosynthesis concepts selected theoretical ideas of R. Assagioli, and current psychological research has shown that the imaginative and narrative manifestations of subpersonalities, as a result of disidentification by the conscious self, are objectified as integral objects that are realized in monologic or dialogic inner speech. It is emphasized that the experience of imaginations and narratives is a simultaneous process, the disidentification with which indicates the subjective level of the development of liminality. The author provides a rationale for dividing imaginative and narrative manifestations of liminality into factual and counterfactual or nostalgic-fantasy ones. Factual forms of liminality are divided into defensive (falsely positive by content) and survival (falsely negative). Counterfactual manifestations serve a compensatory function: they are an unconscious attempt to overcome the divergence between survival and protective manifestations, which leads to the narrowing of the time perspective of self-change or the so-called experience of “life on pause”. Within the framework of the problem of liminality's manifestations, the author identifies the issues of personality unchangeability, fear of the future, and existential anxiety as personal predictors of threshold self-knowledge at the stage of the liminal pause's completion.