The Fantasy Principle

Psychoanalysis of the Imagination

Michael Vannoy Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135447526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Contemporary psychoanalysis needs less reality and more fantasy; what Michael Vannoy Adams calls the 'fantasy principle'. The Fantasy Principle radically affirms the centrality of imagination. It challenges us to exercise and explore the imagination, shows us how to value vitally important images that emerge from the unconscious, how to evoke such images, and how to engage them decisively. It shows us how to apply Jungian techniques to interpret images accurately and to experience images immediately and intimately through what Jung calls 'active imagination'. The Fantasy Principle makes a strong case for a new school of psychoanalysis - the school of 'imaginal psychology' - which emphasizes the transformative impact of images. All those who desire to give individuals an opportunity to become more imaginative will find this book fascinating reading.

Chapter 1
The fantasy principle
Imaginal psychology and the dethroning of “Mr. Reality”

One of the concepts that I have attempted to introduce into psychoanalytic discourse is what I call the fantasy principle. I have advocated the concept as an alternative to the “pleasure principle” and the “reality principle.” For some time, I have told myself that I should elaborate on what I mean by the fantasy principle, and I now propose to do just that.

For many years, I have felt that what Jung has to say about the imagination has been ignored or neglected. As long ago as April 25, 1986, I had a dream about this state of affairs and what I might do to rectify the situation:

I’m in a library. There’s a shelf of books on psychoanalysis. On the shelf is a volume by Jung on the imagination. I think that it may go unnoticed on the shelf. There are also a couple of volumes by Freud. I put them next to the Jung book, thinking that now the Jung book will have a chance of being seen.

In this dream, it occurs to me that what Jung has written on the imagination may never be seen unless I place what Freud has written next to it. People will be more likely to “check out” and read what Jung has to say about the imagination if I juxtapose it with what Freud has to say.

In 1911, Jung published the first part of Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (Transformations and Symbols of the Libido). He entitled the first chapter “Concerning Two Kinds of Thinking.” Jung noted that William James had identified two kinds of thinking: “directed thinking” and “non-directed thinking.” Non-directed thinking, Jung says, “quickly leads us away from reality into phantasies,” and “image crowds upon image” (CW B: 19). In short, directed thinking is reality thinking, while non-directed thinking is fantasy thinking.

Later that same year, Freud published an article entitled “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.” The two principles were the “pleasure principle” and the “reality principle.” In contrast to the reality principle, Freud defined the pleasure principle as fantasy thinking: “With the introduction of the reality principle one species of thought-activity was split off; it was kept free from reality-testing and remained subordinated to the pleasure principle alone. This activity is phantasying” (SE 12: 222).

As early as March 2, 1910, Jung had informed Freud that in a “lecture on symbolism” he had distinguished two kinds of thinking and had called one of them “fantasy thinking” (Freud and Jung 1974: 298). Subsequently, Jung sent Freud a copy of that lecture. On June 19, 1910, Freud wrote the following to Jung:

Don’t be surprised if you recognize certain of your own statements in a paper of mine that I am hoping to revise in the first weeks of the holidays, and don’t accuse me of plagiarism, though there may be some temptation to. The title will be: The Two Principles of Mental Action and Education. It is intended for the Jahrbuch. I conceived and wrote it two days before the arrival of your “Symbolism”; it is of course a formulation of ideas that were long present in my mind.

(Freud and Jung 1974: 332)

This letter was a defensive effort by Freud to preempt any criticism that he had stolen ideas from Jung. Freud both confesses to the crime (“Don’t be surprised if you recognize certain of your own statements in a paper of mine.”) and pleads not guilty (“I conceived and wrote it two days before the arrival of your ‘Symbolism’; it is of course a formulation of ideas that were long present in my mind.”). In effect, Freud admits to Jung that the “two principles” are virtually identical with the “two kinds of thinking.” On the issue of originality, priority in discovery, and intellectual property rights, John Kerr comments: “In context, Freud’s short paper [‘Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning’] reads like nothing so much as an attempt to steal Jung’s thunder” (1993: 336).

