Imaginary characters

There is a city that exists in the mind of every human being, invisible to satellites and census takers, yet densely populated and fiercely active.

Its citizens are the imaginary characters, the figures we invent, inherit, dream, and converse with when no one else is present. They are the heroes of childhood games, the voices of novels, the gods of myth, the mascots of brands, the digital avatars of virtual worlds, and the silent companions of solitude.

To study imaginary characters is to study one of the most extraordinary capacities of the human mind: the ability to create persons who do not exist, to make them walk and speak and suffer and choose, and then to treat them, at least for a time, as if they were real.

This capacity is not a quirk of madness or a luxury of leisure. It is fundamental to consciousness, culture, and the very possibility of empathy.

The Psychology of Invention

The human mind does not wait for permission to populate itself. From the earliest years, children invent companions—imaginary friends with names, personalities, preferences, and histories. Research by developmental psychologists has shown that up to two-thirds of children create such figures, and that the practice is associated with enhanced creativity, narrative skill, and emotional regulation. The imaginary friend is not a symptom of loneliness, though lonely children may create them; it is a technology of the developing mind, a way of externalizing internal processes, practicing social interaction, and exploring the boundaries of the self.

The child who argues with her imaginary friend is rehearsing conflict resolution. The child who comforts an imaginary creature in distress is practicing empathy. The child who assigns her imaginary companion a different gender, age, or temperament is experimenting with identity. The imaginary character is a sandbox for the psyche, a safe space where the rules of reality are relaxed and the possibilities of being are expanded. When the child outgrows the visible companion, the habit does not disappear; it goes underground, emerging in daydreams, in the internal monologue, in the identification with fictional figures in books and films.

Adults, too, maintain a private population of imaginary characters, though they rarely admit it. The entrepreneur who imagines the conversation with a future investor, rehearsing objections and replies. The bereaved who continues an internal dialogue with the dead. The writer who wakes in the night because a character has demanded a different ending. The religious believer who feels the presence of a saint or angel. These are not delusions in the clinical sense; they are the ordinary operation of a mind that thinks in persons, that understands the world through narrative, and that populates the empty spaces of experience with figures who can bear the weight of our hopes, fears, and unspoken questions.

The Literary Character: Autonomy and Revelation

The most sophisticated imaginary characters are those created by writers, and they present a paradox that has fascinated literary theorists for centuries. Where do fictional characters come from? Are they merely combinations of the author’s observations, rearranged like mosaic tiles? Or do they possess some quality of independence, some resistance to the author’s will that makes them feel discovered rather than invented?

The novelist E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, drew a famous distinction between “flat” characters—those built around a single idea or trait—and “round” characters—those capable of surprising the reader, and indeed the author, with their behavior. The round character seems to possess free will. Tolstoy reported that Anna Karenina surprised him by throwing herself under the train; he had not planned it. Dickens wept when he killed Little Nell. These are not sentimental anecdotes; they are reports from the frontier of consciousness, where the imaginary character has achieved sufficient density to influence the mind that created it.

The philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that literary characters are a form of moral knowledge. We cannot know what courage is in the abstract, but we can know it through Achilles, through Elizabeth Bennet, through Atticus Finch. The imaginary character condenses and clarifies ethical possibility. They allow us to experience, from the inside, choices we have not made and lives we have not lived. In this sense, imaginary characters are not escapes from reality but extensions of it—they expand the range of human experience without requiring the human to suffer every possible fate.

The psychoanalyst Carl Jung would have recognized in great literary characters the operation of archetypes—universal patterns of the collective unconscious that manifest in the figures of myth, dream, and art. The Hero, the Mother, the Trickster, the Sage: these are not individual inventions but inherited forms, imaginary characters that pre-exist any particular author and use the author as a channel. Whether one accepts Jung’s metaphysics or not, the observation is compelling: the most enduring imaginary characters feel less like personal creations and more like rediscoveries, figures that were always waiting in the cultural imagination for the right writer to give them a local habitation and a name.

The Mythological Character: Imaginary and Real

The boundary between imaginary and real becomes most porous in the domain of religion and mythology. The gods of Olympus, the avatars of Vishnu, the saints of Christendom, the spirits of indigenous traditions: were these imaginary characters? To the believer, they are not; they are real beings with real power. To the skeptic, they are precisely that—imaginary characters of extraordinary cultural influence, personifications of natural forces, psychological states, or social values.

But this dichotomy may be too crude. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued that religious symbols are not merely representations of something else but presentations of reality, modes of experiencing the world that shape the world in the experiencing. The god who is imagined in ritual is not a fictional character in the modern sense; he is a presence that organizes behavior, legitimates authority, and structures emotion. The imaginary character, in this context, is a social fact. Whether he exists outside the minds that imagine him is a question that the sociology of religion cannot answer, but the sociology can demonstrate that his effects are real, his institutions are real, and his history is real.

This suggests that imaginary characters possess a kind of distributed existence. They live not in one mind but in many, sustained by the collective act of imagination. Santa Claus is a trivial example: he does not exist, yet his effects on the economy, on family rituals, and on childhood experience are measurable and profound. The nation, as Benedict Anderson argued, is an “imagined community”—a character writ large, a collective persona that citizens inhabit and perform. The imaginary character, scaled to the social level, becomes the foundation of collective identity.

The Therapeutic Character

Psychotherapy has long recognized the power of imaginary characters to heal. In sandplay therapy, children create worlds with miniature figures, externalizing and working through trauma through symbolic action. In psychodrama, patients role-play alternate selves or significant others, gaining perspective through embodiment. In Jungian active imagination, the patient engages in dialogue with figures from the unconscious, treating them as autonomous entities with wisdom to offer.

