Imagination and Empathy: Coalescence, Transfer and Embodiment

Abstract

Empathy calls for the ability to transform another’s attitudes by a perceptive, cognitive and affective transposition. By its extraordinary capacity of  generating images, of vitalizing performances and of turning them into certainties and beliefs, by its distorting quality (ensuring and enabling both the  selection and joining of images that belong to the subject’s previous experience and the generation of new images that are not matched in actual reality),  the actor’s imagination creates and projects in front of the spectator fictional, fantastic realities, which go beyond the perceptible reality, which provide  alternatives to reality, by defying the borders of verisimilitude and by exploring not only the possible, but also the impossible.