I should perhaps say that, for me, fantasy is an “F-word.” In A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Charles Rycroft says that the Oxford English Dictionary defines “fantasy” as “caprice, whim, fanciful invention” and “phantasy” as “imagination, visionary notion.” As a result, he says, British analysts invariably prefer the “ph” spelling. He notes, however, that “few, if any, American writers have followed them in doing so” (1968: 50). In “The Nature and Function of Phantasy,” Susan Isaacs provides a different explanation for the “ph” spelling. “The English translators of Freud,” she says, “adopted a special spelling of the word ‘phantasy’, with the ph, in order to differentiate the psycho-analytical significance of the term, i.e., predominantly or entirely unconscious phantasies, from the popular word ‘fantasy’, meaning conscious day-dreams, fictions, and so on” (1952: 80-1). It is a fact, however, that nowhere in Freud’s Standard Edition is the word spelled with an “f”; it is always spelled with a “ph,” even in reference to daydreams and other ostensibly conscious examples.

As in Jung’s Collected Works, I employ the word “fantasy” as a synonym for “imagination,” whether conscious or unconscious. “All the functions that are active in the psyche,” Jung says, “converge in fantasy.” He remarks that fantasy has “a poor reputation among psychologists,” including psychoanalysts, but he asserts that “it nevertheless remains the creative matrix of everything that has made progress possible for humanity.” Jung very much esteems fantasy, which he says “has its own irreducible value” (CW 7: 290, par. 490). According to Jung, “Developing fantasy means perfecting our humanity” (1977: 40).

Jung does note that alchemy, which he regards as a historical precursor of psychoanalysis, implores the alchemist to imagine “with true and not with fantastic imagination” (CW 12: 167, par. 218). In this alchemical context, “fantastic imagination” is equivalent to untrue, or false, imagination. Thus Jung says: “I really prefer the term ‘imagination’ to ‘fantasy,’ because there is a difference between the two which the old doctors had in mind when they said that ‘opus nostrum,’ our work, ought to be done ‘per veram imaginationem et non phantastica’” (CW 18: 171, par. 396). Jung also mentions the classical distinction between imaginatio and phantasia. In contrast to phantasia, which has a pejorative connotation, he defines imaginatio as active imagination. “Imaginatio,” he says, “is the active evocation of (inner) images” (CW 12: 167, par. 219). Although in these instances, Jung privileges true imagination over fantastic imagination and imaginatio over phantasia, in almost all other instances he equates imagination with fantasy, without prejudice, as I do.

When I began to consider what I might say about the fantasy principle, one of my very favorite novels came to mind – Philip Roth’s The Breast (1980). It is a book that I have read several times and that I have assigned in an undergraduate course that I have taught off and on over the last 20 years. The title of that course is “Madness in Literature: Psychopathology through Case Fictions.” In the novel, David Kepesh, a professor of literature, is overnight transformed into a breast. The book seems obviously to invite a Kleinian interpretation. Kepesh, in fact, confesses to having experienced breast envy before his transformation. As he sucks the breast of his girlfriend on the beach one day, his girlfriend fears that she is cutting off his air because Kepesh is turning green. “With envy,” he says. Kepesh, however, rejects the Kleinian notion that he has now suddenly been transformed into a breast because of envy. “I assure you,” he says to the reader, “that I have wanted things far less whimsically in my life than I wanted on that beach to be breasted” (1980: 37). Why, he wonders, would that one envious wish, out of all the others, have been fulfilled? “No, I refuse to surrender my bewilderment to the wish-fulfillment theory,” he says. “Neat and fashionable and delightfully punitive though it may be, I refuse to believe that I am this thing because this is a thing that I wanted to be” (1980: 38).