The “empty chair” technique of Gestalt therapy places the patient in conversation with an absent other—parent, spouse, lost love—who is present only as an imaginary character. The therapeutic power of this exercise lies in the fact that the imaginary character, once invoked, behaves with a degree of independence. The patient who begins by speaking to an idealized father may find the father-figure in the chair responding with criticism, anger, or vulnerability that the patient did not consciously program. The imaginary character becomes a mirror, reflecting not the external reality but the internal complexity of the patient’s relationship.

Even in ordinary life, imaginary characters serve therapeutic functions. The journal addressed to a future self. The letter written but never sent to an old friend. The internal dialogue with a mentor who has died. These are not merely rhetorical devices; they are ways of using the mind’s capacity for personification to process experience, regulate emotion, and integrate memory. The imaginary character is a prosthetic for the self, an extension of the mind’s capacity to think about itself by thinking about another.

The Digital Character: Avatars, Fandom, and AI

The contemporary world has multiplied the habitats of imaginary characters beyond anything previous eras could have imagined. Digital technology has created new forms of imaginary personhood that blur the boundaries between creator, character, and consumer.

The avatar—the digital representation of the self in games, social media, and virtual worlds—is a peculiar hybrid. It is simultaneously the user and not the user, a mask and a face, an imaginary character that the real person performs. The sociologist Sherry Turkle has documented how people use avatars to explore aspects of identity that are suppressed in offline life: the shy become bold, the old become young, the constrained become wild. The avatar is an imaginary character in continuous negotiation with its creator, a self that is both invented and inhabited.

Fandom represents another expansion. When readers or viewers become deeply attached to imaginary characters—Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Naruto, Batman—they do not merely consume; they participate. They write fan fiction, create fan art, argue about character motivation, and mourn character deaths with genuine grief. The imaginary character becomes a shared possession, a communal resource, a figure in a collective mythology that extends far beyond the author’s original intention. The character escapes, becomes public, and lives a life that the creator cannot control.

The emergence of artificial intelligence has introduced the most radical possibility: the imaginary character that can respond. Chatbots, virtual assistants, and AI-generated characters can now hold conversations, adapt to user input, and simulate personality with increasing sophistication. Is such a character imaginary? In one sense, yes—it has no biological existence, no consciousness, no inner life. In another sense, it is a new category, a character that is not merely imagined by the user but generated by an external system, a persona without a person. This raises profound questions about the future of imaginary characters. Will we create artificial companions so convincing that the distinction between imaginary and real collapses not in the realm of belief but in the realm of interaction? And if we do, what does this mean for human relationships with the actually real?

The Ethics of Imaginary Life

The creation and maintenance of imaginary characters is not without ethical weight. To invent a character is to exercise a godlike power: to create a consciousness (or the appearance of one), to give it a body, a history, a fate, and to subject it to suffering or joy at the creator’s whim. The novelist who tortures a character, the filmmaker who destroys one, the game designer who kills one: these are acts of violence against entities that do not exist, yet they produce real emotional effects in audiences and, perhaps, in the creators themselves.

There is also the question of responsibility toward imaginary characters that become public. When an author creates a character that embodies harmful stereotypes—racial, gender, national—does she bear responsibility for the character’s influence? The character is imaginary, but its effects are real. Conversely, when audiences demand that characters conform to their expectations—insisting on particular romantic pairings, particular moral arcs, particular representations—who owns the character? The creator who imagined it, or the community that has adopted it?

The philosopher Umberto Eco, himself the creator of the richly imaginary character William of Baskerville, argued that fictional characters are “possible worlds” that the reader co-creates. The author provides the blueprint, but the reader constructs the dwelling. This co-creation model suggests that imaginary characters exist in the space between minds, sustained by a collaborative act of imagination that no single participant fully controls.

The Ontological Question

Do imaginary characters exist? The question seems absurd—of course they do not, in the way that chairs and cats exist. But the philosopher Alexius Meinong, in his theory of objects, proposed a category of “non-existent” or “subsistent” entities that have a kind of being even though they lack reality. Sherlock Holmes has no physical existence, but he has properties (he is a detective, he lives at 221B Baker Street, he smokes a pipe), and these properties can be truly or falsely attributed. The statement “Sherlock Holmes is a detective” is true, even though Holmes does not exist. This suggests that imaginary characters inhabit a realm of semantic or intentional existence—a mode of being that is dependent on mental acts but is nonetheless structured, persistent, and rule-governed.

The phenomenologist Edmund Husserl would say that imaginary characters are intentional objects—they are constituted by consciousness and for consciousness, but they are not mere hallucinations. They have a coherence, an intersubjectivity, and a temporal stability that distinguish them from the random phantoms of psychosis. We can talk about them with others. We can compare our mental images of them. We can be surprised by their behavior in a new story. These are not properties of nothing; they are properties of a peculiar kind of something, a something that lives in the no-man’s-land between being and non-being.

Imaginary characters are the most ancient and most modern of human creations.

They begin in the solitary play of the child and extend to the global networks of digital fandom. They serve as tools of psychological development, vehicles of moral exploration, vessels of cultural memory, and prosthetics for emotional life.

They blur the boundaries between self and other, between creator and created, between the real and the possible. They are, in a sense, the mind’s native architecture: we do not think in abstractions but in persons, in stories, in the faces of beings who may never have lived but who matter nonetheless.

To create an imaginary character is not to escape reality but to expand it. It is to assert that the possible is as real as the actual, that the unborn have a claim on our attention, and that the human capacity for empathy is not limited to the existing.

We need imaginary characters because they allow us to practice being human before the stakes are final, to explore the roads not taken, to give form to our fears and our hopes, and to populate the solitude that would otherwise be unbearable.

They are the citizens of the invisible city, and though they cast no shadow, they shape the light.