Abstract
This chapter summarises some key ideas in the fields of social psychology, somatic inquiry and psychotherapy, social contract and sexual consent, the role of imagination in inter-personal ethics, and the impacts and potential of aesthetics, imagination, and representation in culture for generating new social paradigms. By knitting together these themes from a creative arts psychotherapy perspective, this chapter theorises a psychology of consent as an essential component of love studies by considering the components, core conditions, and resources that generate mutuality across difference from a psychological perspective. These ideas represent a feeling towards something rather than a knowing, an expression of a desire for ethical mutuality rather than a grasp of it. The objective of this chapter is to show how these ideas, and their place in this edited collection, might inspire a multi-professional muddling together towards social hopefulness, and specifically a hopefulness about our capabilities to creatively engender the state of being defined here as consensuality, collectively and intimately, and to thrive in it.