Imagine the Feeling: An Aesthetic Science of Psychology

We claim that static trait models have dominated contemporary personality psychology but fail to reflect adequately the persons they depict. Beginning from, but moving well beyond, this critique of the five factor model (and the personality psychology field over which it reigns), we shine an aesthetic and critical light on psychology's wider failings. We review the linguistic and methodological features that have undermined the discipline's faithful understandings of human beings and their experience. In its place, we champion an aesthetic (as opposed to an an-esthetic) science of the person, one that is responsive in spirit and in practice to the emotional and imaginative life of participants and to the contexts in which they move. Specifically, we suggest that the images of fantasy and of ordinary metaphor may afford poetic understandings of participant experience that surpass those produced by literal, discursive description. We also hold that these images may offer us the most sensitive and faithful expressions of how social and environmental contexts-and so-called structural and discursive realities-are felt. The paper concludes by sketching several methodological trajectories that may stimulate researcher imagination and empathy, making research more faithful to participants and the reaches of their experience. Research practices informed by feeling and image in this way may generate new knowledge as well as new obligations.