The imagination plays a central role for all forms of social and cultural action and its concentration in human and world images. Using images, diagrams, models, etc., it controls the human behaviour and action. Images are defining moments of the action, whose significance is constantly increasing. This leads to the question what makes an image and what types of images can be distinguished. For example, mental images can be distinguished from manually and technically generated images, as well as moving and non-moving images.

The imagination is of fundamental importance not only in global art. It plays an important role in the genesis of the Homo sapiens sapiens and its cultures. References to the aesthetic design of bone scrapers can be traced back several hundred thousand years (Wulf 2014). People’s access to the world and the world’s access to the «inner» person takes place using the imagination in the form of images.

A distinction can be made between magical images, representative images and simulated images. The magical images have no reference connection; they are what they portray. The statue of the «Golden Calf» is the holy thing; with a relic the body part of the holy thing is the holy thing. The situation is different for representative images which are often based on mimetic processes. They refer to something which they portray themselves or are not. Photos are included here which show situations which are the past and not the present. Simulated images are images which have become possible with the new processes of electronic media and are playing an increasing role in the lives of people. The difference between the perceived and the mental images is important. Each presentation is an expression of the fact that an object is missing. This is obvious for souvenir pictures and future projections. The perceived images based on existing objects have an influence on both.

Pathological images, visions and dreams also differ to perceived and souvenir pictures. In all cases the imagination is involved in the creation of the images. With help of the imagination mental or «inner» worlds of images emerge, in which emotions are crystallised. The dynamics of the imagination combines people and creates a sense of community. Its ludic character creates connections between images and new images can emerge.

With help of mimetic processes individuals, communities and cultures create the imaginary. This can be understood as a materialised world of images, sounds, touch, smell and taste. It is the precondition that people perceive the world in a historically and culturally influenced manner. The imagination remembers and creates, combines and projects images. It creates reality. At the same time, the reality helps the imagination to create images. The images of the imagination have a dynamic character structuring the perception, memory and future. The networking of the images follows the dialectic and rhythmical movements of the imagination. Not only everyday life, but also literature, art and performing arts, obtain an inexhaustible memory of images. Some appear to be stable and hardly changeable. In contrast, others are subject to the historic and cultural change. The imagination has a symbolising dynamic, which continuously creates new meanings and uses images for this purpose. Interpretations of the world are developed using these images created by the imagination (Hüppauf, and Wulf 2009; Wulf 2018).

In contrast to the general use of the concept of the imaginary, Jacques Lacan primarily emphasises the delusional character of the imaginary. Desires, wishes and passion play a central role here in that people cannot escape from the imaginary. For them there is no direct relationship to the real world. As a speaking entity, people can only develop a fractured relationship with the real world via the symbolic order and the imagination. With its help they can try to hold their own ground against the forces of the imaginary. «The socially effective imaginary is an internal world which has a strong tendency to shut itself off and develop to some extent an infinite immanence; in contrast, the human fantasy, imagination, is the only power capable of forcing open the enclosed spaces and can temporarily exceed it, because it is identical to the discontinuous phenomenon of time» (Kamper 1986, p. 32f.). This compulsive character of the imaginary creates the limits of human life and development opportunities. This clarification of the compulsive character of the imaginary is so important, it only makes up one part of the range of meanings, which describes the diversity and ambivalence of cultural visual knowledge according to the opinion expressed here.