What Not Having Mental Imagery Implies for Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Our Sense of Self

Some people see things in a way that carries shape, color. A scene can be summoned and even consciously altered. For others, this does not happen at all. Closing one’s eyes does not produce a mental picture but something closer to darkness. What has come to be called “aphantasia,” coined in 2015, names this condition. Many people only discover it by accident, often after encountering descriptions like MacFarquhar’s and realizing that a basic idiom has been misunderstood their entire lives. It is not just that minds differ, but that we have been speaking past one another, taking metaphor for fact or fact for metaphor.

I recognized myself immediately. When I read, I do not picture characters or scenes; it would never occur to me to do so. The words, as one of MacFarquhar’s interviewees put it, tunnel “directly into the mind.” The visual world drops out, giving way to something more verbal and spatial than pictorial—like navigating a terrain without ever seeing it. One aphantasic described their memory as a kind of echolocation, like those river dolphins who, living in muddy water, have lost most of their sight. 

My absence of images does not foreclose imagination. Images can impose themselves—in dreams, in flashes—nor does it eliminate attachment or feeling, though it may alter their texture. There is, perhaps, something to be said for a degree of blurriness in memory: a softening of edges that allows one to forgive others, and oneself. (I also eventually remembered more in psychoanalysis.) But this raises an unsettling question: If much of what we take to be memory, selfhood, even desire is bound up with images—what happens when those images are not there? 

MacFarquhar places aphantasia alongside its apparent opposite, hyperphantasia, where mental imagery is vivid, immersive, and sometimes inescapable. Here, imagination can become a kind of atmosphere one inhabits—rich, generative, but also difficult to regulate, even to distinguish from reality. Images linger and return unbidden. If aphantasia risks a certain distance from experience, hyperphantasia risks its opposite: an overproximity, where what is imagined carries the force of what is real. (Mind you, psychoanalysis began with what Freud described as daydreaming women. Today, TikTok calls them maladaptive daydreamers.)  

Freud’s psychic map doesn’t quite bifurcate the personality between the imaginers and non-imaginers, the men from Mars and the women from Venus. Well, maybe it is a little of the latter since the way sexuality (oh-so-stuffed with images of gender) affects us is rather important to Freud. In his universal picture of mental functioning, we are in fact on a moebius strip that moves from aphantasia to hyperphantasia, tracing the unstable passage between words and images, thought and hallucination, memory and fantasy:

My explanation of hallucinations in hysteria and paranoia and of visions in mentally normal subjects is that they are in fact regressions—that is, thoughts transformed into images—but that the only thoughts that undergo this transformation are those which are intimately linked with memories that have been suppressed or have remained unconscious. 

Freud was deeply struck by the proximity of language-based thinking to the murky environment of the unconscious. He turns most dream images back into linguistic puns to search for deeper repressed layers. In a near-death experience at a young age, he recounts the awareness of danger immediately taking two forms: words shouted in his ear with “indistinct sound images and slight lip movements” along with their visible counterpart written on a piece of paper floating before his eyes saying, This is the End. 

If there is a spectrum between aphantasia and hyperphantasia, for Freud it is a shifting field of representation lurking above the surface of what we psychoanalysts think of as the Real chaotic experience of reality—trauma, knowledge of mortality, overwhelm. Like Freud’s late ideas about mourning the loss of a loved one: to accept their death, every connection—our images, memories, ideas, affects (from guilt and shame, to love and blame)—must be gone over in the mind and released into darkness. Apparently, we would rather do anything than that. I called MacFarquhar to go further down the phantasia rabbit hole.   

I have aphantasia. Have you diagnosed yourself?

I’m not aphantasic or hyperphantasic, and there’s not really any reliable way to figure out where you are on the spectrum between the two poles. Based on the epiphenomena of aphantasia, I feel like I’m probably closer to that end of the spectrum. My memory is not very good; my facial recognition is not that great. I’ve never pictured fictional characters when I read, so I think I’m probably closer to that, but I definitely have imagery. Who knows? In 2010, when I was interviewing a philosopher, Derek Parfit, he mentioned that he doesn’t have any visual imagery. He said, “I can’t picture my wife when she’s out of the room.” I was stunned by this and thought, Well, faces are difficult and complicated. “How about the flag? Can you picture the flag?” He replied, “No, nothing.” 

Shocked, I went back to my hotel room and started researching, but because it was 2010, I found nothing except Sir Francis Galton who asked about the mental images (or lack of them) scientists used. It stayed in the back of my mind, and then years later, I was interviewing a political activist in North Carolina, and he was describing the opposite—a form of memory where not just your past, but all the facts you know, you see visually in a kind of hologram—an ellipse around your body.

Like a memory palace?