The year before his transformation, Kepesh had ended five years of psychoanalysis. After Kepesh is transformed into a breast, his analyst, Dr. Klinger, visits him in the hospital. Dr. Klinger assures Kepesh that he is not insane but that he is, quite literally, a breast. Kepesh, however, believes that he is simply suffering from a delusion. In analysis, Kepesh attempts to interpret the meaning of what he calls “the fantasy of physical transformation” (1980: 66). He says:

Now, with Dr. Klinger’s assistance, I was trying to figure out just why, of all things, I had chosen a breast. Why a big brainless bag of dumb, desirable tissue, acted upon instead of acting, unguarded, immobile, hanging, there, as a breast simply hangs and is there? Why this primitive identification with the object of infantile veneration? What unfulfilled appetites, what cradle confusions, what fragments out of my remotest past could have collided to spark a delusion of such classical simplicity?

(Roth 1980: 66–7)

Eventually, Kepesh accepts the fact that he has been transformed into a breast. He assumes that everyone knows about his transformation and that he is now famous. Dr. Klinger, however, assures him that “the case has been handled with the utmost discretion” (1980: 86). If hardly anyone knows, Kepesh says, then perhaps he himself should be the one to tell everyone. If he does that, Dr. Klinger says, then everyone will merely dismiss him as a “joke,” a “freak,” and a “charlatan.” Kepesh says: “You’re advising me to leave well enough alone. You’re advising me to keep this all to myself.” Like a good, neutral analyst, Dr. Klinger replies: “I’m advising you nothing, only reminding you of our friend with the beard who sits on the throne.” Kepesh says: “Mr. Reality.” Dr. Klinger says: “And his principle” (1980: 88). The allusion, of course, is to Freud: “Mr. Reality,” our friend with the beard who sits on the throne of psychoanalysis with his principle.

Freud regarded Jung as heir to the throne of psychoanalysis. He called Jung his “crown prince.” That, of course, implied that Freud was the “king,” and, in fact, Freud ruled psychoanalysis like an absolute monarch and eventually disinherited Jung, with the result that Freud remains, to this very day, on the throne (although perhaps Melanie Klein is now his “queen”). This seems to me a “royal” problem, one to which the fantasy principle provides a solution – the dethroning of “Mr. Reality” and his principle.

Freud defines the reality principle in contrast (not in contradiction) to the pleasure principle. The exigencies of reality, Freud says, require the ego “to postpone the obtaining of pleasure, to put up with a little unpleasure and to abandon certain sources of pleasure altogether.” Such an ego, he says, “has become ‘reasonable’; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle, which also at bottom seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed and diminished” (SE 16: 357). As Freud defines the ego, it is “reason” (SE 19: 25) – or reason in the service of the reality principle. In short, for the ego to be reasonable is for it to be realistic.

Freud declares in no uncertain terms that “a happy person never phantasies, only an unsatisfied one” (SE 9: 146). “Mr. Reality” would probably have disapproved of rock-and-roll as just one more example of the vulgarities of popular culture, but he would certainly have approved of the lyrics of Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, and Chris Wood (1967):

Dear Mr. Fantasy, play us a tune,
Something to make us all happy.
Do anything, take us out of this gloom,
Sing a song, play guitar, make it snappy.

Like Freud, Winwood, Capaldi, and Wood assume that the purpose of fantasy is to make unhappy people happy.

Freud equates fantasies with daydreams and contends that they, like dreams, are without exception wish-fulfillments. “The motive forces of phantasies,” he says, “are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish” (SE 9: 146). In effect, the pleasure principle is a “fantasy principle,” but the only motivation of this fantasy principle is wish-fulfillment. The pleasure principle (or Freudian drive psychology) is, in philosophical terms, a variety of hedonism. When drives cannot be satisfied in reality, Freud says, they are repressed into the unconscious, where they are then fulfilled as wishes (for example, in dreams and daydreams), which, he acknowledges, are expressed as fantasies. What most interests Freud, however, is that drives are fulfilled as wishes, not that wishes are expressed as fantasies. That is, he emphasizes the drives and wishes, not the fantasies. Freud says that there is a certain “class of human beings” who find it necessary to recount their fantasies. Whom, exactly, does he have in mind? “These are the victims of nervous illness,” he says, “who are obliged to tell their phantasies, among other things, to the doctor by whom they expect to be cured by mental treatment” (SE 9: 146). According to Freud, the purpose of analysis is to cure patients of their fantasies!

