Fantasy

Fantasy, a form of imaginative thinking that is controlled more by the thinker’s wishes, motives, and feelings than by conditions in the objective world. In fantasy the individual is most often not seeking to communicate his thoughts to others, but is chiefly sending messages to himself. Fantasy is a form of dreaming. Most authorities regard daydreaming as the major form of fantasy, but dreaming during sleep is also classified as fantasy.

From a practical point of view, fantasy may appear to be without useful purpose, but research has shown that this type of thinking plays an important role as an outlet for the frustrations of everyday life. In fantasy, the frustrated man may depict himself as achieving desired goals, engaging in desired actions, and in general overcoming obstacles and problems encountered in real life. In fantasy, the thinker can rescind some of the laws of the physical and social world and thus make events appear as he wishes them to be.

Daydreams and Night Dreams. Daydreams are believed to occur in all normal people, but excessive daydreaming is regarded as a sign of personality maladjustment. Adults have been reported to be more reluctant to report the content of their daydreams than to report on their night dreams. Daydreams are generated by the thinker and are not concerned with reality or with practical adjustment to the outside world. For the most part, daydreams allow imaginary achievement of satisfactions not attained in real experience. Sigmund Freud believed that daydreams reflected the same dynamics as night dreams: wish-fulfillment. In observations published shortly before his death, Freud suggested that daydreams and night dreams have so much in common that a study of daydreams might have provided the best approach to the understanding of dreams in general. He felt that the study of daydreams would have given a shorter route to the recognition that dreams are wish fulfillments.

A dream, according to Freud, serves two purposes: (1) it is a wish-fulfilling device; and (2) it is a guardian of sleep. Freud believed that a careful study of dreams would reveal information about the dreamer’s wishes and other aspects of his personality. Freud distinguished between the manifest content of the dream (what the dreamer reported as his dream), and the latent content of the dream, which is the alleged hidden, or true, meaning of the dream. Wishes are disguised in dreams by means of symbolism. The task in dream interpretation is to interpret the symbolism in the manifest content of the dream into its true dynamics. Modern behavioral research with brain waves and eye movements has revealed that there are three to five periods of dreaming during an ordinary night of sleep, and that about 20% of sleeping time is devoted to dreaming.

Fantasy and Personality. It has been traditional to study the relationship of fantasy to personality by means of dream analysis and interpretation, or by means of an analysis of the free associations of a patient. In 1921 the Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach published a new technique. He analyzed personality by studying responses to inkblots. In 1937, Henry Murray of Harvard presented the Thematic Apperception Test. Subjects looked at pictures and then told stories about them, ascribing feelings, actions, and motives to the persons in the pictures. The storyteller developed his fantasy in a chain of associations initially elicited by the pictures. Such projections of fanciful material reflect the motives, mood tone, and other aspects of the respondent.

Fantasy and Creativity. Imaginative flights of fantasy play a role in creative thinking. The creative thinker seeks to communicate his images, his fantasies, and feelings through the vehicle of his particular skill-painting, poetry, music, fiction, or invention. It is not fantasy, per se, that distinguishes the creative person from the general population, but rather his skill in translating and communicating his ideas. While the creative thinker has the capacity to recognize the difference between his fantasy and reality, some mental patients lose the ability to make such a distinction.