Comedian and children’s author David Walliams recently said that the make-believe companions of his childhood were still with him. “They’re still my friends – they’re not imaginary, are they?”
Being a psychotherapist with no sense of humour, I am going to answer Walliams’s question seriously.
Humans are meaning-making creatures. One of the ways we do this is by projecting different parts of our personalities on to each other, on to animals and objects, and on to figments of our imagination. So yes, imaginary friends are imaginary, but also real, because they represent real parts of you. My late father could not bear to feel vulnerable, so when you asked him how he was, he always said “fine”. If you wanted to know how he really was, you asked him how the dog was. He would then tell you something like: “Oh, the dog’s depressed since I broke my hip.” The part of him he could not recognise in himself he projected on to the dog.
Children do not even need a thing like a dog to hold their feelings as they are less self-conscious about something having to appear real. For example, when my daughter was small, I collected her from nursery school one day and the teacher said she seemed out of sorts since her goldfish had died. I was puzzled, because our family had never had a goldfish. However, my beloved aunt had recently died and I was in mourning. I believe that my child could handle the death of a goldfish, but this massive, terrible thing of my bereavement needed to be reduced to the value of a goldfish for her to be able to conceive of it. She also had an invisible friend called Biddie, who was, apparently, a mouse who got up to all sorts of adventures and had plenty of feelings. I think Biddie was too precious to kill off when my aunt died, so she invented a much less cuddly creature, a goldfish, who was sacrificed to help her make sense of what was going on.
Our feelings are real, we know that because we feel them. If it helps us to make sense of them to put them on to characters, and give those creatures adventures, let’s not get too hung up about whether they are real or not.
