By Hartwig Schiller. Images are created in the life of the human imagination. They vary in character and are as much connected with personal and individual prerequisites as with the characteristics of general human development. The experience of nature, cultural products or historical processes produce different images, as do a person’s frame of mind, but also age, location and spiritual identity. The contemporary world, for example, forms a general background to the soul life and is involved alongside other significant influences in the creation of ideas. The individual constitutional nature of an individual also plays a considerable part. If we ask a nine-year-old child what a fairy tale hero looks like then he is, of course, handsome, tall and good, and similar to mother, father or a sibling. In a choleric child he will assume traits of decisiveness and strength, in a melancholic child empathy and depth. There are even adults who find it difficult to accept that Rudolf Steiner was a rather small, slim person. Something always intervenes in the development of ideas which comes from unconscious regions of the will. Importance in that context tends to correspond with a physically imposing presence.Images make life humanThe drawings of small children reveal the origins of their pictorial quality. We see whirls, intersections, “cephalopods”, rhythmical repetition and other characteristic images of their physical and psychological development. The representations show an unconscious image of inner processes. One of the most important art theorists of the nineteenth century, Konrad Fiedler, put it like this: “All art is development of imagination, as all thinking is development of concepts.” And nothing shows the development of the way the child understands images better than the field of art. Children’s understanding of images frees itself from the body between the ages of five and seven. Their play becomes freer and in role play, for example, uses many different aspects of the imagination. People and things can change to represent a great variety of different things from one minute to the next. At the same time memory begins to develop significantly. It changes from the recognition of references based in experience to free references related to subjects and motifs.
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