ACT and Image: The Emergence of Symbolic Imagination

By Warren Colman

How did humans develop the capacity for symbolic imagination?

In this ground-breaking book, Warren Colman provides a reformulation of archetypal symbols as emergent from humans' embodied and affective engagement with their social and material environment. Beginning with the oldest known figurative image in the world, the 40,000-year-old Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel in Germany, he traces the emergence of symbolic imagination through the origins of language, the growth of human sociality and co-operation, and the creative use of material objects, from the earliest stone tools through the cave paintings and figures of Upper Paleolithic Europe and beyond. This leads to a consideration of how the imaginal world of the spirit may have come into being, not as separate from the material world but through active participation within a world alive with meaning.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0367862670
• ISBN13: 9780367862671
• Release Date: April 2021
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 330 Pages