In contrast to Freud, I would say that not only unhappy persons but also happy ones fantasize (and do so continuously), that not all fantasies are wish-fulfillments, that some fantasies are pleasurable but that some are unpleasurable, and that the purpose of analysis is not to “cure illness” by correcting the fantasies of patients in conformity with reality but to increase consciousness by interpreting or experiencing the meaning of those fantasies. Jung says that fantasy is “a natural expression of life which we can at most seek to understand but cannot correct” (CW 18: 527, par. 1249). It is, he contends, “not a sickness but a natural and vital activity” (CW 18: 528, par. 1249). Rather than correct the fantasies of the patient, Jung says that “I even make an effort to second the patient in his fantasies.” He says that he has “no small opinion of fantasy” and contends that “we can never rise above fantasy.” Although Jung concedes that “there are unprofitable, futile, morbid, and unsatisfying fantasies whose sterile nature is immediately recognized by every person endowed with common sense,” he insists that “the faulty performance proves nothing against the normal performance.” He concludes: “All the works of man have their origin in creative imagination. What right, then, have we to disparage fantasy?” (CW 16: 45, par. 98).

“The psyche creates reality every day,” Jung says. “The only expression I can use for this activity is fantasy” (CW 6: 52, par. 78). If, as Jung succinctly says, “image is psyche” (CW 13: 50, par. 75) and if the psyche creates reality, then what creates reality is the image. Rather than say that the psyche, or the image, “creates” reality (which might imply that the activity of fantasy creates reality ex nihilo), I myself prefer to say that it constructs reality. Thus I emphasize what I call the psychic construction of reality, or the imaginal construction of reality. “Every psychic process,” Jung says, “is an image and an ‘imagining’” (CW 11: 544, par. 889). He says that “the psyche consists essentially of images” (CW 8: 325, par. 618). I would say that the psyche is composed of images and that reality is constructed in and through those images. The psyche comprises an ego-image – as James Hillman says, the ego should acknowledge that “it too is an image” (1979a: 102) – and a vast variety of non-ego images. In addition, I would say that reality is not only constructed but also, as Jacques Derrida might say, deconstructed by the imagination. In this respect, the imaginal deconstruction of reality is just as important as the imaginal construction of it. Non-ego images spontaneously and autonomously manifest in the psyche in order to deconstruct (Jung would say “compensate”) images that the ego-image has previously privileged.

“We live immediately,” Jung says, “only in the world of images” (CW 8: 328, par. 624). He asserts that “the world itself exists only so far as we are able to produce an image of it” (CW 11: 479, par. 766). Does Jung believe that the world has no existence independent of our image of it? Jung is no solipsist, or “absolute imagist.” He acknowledges that the world has an existence independent of our image of it, but he maintains that our image of it always mediates our experience of the world. For Jung, the image is not secondary and derivative from external reality but is primary and constitutive of it. The fantasy principle, I would say, is logically prior to the reality principle – or, as Hillman says: “first fantasy then reality” (1975: 23).

In Jung and the Postmodern (2000), Christopher Hauke cites Jean Baudrillard, who says that in contemporary America the question is one “of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle” (1994: 13). What Baudrillard says, however, itself conceals the fact that, for Jung, the “real” was never real, that reality was always, as Jung says, “so-called reality” (CW 11: 479, par. 766), because our experience of it is always mediated by our image of it. For Jung, there was never any question of “saving the reality principle.” Jung was never, like Freud, “Mr. Reality.” He was always, if I may say so, “Mr. Fantasy.”

Before Jung ever even met Fr...