A memory palace is something that you consciously construct to memorize things. For the activist I interviewed, it’s more involuntary. He just experiences his memory in this ellipse around his body. It was a mixed blessing. He was still living in the place where he grew up and he was continually haunted. To escape, he spent some time in his 20s in the desert out west because he craved emptiness.

Then there [was] this third thing. One evening, I was having dinner with two old friends. One is a very serious pianist, and she was saying that whenever she plays the piano, she sees the room filled with colors. Of course, I knew what that is—synesthesia. But the striking thing was that afterwards she said, “I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned that before.” That was completely shocking. This was something so important to her life, this deeply beautiful and emotional thing, yet she’d never mentioned it before—not because she was embarrassed by it, but because it had just never come up.

Right before I read your piece, I had an experience with a patient where I got frustrated. He was always creating images that would inevitably lead to incredible disappointment—yet he would still insist on imagining them. He was a daydreamer of sorts. I know this idea is important to Freud, and yet, I thought, How do you live like this? I realized my frustration was rooted in difference. 

Adam Zeman, the neurologist who coined the term aphantasia, pointed out to me that the condition doesn’t just affect how much you’re able to live in the past, but also how much you encounter the future. All the aspects of having imagery sound good at first, but they can turn out to have quite significant negative aspects. As you’ve pointed out, always envisioning the future is not necessarily a good thing. When you found out that you have aphantasia, what did you think about it? What kinds of realizations did you have?

I didn’t have a lot of memories, which I always sort of chalked up to trauma, but I got memories back over the course of analysis. I realized while reading your piece that my memories were always spatial. I would remember a space or placements of things. I was always reconstructing a landscape, but without it really being imagistic.

You talked in your piece about aphantasic reading. I read incredibly quickly and digest huge amounts of material. And reading saved me, probably because I lived in a kind of blankness. One could say school is a good thing, but there was something more to it, almost constitutionally—that school was the right thing for me. When I realized I had aphantasia, I reflected on how I always thought I had a photographic memory. For example, when I took tests, I would make notes, and I could see what I wrote on the page because I knew where I had written it. But it’s not a photograph; it’s a spatial memory. 

When I trained myself as a psychoanalyst to listen to patients, I developed a compartment for them. You can’t just walk around with all that material. Luckily, I can store massive amounts of information about patients. I don’t have access to it except when I’m with the patient in my office; it suddenly all appears to me. Sometimes it freaks my patients out because I remember the most insane things—and I don’t take notes.

That’s interesting. Even though I do have imagery, I’m not a very visual person. It never struck me as important. I was just never interested in my own imagery, unlike hyperphantasics, for whom it’s endlessly fascinating. From what you’re saying, your mind almost sounds like computer files: The storage of information and words takes up less space than storage of imagery, so you can put more into your mind. 

I tried to think about how this maps onto Freud. He has a kind of system where images are at the top of consciousness, then in a lower layer of consciousness is the verbal, spatial, and then there’s the unconscious. Word representations are the basis of the translation into images. So, he questions all conscious images, and he even questions dream images, because he thinks they’re constructed out of words. 

I would think that images are more primal than words. I wonder, was Freud aphantasic, or at least, was one of the revolutionary things he did to reverse the order?

That was his great intervention in psychology: that whatever the most primal thing is, it’s not anything that is either visual, as we know it, or linguistic material, as we speak it, and with which we organize our realities. What that more primal thing is—we don’t know. It must be much stranger and much more chaotic. We can have some idea of it in dreams, because it’s not just that dreams are visual. They can be many things—they can be auditory, or just a sensation in the body. They often are more real than reality. 

Was he not interested in the pre-verbal? 

We know the brain changes, which is always the moment Freud marked—around 6—around the consolidation of language, the changing of the representational system of the mind, and repression. Of course children would have pre-verbal experiences, but he’s basically saying that everything is coded verbally backwards after that point in time.

But you recognize things and you dream in images, but you don’t have them voluntarily accessible to you in waking life? As a psychoanalyst, what do you make of that? Where are they?

I don’t know. This is what I find so strange. You say, can you imagine a red glowing orb? Can you turn it to the left and make it shoot a green light? I’m like, What? I guess I could do that, but it doesn’t feel real and palpable in the way that you describe people having images. In the aphantasic network, which I signed up for—they bomb me with emails—they ask, do you have a dim, blurry image? I feel like maybe I have that. Or I can construct something out of pictures of pictures, but it’s not my mental image. So when you say, can you picture the American flag? I see Robert Mapplethorpe’s flag.

So you can see something?

Yes, but I see Robert Mapplethorpe’s picture of a flag.

So you’re probably not aphantasic.

Well, maybe I’m not on the most extreme end, but I still feel like it’s a picture of a picture. It doesn’t belong to me.

