An image schema is a recurring structure within our cognitive processes which establishes patterns of understanding and reasoning. Image schemas are formed from our bodily interactions, from linguistic experience, and from historical context. The term is explained in Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind, in case study 2 of George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things and by Rudolf Arnheim in Visual Thinking.
In contemporary cognitive linguistics, an image schema is considered an embodied prelinguistic structure of experience that motivates conceptual metaphor mappings. Evidence for image schemata is drawn from a number of related disciplines, including work on cross-modal cognition in psychology, from spatial cognition in both linguistics and psychology, and from neuroscience.
Read more about Image Schema: Johnson: From Image Schemas To Abstract Reasoning Via Metaphor, Lakoff: Image Schemas in Brugman's The Story of Over, Relationships To Similar Theories, Lists of Image Schemas
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“Our ego ideal is precious to us because it repairs a loss of our earlier childhood, the loss of our image of self as perfect and whole, the loss of a major portion of our infantile, limitless, ain’t-I-wonderful narcissism which we had to give up in the face of compelling reality. Modified and reshaped into ethical goals and moral standards and a vision of what at our finest we might be, our dream of perfection lives on—our lost narcissism lives on—in our ego ideal.”
—Judith Viorst (20th century)