Abstract

This paper explores the core characteristics of Vratislav Effenberger’s theoretical system, highlighting his perspective on the significance of imagination in ideological thinking. It provides background and an overview of Effenberger’s concept of ideology, outlines the Surrealist notion of imagination, and presents the author’s methodological connection of Surrealism, psychoanalysis, and Prague Structuralism. Effenberger emerges as a thinker dedicated to bridging the gap between the modernist (primarily avant-garde) interpretation of the world and the postmodern tendencies evident from the mid-20th century onwards. In Effenberger’s terms, ideology is an approach to reality that aims to grasp it as at least a potentially meaningful totality and engages in the actualization of this meaning or totality in social and psychological practice. He argues that such an approach is closely linked with avant-garde thought, which, for various reasons, has diminished in significance since the Second World War. In place of prior unifying perspectives, relativism and skepticism have become more dominant. However, Effenberger contends that integrative inclinations remain alive in human thought in the form of “idea models” found in the field of “psychoideology”—the realm of preconscious thought formation. These idea models play a pivotal role in psychoideology, nurturing the dialectics of imaginative and conceptual reasoning, which are vital for fostering innovation and creative endeavors.