I discovered in reading about this that it’s not just about vividness or brightness; it’s also about the ability to manipulate—an ability to do things with the image—and the ability to choose what you see. It’s easier to see a representation of something—to see a picture of a flag, or if you see a person, you may picture a photograph of them rather than the person themselves, because it’s fixed. It’s easier. It requires less conjuring ability. I think that makes sense.

I was reading Jung for the first time with this artist Precious Okoyomon, who, by the way, is also aphantasic. I told her I was transgressing a real prohibition by my Freudian training not to read Jung. He’s obviously hyperphantasic—the visions and imagistic way he describes his life, even at 4 years old. This informed his whole system. So is Freud vs. Jung an aphantasic-hyperphantasic showdown? And what are the therapeutic consequences of someone who’s one way and someone who’s another? 

This is the thing that intrigues and haunts me: If this very central and important difference between us has really only been recognized since 2015—which is incredible—then of course there must be dozens of other things that we have not yet pinned down, even though they’re hiding in plain sight. This is not an obscure and rarely encountered feature of the mind. This is something present in all of us every day.

Like trauma. Why some people can experience the same traumatic event, and then only some have difficult sequelae from it. And those sequelae are very various. Some experience a radical severing at the moment of trauma from themselves and from life. Other people can’t stop imagining it. So one would be a hyperphantasic reaction; another would be more aphantasic—whether it goes into blackness or into repetitive and intrusive imaging.

It does seem that aphantasia is somewhat protective against trauma. One of the problems for people with trauma is that if they are aphantasic, they may not be diagnosed correctly with PTSD, because the criteria are very much centered on visual memories of the event. 

If we are an image-based culture, do we privilege hyperphantasia? 

I actually feel like our culture is more textual than ever. Perhaps slightly less now, with people scrolling TikTok and Instagram instead of reading texts and emails, but certainly pre-iPhone, people were reading and writing more than ever before in human history. So the idea that we have an image-based culture doesn’t seem completely right to me. I think the significance of the present moment is less TikTok or Instagram or social media in general, and more the iPhone and photographs. That is such a powerful prosthetic—not only for people with aphantasia, but for all of us who don’t have photographic memories of our past. 

One startling claim is the relationship to one’s sense of self. Visual imagery seems to create a greater attachment to one’s sense of self, to one’s past, to one’s autobiography. And on the extreme end of aphantasia, there’s very little sense of self, very little autobiographical memory, and almost the potential to live completely in the present. 

Derek Parfit, who was the first aphantasic I encountered, organized his philosophy around the idea that selves are not very important—that there is no hermetically sealed individual. That’s a very Buddhist idea, and he just doesn’t think that’s what matters. He’s certainly not interested in his own self. It’s a way of being, and I don’t think it’s better or worse. Maybe if I were Buddhist I would think it was better, but it’s exciting to me that there is this very deep difference between people. Do you think some people might be repressing imagery attached to memories, traumatic or otherwise?

I would think of hyperphantasia and aphantasia as both defenses. We constantly ask questions about the difference between images and words. When someone has an image, you try to translate it into language. When someone has language, you might ask about it in a way that prompts memories or material that might be more visual. We’re trying to move back and forth between these, seeing it as a process of translation, as a way of loosening things.

What about people who are congenitally blind? Where does this leave them if they have no visual sense whatsoever?

There have been amazing studies on the blind by psychoanalysts, a lot of which got lost to history. But we know that some congenitally blind people have something that seems to approximate images. We also know that those images are constructed on the basis of a more symbolic matrix.

Jacques Lacan has this concept called the mirror stage. It’s about your relationship to your visual image—how you construct a sense of your whole body through an image of yourself from the outside, and in reverse. He says this stands in contrast to the immaturity and chaos of the child at that stage, who attaches to this visual image. Psychoanalysts often talk about what it means to get stuck in that image of yourself—an image that is outside of you and backwards. 

One of Adam Zeman’s collaborators, a French scientist named Bérengère Digard, has prosopagnosia—difficulty recognizing faces. What we don’t realize is how many cues we use to recognize people besides their faces—clothing, hair, voice, even smell. She said it becomes difficult when someone changes their appearance, like getting a haircut without warning. Here’s the remarkable part: She said that if she’s in a crowd near a floor-to-ceiling mirror—like in a hotel—she won’t know which person is her. Of course, in a bathroom mirror, where she’s alone, she knows it’s her. But in a group, she can’t identify her own reflection. Don’t you, as a psychoanalyst, feel that everything is a form of misrecognition?

Yes, I suppose so.

Further Phantasias 

Jayne Bigelsen and Tina Kelley on maladaptive day dreaming

Nuar Alsadir on the analyst Wilfred R. Bion and his (aphantasic?) patient Samuel Beckett 

A series on repression in Lacanian psychoanalysis (parts I, II, and III)

Katie Heaney on the memory wars

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