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Concept
Fantasy (psychology)
Summary
In psychology, fantasy is a broad range of mental experiences, mediated by the faculty of imagination in the human brain, and marked by an expression of certain desires through vivid mental imagery. Fantasies are generally associated with scenarios that are impossible or unlikely to happen.
In everyday life, individuals often find their thoughts "pursue a series of fantasies concerning things they wish they could do or wish they had done ... fantasies of control or of sovereign choice ... daydreams."
George Eman Vaillant in his study of defence mechanisms took as a central example of "an immature defence ... fantasy — living in a 'Walter Mitty' dream world where you imagine you are successful and popular, instead of making real efforts to make friends and succeed at a job."
Other researchers and theorists find that fantasy has beneficial elements — providing "small regressions and compensatory wish fulfilments which are recuperative in effect." Research by Deirdre Barrett reports that people differ radically in the vividness, as well as frequency of fantasy, and that those who have the most elaborately developed fantasy life are often the people who make productive use of their imaginations in art, literature, or by being especially creative and innovative in more traditional professions.
For Freud, a fantasy is constructed around multiple, often repressed wishes, and employs disguise to mask and mark the very defensive processes by which desire is enacted. The subject's desire to maintain distance from the repressed wish and simultaneously experience it opens up a type of third person syntax allowing for multiple entry into the fantasy. Therefore, in fantasy, vision is multiplied—it becomes possible to see from more than one position at the same time, to see oneself and to see oneself seeing oneself, to divide vision and dislocate subjectivity. This radical omission of the “I” position creates space for all those processes that depend upon such a center, including not only identification but also the field and organization of vision itself.
Official source
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